No sooner have 2013 Pre-fall and 2013 Spring Summer Couture collections come out than to find us in now in the midst of the 2013 Fall/Winter collections.  Let’s get to the brass tacks: it’s the creative hybrid that our culture continues to provide as designers throw around what they recall as having made an impact in the quest to find something new.

For our last century, convention was tampered with post-war, with each successive decade we have been challenging status quo. The heyday of artistic creativity was truly explored courtesy of the avant garde in the 60s and more so in the 80s and the breaking of convention was explored in the 70s and 90s (which comprised to a degree of reinterpretating and streamlining the 70s). Each made its mark culturally to the degree that fashion since then has never really left these decades. Rather, we have seen our aesthetics oscillate between the more ostentatious extravagance and impracticality or the former and the practical and casual ease of the latter with dashed of the other decades for effect. We have done so creatively in a manner similar to how a perfumery mixes various notes to evoke a response.

And so listing them would fill more space than is needed. The fact is that many collections provoke a guessing game of sorts for which elements are being mixed. But the stiff textiles, the cocooning, the light military references (Rebecca Minkoff, Richard Chai Love), armour (3.1 Phillip Lim, Belstaff, Kenneth Cole Collection),  and masculine tailoring all hint of being on guard (or even fighting based on boxing references at Alexander Wang), a state of mind we are in.

The information we have is as convoluted as the references in each collection. We see  70s (Caroline Herrera, Custo Barcelona, Cynthia Rowley, Diane Von Furstenberg, Gregory Parkinson, Rachel Comey, Trina Turk, Veronica Beard, Wes Gordon),  80s (Band Of Outsiders, Donna Karan, ICB, Jeremy Liang, Katie Gallagher, Kimberly Ovitz, Libertine, Nicholas K, Prabal Garung, Sachin + Babi, Sally LaPointe, Tess Giberson, The Row, Thom Browne, Vivienne Tam) and 90s (10 Crosby Derek Lam, BCBG Max Azria, Catharine Malandrino, Charlotte Ronson, DKNY, Edun, Helmut Lang, Jenni Kanye, MM6 Maison Martin Margiela, Nicholas K, Nicole Miller, Vivienne Westwood)  predominantly expressed. Most have a mishmash echoing the current complicated emotional states that cannot be encapsulated in a simplistic decade reference that we would have invoked in the past. Our information age has ensured that we cannot escape awareness of the layers of thought we now have, and many reasons as detailed in past articles still apply.

Some of what we see is sentimentally driven and some of it is because we are stuck, waiting for inspiration for a new direction. Those last decades offered us our last known point of origin for experimentation. Until the new Millennials that have zero connection to the previous century come of age we have no choice but to wait. Whatever our future is it will not be anything like what we are throwing together now.