Now ends another chapter of the fashion calendar, that being the Haute Couture Fall Winter 2016 season. Within these luxe presentations represents the range that fashion faces: wearability and classic appeal that ensures sales versus the risk of experimentation that breaks boundaries which can either fall flat or become doorways to groundbreaking influence that shapes fashion for seasons to come.

Even though there is a lot of play with form and assembly with a healthy embrace of technology, the familiarity of twentieth century foundations within every collection tells us that we are still reluctant to move completely into a future yet unwritten; the retro sourcing betrays the innovative steps incorporated these days. This is not for want of the designers who painstakingly create from the heart. Haute couture is the height of passion supported by the kind of budgets and access to artisans many creators dream of. But the public...even the exclusive world that couture caters to... isn't fully ready to leave the last century behind.

The presence of technical materials utilized now suggest a willingness to embrace the future, and the proliferation of deconstruction and creative upcycling show that we are willing to embrace new mainstays to support new results that can usher in unlikely yet innovative directions. The problem is that everything is still approached from a 20th century way much the way early 20th century designers with ties to the 19th century fell back to approaches rooted in their experience. It was only when those with no ties whatsoever to the 19th century came into power that they took the innovations of their day and translated these into what they felt related to their experience. This was free of prior generations' perceptions pop appropriateness and embraced a combination of values and lifestyle. 

We want to go forward. The current experimentation of Iris van Herpen, Maison Margiela and Viktor & Rolf seen in these couture collections reflect the key elements of the kind of platform that will lay the way for the new way of fashion we have yet to fully actualize. It embraces new technology, disruption of assembly convention and ecology via repurposed materials to satisfy this desire to grow forward. And as we speak, continued experimentation and technical progress hold the keys to further us into new frontiers. But just as the Art Nouveau era could only hint the sporty disruption the Deco period would bring, so to is this experimentation within the limitation of time yet arrived. 

We are getting there, wherever that may be. To some, it seems like madness in the making. But then again, what we consider as the norm these days would have been considered the territory of insanity for those the century before. They couldn't "get" us any more that we will not fully "get" those of the coming years that will define and represent our new century. To arrive, we have to go to the edge, ready to greet whoever is purely on that side of the 21st century to "get" what we are trying to be. At least we now know what some of the components are, and eventually they won't seem nearly as crazy as the world seems to be right now.