There was a moment, midway through the Balenciaga show at the New York Stock Exchange in May, when the venue’s countless stock-ticker displays began to freak out, screens flashing and pixellating in time with the techno soundtrack as latex-masked models clad in satirically large business suits stomped by, never breaking stride. “Aha,” I thought, “yes, truly we are living in the extended-dance-remix era of late capitalism.” Everything’s breaking down—global pandemic, culture war, actual war, climate crisis, inflation, what even is crypto, anyway?—but the song keeps playing on its endless loop, and so we keep dancing to its beat. At its best, this is what fashion does: it shows us the now. Through the lens of a collection, we see a stylised snapshot of our time—its obsessions, its dreams, its anxieties, its strategies for making sense of the world—and, counter-intuitively, it is this keen responsiveness to the present that points the way forwards, to something new. As Diana Vreeland once famously said, remarking on the mirror fashion holds up to society, one can “see the approaching of a revolution in clothes”. What’s fascinating about this particular fashion moment is that it augurs not a single revolution, but many all at once.
The designers featured in this portfolio are all trying to “re-establish fashion in a new way”, as Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele says, referring to his idiosyncratic approach to reinventing a legacy brand for the modern era; an ongoing process, he notes. For Michele, that means embracing the fact that fashion is no longer meant to speak to an insider elite—a perspective shared by Telfar Clemens of Telfar, a designer very different from Michele.
Michele also finds common ground with Paris’s sui generis upcycler Marine Serre in her commitment to sustainability—and the suspicion that part of the answer to fashion’s over- production problem lies in aesthetic continuity: we may very well be witnessing the beginning of the end of the concept of so last season. Serre, who uses many of the same materials and prints in each of her shows, hopes that by doing so she alleviates some of the pressure on the consumer to be constantly chasing novelty. “There’s a difference between novelty and newness,” she notes. “Novelty is here and gone in a moment; newness is changing the way someone sees.”
Of course, the production of novelty, the better to stimulate sales, is at the core of the contemporary fashion business model. Mercilessly so in the case of fast-fashion brands that turn over their inventory on an all-but-daily basis, but the obligation to churn out product extends up to fashion’s luxurious tippy-top: one reading of the latex masks at the Balenciaga show, according to the label’s creative director, Demna, was that they underlined our often fetishistic relationship to stuff and the way trend-chasing can efface the individual underneath. “Fashion is a tool,” he explains. “It can disguise you or serve as camouflage, or it can help bring your [visual] identity to life. It’s up to the consumer to decide how to use it.”
In other words, Demna’s show was a critique—a tricky proposition when, as he acknowledges, Balenciaga is still in the business of making lots of things lots of people will want to buy.
But that, too, reflects the moment. We’re in an in-between state. Many of the ‘disruptive’ changes over the past few years are now baked into the way the fashion industry operates—to wit: the democratising impacts of social media, with its emphasis on spectacle, celebrity and hype; and the pressure on brands to take up social and political causes. Social media has also amplified demands that designers and brands reflect their publicly progressive stances in how they cast their campaigns and staff their ateliers, an evolution that is ongoing. Although the industry as a whole has made great strides in inviting a broader spectrum of demographics and points of view into its fold, embracing body and ethnic diversity, and challenging the gender binary, one would be hard-pressed to say that work on that front is complete. “There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance,” says Paloma Elsesser, one of a handful of full-figured models to have emerged in the past half decade. “Sometimes I’m walking in shows where I know the designer doesn’t actually produce clothing in my size—but then again, the fact that I’m on that runway at all indicates, yeah, the fashion landscape has changed.”
In the meantime, long-established industry practices have been called into question—notably, the tick-tock schedule of biannual Fashion Weeks followed by ahead-of-season delivery to stores, usurped by streetwear-inspired ‘drops’ and ‘see now, buy now’ direct-to-consumer sales. All is flux. Many designers no longer call themselves designers, preferring the polymath descriptive creators as they play in a variety of mediums—as seen with Virgil Abloh, who before his death modelled so much of the current change, while still accommodating himself to traditions such as Fashion Week. Even that institution was nearly dealt a mortal blow by COVID-19; that fashion weeks persist speaks both to the utility and the feel-good factor of gatherings and live experience, along with the fact that no compelling rival institution has yet emerged. As an industry, fashion is in the challenging position of building a bridge to the future while navigating the rickety infrastructure already in place.
While this is flummoxing and sometimes frustrating, it is also exciting. With no obvious path forward, the most curious and creative designers working today are engaged in furious processes of experimentation, laying down tracks others may follow towards a fashion future less wasteful, more just and—this is important—bolder in terms of ideas, craft and style. The key is not to turn back.
“It’s easy to overstate the change,” notes Babak Radboy, Clemens’s hand-in-glove partner at Telfar, referring to political and social convulsions in the wider world. “There’s a desire in fashion [and beyond] to produce a narrative of progress that makes it seem like, great, the work is done, when in fact there’s been very little shift in terms of who holds power or how things operate.”
“Like, we spent two years calling each other out, and now that it’s all out, everyone’s figured out how to get back to business as usual without pissing people off,” adds Clemens. But business as usual is gone. A new language is emerging out of an old vocabulary. This is the situation of fashion now, at a moment of becoming. Eyes on the horizon, we join the designers in this portfolio in celebrating the chance to explore.
Also read:
7 great moments for inclusivity in 2020
12 new fashion trends to bookmark from the pre-fall 2022 Collections
7 street style trends to lift from the fall 2022 Haute Couture shows
