Make 'making sense of fashion' make sense again
If you understand what I'm trying to get at from the title itself I applaud you.
Just a random thought on a Thursday afternoon: what is going on with fashion? Not in a dreadful sense where I am questioning the value system of fashion, but coming from a place of ‘is fashion heading towards any particular way?’ Is fashion expanding outwards in all directions? Are we running around in circles?
Just like anyone who is tuned in with fashion but isn’t fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be there among the fashion week festivities, you try to keep up with the latest through various runway platforms. From there you are presented with all runway shows in their most fundamental form, just the clothes. No theatrics, no music, no movement, no atmosphere, just you and the clothes lie dormant on your screen, waiting for your assessment. One important thing that I do when I decide to pen out my comments is to make sure I judge the collection through individual pieces and the cohesiveness of what is called a collection. Some may argue that the so-called collection cohesiveness will ultimately be rendered obsolete when the clothes are cherrypicked out of order by buyers and displayed in department stores next to racks of other designer clothes, storytelling matters the least. True, but from the standpoint of the art form of fashion presentation, the story that sucks you into the brand’s universe, or the collection’s universe at least, will activate a certain magic in you, it will paint a certain picture for the audience that enhances the audience’s affinity to the clothes. What I’m trying to say is no matter if the ‘bigger picture’ may be disregarded in the end, it is still important for us to try and make sense of it and robustly discuss it to keep this mentality alive amongst the convenient evil of capitalism that likes to strip everything down to its commerciality.
Why am I saying this? What does this have anything to do with ‘where is fashion headed?’ From looking at all these collections, it seems to me that there isn’t any correlation from one another, it’s a tough task. I am not here to assign a positive or negative but to raise a question to you as well, where are we headed? Balenciaga just showcased their couture collection yesterday with an array of clothes that Vogue associated with ‘modern couture.’ On the other hand, we saw Miguel Adrover take the conversation to his personal Instagram soon after the showing of Balenciaga's couture show and exclaim with sarcasm and anger that Demna was blatantly copying Miguel’s work. The comment section is expectedly divided with some saying that it’s been done so many times after Miguel, Demna isn’t copying, it is also what Demna has been doing all these years. The other side claims that Demna has been copying since day 1, nothing is original about him besides his parodic genius. In terms of the maturity of the general cultural understanding of fashion and plagiarism, where are we currently at? Are these similarities to be chalked up as normal since so many people have done it? What about the culture of reps? Is wearing reps okay? Is wearing reps an effective tool against corporate’s insane pricing? If wearing reps is increasingly not a problem to many, should we care that much if someone plagiarised someone else? That’s a bit of a sidetrack anyway, I don’t think it is productive for me to try and dissect the nuances of plagiarism and replicas, but this serves as a jumping-off point of ‘where are we currently at.’
From my understanding of the fashion world yet, it can be divided into periods, there is the pre-war period, the post-war period, the ready-to-wear period, the period where subcultures were brought to the main fashion stages, and now. Each of the mentioned periods plus any others that you can so clearly define was driven by something. When we examine the fashion scene with scrutiny, we focus on the designer’s journey in experiencing and expressing their worldview and what they think is stylistically and politically important. When we zoom out, we see some form of silver thread through many collections from different houses, it may be a general political outcry, a new way of dressing, or an artful commentary on fashion or garment technology innovations. It can be one of these threads, or it can be all of them. No matter what it was, there were themes we could latch onto, we could kind of foresee how it makes sense, we could deduce where fashion is headed, and on top of that, the transition into the next period according to what’s shown and the world around them back then. I list them out with ease with the help of retrospection, with the help of years of research. What about now?
The conversation of ‘this is real fashion’ and ‘fashion is dead beside so and so designers’ is deceptively helpful, these objective points of view on fashion only serve as an indication of personal taste but not at all the state of fashion. Fashion can’t be dead just because big houses decided to do monograms. It can’t be, it is simply a commercial tactic that was prominent throughout fashion history, it’s the reason why ready-to-wear even existed, and the conversation around ‘real fashion’ back when Pierre Cardin started the concept of ready-to-wear in a previously couture dominant ecosystem was just as vibrant as today!
So I want to ask again, where do you see fashion going? From the 20+ collections I’ve seen in the past few months which I have to admit isn’t at all a respectable amount but is enough for me to question what will happen next? Obviously, every designer is doing their own thing, obviously, there are going to be differences in ideologies and design inspirations, and obviously, there isn’t one way to do fashion or rules that anyone needs to follow, so does that mean fashion is for the first time from my perspective, expanding outwards in all directions instead of progressing linearly like how it’s documented? Each piece of fashion critique I read seems to hone in on what the designers are doing and fail to connect it outside of the houses’ history, and to be honest, what are they supposed to connect it to anyway? There isn’t anything as defined and comfortable as the brand’s history. So fashion criticism became a bit shortsighted, it became an introverted view of fashion, a case by case with different designers, rather than being able to show the audience how each season, loaded with hundreds of collections, comes together and forms a certain phenomenon or contributes to a bigger picture.
Trend forecasts then became a bit pointless as well. Who cares? Who cares that the most popular colour this season is red and it stands for a sense of aggression? Because when the next season comes, the trending color is going to be purple and it represents our deep femininity, the red from the previous season would cease to exist in future fashion conversation since it didn’t matter much in the first place anyway. Everyone is going everywhere and it is hard to keep track, but that isn’t a problem at all, the problem is that no one is trying to make sense of what is going on and I don’t like how shortsighted we’ve become.
Thank you for reading this and hope you have a great day!