One of the chief reasons for writing this blog stemmed from conversations I used to have with friends who were not as engrossed with the fashion industry. To some of them, it seemed like a superficial world that almost hedonistically celebrated materialism, trumping out goods with great regularity for profit by generating the false sense of keeping up lest one takes a blow to their self-esteem. Pretty harsh assessment, I thought.

It is true that it is a business and that, like any other business in our world, success relies on keeping consumer interest while continuing profit through continuous sales of one’s products. That can be said for almost everything these days. The jarring circumstances are leading our public to reconsider the competitive aspect in favor of investment mentality and a support for individual style. Of course, this balances with our attention span, a pace we have trained ourselves over time. We no longer settle on one look, be it home furnishings and décor, hairstyles, or accessories. The support of moving forward helps to fuel this aspect as we have crowned “new” as ultimately better.

But there is a lot more to fashion than this. Just as a lot of effort goes into engineering the exact amount of spray and colour onto a cola can in an ad campaign to optimize the best response, so too does fashion take great care to craft clothes. The process is indeed quite extensive, from the years of planning a colour to the choice of texture and structure of textiles, each element which seems effortless is carefully and deliberately crafted with a keen sense of sophistication.

The most effort comes from those who put more creativity into their design as opposed to other more pedestrian collections that distill this into simpler items that are more readily acceptable by the public or in collections that do more of the following rather than the leading.

The understanding of this effort and thought behind the process plus the constraints to blend commerce and shelf life as challenges make for a compelling understanding of what looks like “just clothes” to someone who has never been involved in the process. And it by sharing this insight that becomes the most joyous: explaining the inner working and connections that result in design choices that become common knowledge, or as the public sees it, as trends.

While the bulk of fashion deals with wearability, it is the more creative collections that have more vision and voice, articulating further understanding of their world in the same manner that artists do, translating what they see into form, colour, shape and texture. When the more creative designers decide to look forward, one of the striking things one notices is the obscuring of the face.

It’s not a new concept. During the turn of the century, modern fashion concepts at exhibitions seemed to play on this approach, veils obscuring features in the process. It tends to coincide with darker expectations of the future, just as more optimistic ones go in the opposite direction.

In the last few decades of the last century we saw this occurrence more frequently on runways, with the avant garde utilizing this approach in their runway presentations. The future of the world they see for some is just not as optimistic. Some designers, such as Yoshiyuke Miyamae, Rei Kawakubo, Sarah Burton,  Fyodor Podgorny and Golamn Frydman found ways to obscure and hide the models’ faces. Others, like Anne Demeulemeester, hid theirs behind stray fringes of hair while Anna Sui and Julien MacDonald hid theirs behind sunglasses.

Causation is the speculative part; while there are common nuances that one can derive from psychology not every aspect of design is meant to be laid out for the public as personal aspects help shape the design vision and can be quite personal. A good artist who taps into their being by translating their emotion into their craft leaves it to the observer to find interpretation. The relevance of it as it harmonizes with public is what makes it more personal as well. Given that there is some trepidation recently, this desire to hide doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Perhaps that may be the tidbit to offer the novice who seeks to understand fashion. Just as in art, it doesn’t matter whether you can intellectualize what you are experiencing; it’s whether it reaches you and makes you feel something that counts. And if it does, and if it’s well executed and fresh, then you have a masterpiece. Fashion just likes it to happen with more frequency and leaves the observer to find it.