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Fashion Observed


Trend observations with a sociological eye from afar...

by Darryl S. Warren  

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Threadbare

Fall/Winter fashion weeks for the Big Four have come and gone, and the volume of fashion to pour over is, for some, a daunting task. It requires the examination of thousands of images covering hundreds of collection presentations to see through the obvious. These aren’t just clothes, but our collective language of expression told through the balance of commerce and creativity. Expression hinges on complicity of mood for this type of artist to be successful enough to continue participating in the cycles that fashion propagates.

Amongst the many things seen was deconstructivism.  Mind you, since the 80s this has never fully left as the concept allowed designers to explore new combinations of assembly to create new design. The prominence of this recently, though, is in tandem with our quest to break the mold as designers hope to set the standard for the next century, to make the same historic impact that Chanel did in the 20s. The aspect of leaving behind a legacy worthy of history books and a long lasting cultural reference is tantalizing for the most die-hard and aspirational amongst those on one’s field, and here is no less important.

The movement actually started sooner, though. Attempts to break the mold were very much in the 70s when futurists had a bleaker view of the world of tomorrow and underground artists and designers looked at what that meant with something as personal as fashion.  This helped open the doors to some of the ravaged looks later in the 70s when fashion’s underground went punk, which represented the rejection of everything with wanton nihilism. You see, deconstructivism doesn’t only look at reconstituting form but also stripping away the conventions of construction. Absences of lining and unfinished edges are also some of the hallmarks of this concept.

Many people forget the reason for deconstructivism never fully lasting in the market: the populace has a natural aversion to appearing poor and these threadbare items, while certainly breaking away from convention to expand the palette of fashion in the quest to explore new directions, tended to have a quality that lent itself to an aesthetic that failed to differentiate itself from something cobbled together from leftover garments or looking similar to the worn and frayed items someone without an income would wear naturally.

This was observed in the earliest of the 90s when a well-known New York editor, proudly wearing layers with frayed edges, was waiting at the corner for the light to change when a homeless person sauntered up beside her. As she looked this person up and down, it dawned on her that there wasn’t much difference in attire. She wasn’t the only one. While times were good people had confidence in their economic state and the folly of experimenting with this concept but as the bubble started to burst being associated with the failure of poverty was like wolfbane to fashionistas and this trend lost interest quickly.

As the economy started to recover and fashion became more accessible again towards the late 90s fashion started to venture towards this route once more. However it never had a chance. The spring/summer collections of 2001 came on Sept 11th, and the idea of wearing distressed and tattered textiles at once was seen as vulgar and in poor taste in the face of images form ground zero. It was most politically incorrect to even entertain this concept when seeing images of senseless suffering from the hands of terrorism at a level not seen before on the soil of a nation that seemed safe from something of this magnitude. So we dialed back. Everything dialed back: colour, cut, and form. The public did not have anything to look forward to if this was any indication of our future and needed something safe and tidy. So fashion has acquiesced. It has done more looking back because anything was better than what remains unknown.

Our attention to media and deluge of information has served to enhance our awareness of the state of affairs of the world and as sensationalizing bad news gets more sales our media and entertainment has responded in kind. Video games are more realistically bloodthirsty as the public grows more desensitized to violence in films and television and we gravitate to it. And so our culture produces more.

When we realized the nuclear threat of the long-standing cold war had diminished in the late 80s we felt comfortable to explore deconstructivism’s tangled shredding. When we saw that Y2K was averted we felt confident in our ability to tame the destructive potential of or technology and looked towards exploring it again. Now, years later from Sept 11th and faced with the myth of 2012, we somehow have grown desensitized from threat and have decided that this fear is unfounded (or the impending destruction is so magnanimous that there’s no point in wasting time worrying). And so we are exploring this again.

Designers from both sides of the ocean looked to various aspects of this technique, with some of them new to the approach and others more “veterans” of the technique as they were known for exploring it in earlier incarnations. Those on this list included:, A. F. Vandevoorst  (distressed textiles), Anne Valerie Hash, Ann-Sofie Back Atelje, Anthony Vaccarello, Behnaz Sarafopour,  Jean Paul Gaultier (trenches morphed into skirts; he knows how to do “that”),  Junya Watanabe,  Luke Brooks (distressed leather), Imitation of Christ (collar stretched to accommodate an arm as well), the ever-so-clever Maison Martin Margiela, Miguel Androver (pretty much everything), TRIAS (distressed foil-backed chiffon), and the fabulously insightful Dame Vivienne Westwood.

It goes hand-in hand with the repurposing that the green movement is hoping to make more popular as those within the industry attempt to lessen the footprint that fashion creates and the patchworking of textiles that austerity in the 30s introduced when consumption came to a grinding halt yet women still wanted something new to wear. This patchworking has been and still is, of course all over the runways.

What may spell the death knell of this concept will be what killed it before: the fear of being associated with the poor. It is this fear that drives our economy and keeps the per-capita debt high in our first world culture as we struggle to hold onto the place many were tenuously part of in our economic class system, a system we don’t acknowledge outright but exists with the same venom as in times before. Hopefully we can salvage some new ideas as we look forward, embracing blind hope that we will have a world where our economies rebound and our choice, not circumstance, leaves our wardrobe stylishly threadbare.

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