This year will be a year of enormous changes in fashion. That much is a given.
Or actually it is a given that this will be a year of enormous changes in fashion staff. Starting this month, new designers from eight global brands, including Calvin Klein and Chanel, will make their catwalk debut. As they will at Bottega Veneta, Lanvin, Givenchy, Tom Ford, Alberta Ferretti and Dries Van Noten – with the possibility of more open spots being filled at Fendi, Maison Margiela, Helmut Lang and Carven in the coming months.
Sheesh! Whether that shift in power will translate into a seismic change in what we wear is another question.
There is much speculation about the cause of the unrest. Much of the blame has been focused on a slowdown in luxury spending (particularly in China), as well as global political and economic uncertainty, which has led to a game of Blame the Designer (when in doubt, blame the designer), leading to Change the Designer. Designer.
In such an environment there is a tendency to play it safe. To fall back into the comfort of a camel coat and assume that what sold well in the past will also sell well in the future. To focus on the commercial over the creative.
This would be a mistake.
It’s time for a fashion revolution. The kind of revolution that Coco Chanel brought about in the 1920s, when she transformed the little black dress, the uniform of the serving class, into a status symbol of liberation, causing Paul Poiret to clutch his chest in horror and declare: ‘What has Chanel invented? Luxury poverty.” Her clients looked like “little malnourished telegraph clerks,” he sneered.
The kind of revolution that Christian Dior brought about in the post-war era, when he scandalized the world with the New Look, in all its wasp-waisted glory, which caused riots in the streets against the sheer excess of material. The kind that Yves Saint Laurent sparked during the upheavals of the 1960s, when he adapted the male tuxedo for women, driving Nan Kempner out of La Côte Basque for the crime of wearing trousers.
And the kind that Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons created when she treated darkness and destruction like precious skins as the Cold War collapsed and Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history. Ms. Kawakubo was castigated for promoting “Hiroshima chic,” while her embrace of flawed ideas about beauty and the body changed forever.
Just as, when the millennium dawned, Thom Browne was widely mocked for wearing grown man shorts (or just plain old shorts) and shrunken jackets. Until those shrink-wrapped gray suits changed not only the proportions, but also the meaning of “uniform.”
Such designs were as shocking as they were exciting, but they also rose to the challenge of a changing world and a changing sense of how people dressed – not just at the moment they appeared, but forever after.
Fashion is essentially a story of what paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge called “punctuated equilibrium,” a theory that holds that significant changes come in spurts that interrupt long periods of stability or slow evolution. That’s how we got LBDs, the new look, pants, the possibilities of destruction.
Creativity emerged from chaos. That’s where we are now: at a massive turning point when the world order is in flux, social mores are shifting, the AI age is dawning, and it’s not clear how everything will be resolved. The first quarter of the 21st century, with the rise of streetwear and athleisure, is over. There is a hunger for the next thing that is decisive.
Hence the outrageous reaction to Maison Margiela’s couture show last January, when John Galliano, the house’s designer at the time, offered a phantasmagoric underworld of exploding flesh and extraordinary tailoring that was so different from the current made-for-the-gram runway. it caused fits of ecstasy in the audience.
Those clothes weren’t actually new; they were new dramatized versions of works Galliano had previously made – a return, with their extreme corsetry and theatricality, to the fantastic fashions of the late twentieth century. It was the applause more than the actual silhouettes (which haven’t even remotely penetrated the general population yet) that was telling: the clearly voracious appetite for something that didn’t look or feel like anything that had come before.
It was a sign, if one was needed, that the door is wide open for someone to stop reinventing history and start inventing; to create what we didn’t know we wanted, something that’s impossible to predict, because by definition it’s not a surprise if you can predict it.
There are designers who are clearly trying: Demna, with his inversion of luxury semiotics at Balenciaga; Jonathan Anderson, with his surreal cunning at Loewe. These are designers who distort not only items, but also proportions. Some of their work has disrupted the status quo and caused moments of viral outrage (especially Demna, with its chic Ikea bags and eroded sneakers), but so far neither has created a paradigm shift. Wouldn’t that be something to see?
I hope that the new generation tries, that new names and new brains actually make new clothes, even if they are old houses. Thanks to our massively connected world, the possibilities for one crazy idea of what it means to look modern to change the mass sense of self are virtually limitless.
I hope they seize the moment not to dutifully respect the so-called codes of the house – enough with the codes of the house – but to embrace the abstract ethos of their brands, and not the literal forms from the archives. Not to just change the mold, but to break and reinvent it. If outrage is the result, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s often outrage when you see something that challenges your ideas about appropriate dress.
But it’s a shame with a purpose. And if there’s one more lesson history teaches, it’s that such outrage is ultimately worth it.
Until then, it will take courage for executives and backers to withstand the initial backlash and defamation; it takes time to adjust the eye and wardrobe. The problem is that time and patience are luxuries that designers rarely get these days. If they want to seize the opportunity, if they want to do the unexpected, they must be given the space and support to do so.
So come on, fashion. Surprise us. Enchant us. Give us a shock. I challenge you.
