While the world faces more pressing realities (Texas, North Korea), those within the world of fashion are in hiding, preparing for there next quarterly event know as Spring Summer 2018. A few collections have come out more recently, this time from Sweden as they hold their fashion week as well as the first roll-outs from Kiev. Vogue has been keeping an eye out as these centres are not among the majors yet are becoming more mature, demonstrating a capacity to rise up to international expectations regarding collection standards where cohesion, point of view and quality are benchmarked achievements to gain editorial respect.
Much of what is coming out is wearable and that's not a bad thing when remembering that fashion is, above all, a business. But business doesn't sell magazines, generate clicks on web pages or gain shares on social media. The passion of creativity is another requirement and the balance of commerce and personal artistry is what makes the designer worthy of attention beyond admiration for sales. It is a tremendous feat to create something not just functional, but desirable that resonates with inner sensibilities where the customer feels a connection...an inate relevance that speaks to them intimately.
Right now, the nostalgia for better times is crossing with the desire for creative exploration in the name of breaking new ground. This feel-good sentiment seeks to also run with the tech-dominated future focus where our modern world screams advancement as the new norm. Disruption, innovation...call these aspects what you will, they all indicate the focus on change, and if there is anything we know about the human species, it's that we don't always take well to change, but when push comes to shove we find our way forward. Not a straight path, though; we zig-zag back and forth as we climb higher, eventually getting there with a bit of passive resistance along the way.
This blog has long pointed the various ways we claw back, and the re-emergence of oversize was covered when it first started to re-emerge in collections several years ago. The awareness of fears bigger than ourselves in both the 50s and 80s when volatility involved nuclear realities resulted in not only finding clothes that became armour-like, but also infantized the wearer by swallowing them much in the way children wear their parents' clothes not just for play but as a subconscious way of connecting to security.
With rising tensions in the Pacific and unpredictable responses coming from US/Soviet interactions, the need for comfort has again found relevance. Practicalities are the increased appeal to larger markets where modesty is taken into account and rising temperatures where looseness wears more comfortably than body-con fits that fail in high temperatures. This plus the awareness of the future and the need to break away for the past is what gave the rule-breaking edge to 80s fashion experimentation, especially in the late 80s when it got more architectural in part due to the Japanese. Inching closer to the Olympics, the focus strengthens on Japan and before you know it, these cumulative forces match the future-seeking late 80s and thus the innovators so far such as Casely-Hayford, Demna Gvasalia's Vetements, Raf Simons (normally we focus on women's wear but this is an exception), Vika Gazinskya and the young unbridled talents from the Swedish School Of Textiles find volumous affinity.
Twisted and draped, cut and recut, spliced additions, deconstructed and banded in naturalistic freeform where the textiles do the speaking translate to design giving voice to the materials in the name of innovation via the familiar. This sophisticated approach takes the wanton abandonment of rules launched from past inspiration and brings that experimental spirit as designers try out forward approaches in clean execution, harmonizing with technical expectations in this photoshopped and edited slick curation our reality promotes.
To be fair, the limits of creativity lie in current technology, and only when we have evolution of technical equipment and material development that we have seen but in glimpses these past few years will we see the next stages of design that can move beyond the past. By then, we will be comfortable in our next zag of our future; may the coming fashion weeks offer more glimpses as we get further settled into our new millennium.