Menu

Fashion Observed


Trend observations with a sociological eye from afar...

by Darryl S. Warren  

Follow  on Twitter:         @FashionObserved
              on Instagram:   @fashion_observed_ 
              on Facebook:      /FashionObserved
              on Pinterest:      /FashionObserved

Second-Guessing the Future

Rich is the person who can perfectly anticipate the future in glorious detail, a feat that is not easy when looking at the creative restraints of our own environment. It is true that we have larger access to technology and information that any generation previously in history (or at least in recorded history) and that this data can be summoned into our homes at a few keystrokes. Each century looks at the edge of its own incarnation to guess how the future will be, but is limited due to the unknowns such as the speed of integration of technology and the progress of humanity.  Despite attempts at predicting fashion, the 1900s still expected women would wear a petticoat. If they only knew….

Well over a hundred years ago that generation also expected some ludicrous expectations, such as utilization of personal balloons to enjoy one’s weekend constitution on the water or enclosed cities. In the 40s we would be confined to jumpsuits and in the 50s it seemed we’d all be accustomed to lame and extreme underwires in our shoulders. What is fascinating is how the concepts and inventions are interpreted; integrating the only technology they have access to as a model for the future, their expectations fell short of reality. Of course we now live in this time and while some of the concepts aren’t far off the mark the implementation of them are very far from how they imagine them.

The anticipations of the future that science fiction attempts to capture can be quite extreme, oscillating between fatalist negativity of apocalyptic expectation versus extreme optimism; mankind is anything but! When optimistic, we have the capacity to place a lot of faith in our evolution by coupling it with futurist imaginings of our technical progress while sometimes failing to take into account the social aspects that have a large part in how this technology is integrated and how those results affect the developments of societies. Visions of the future fail to take into consideration base desires for traditional beauty that we fall back on, and circumstances such as a world war can affect the evolution of fashion by adaption out of necessity.

We are now living at a point where our technology is catching up to the images our pop culture has presented over the last half of the decade, and along with that some of our fashion collections are only too eager to have us dress the part, such as Manish Arora, Mugler, or Gareth Pugh. Others designers like Hussein Chalayan, Nicholas Guequierre and Martin Margiela or labels such as Communn offer a vision of future fashion that isn’t as other-worldly yet clearly separates itself from the traditional clothes that are very twentieth century.

If you recall designs from the heydays of Paco Rabanne, Courreges and Pierre Cardin, they also had lofty anticipations on the direction of fashion as looking to the future seemed better than hovering in the present. While it pushed the envelope of the day some concepts did not become mainstream anymore than the continuous masking of the face does in modern runway presentations.  It did, however, offer an expansion of the limits of fashion in the quest to evolve.

We will, over the course of the decade, see what our century will be about and until we live it we really will have no clue. It is, however, nice to speculate, to dream and isn’t the thrill of fashion about the facilitation of those dreams to give us the clothes for the role we wish to play?

Go Back

Post a Comment
Created using the new Bravenet Siteblocks builder. (Report Abuse)