Human beings can be funny creatures. We like to compartmentalize and generalize our fellow man while acknowledging our characters as more intricate and sophisticated. We meekly admit and gently celebrate a softer, gentler side, balancing this with proud displays of strength and even force of will. We appreciate creativity while socially scorn those who challenge the comforts of conformity. We search for who we are, trying on different hats while coming back to our essence in evolutions of new grades of our tried and true personalities. It sometimes becomes a personal game of “who are we?” versus “who are we really?”, where our security of self within the world and those we have in our lives shapes how much of these differences become apparent and revealed. The awareness of sophistication of our being, even in the most outwardly conformist of individuals, is our assurance of our identities as ours.
Sometimes the differences are blended and mixed together while other times the differences polarize our characters, like the work self versus the personal self as a familiar example. The surprise of seeing people we know in different elements demonstrating character traits we never knew they had shows us that we are not as simple or as uniform in our makeup.
There is a lot of “sides” being explored and revealed these days as we start to examine our behaviours more openly. We have seen a flood of articles ranging from our views of feminism, race and social responsibility in fashion to economic behaviour drivers and and generational mindsets in relation to tech and innovation. We see this in articles on how we use our daily habits in social media to how algorithms are gaining sophistication by predicting our behaviour. Our interests are not only in what is happening, but how and why. And as they show us to be creatures of habit, they also reveal we have multiple aspects that make us the complex beings we deep down know us to be.
Fashion collections have, of course, been reflecting the amalgam of ideas and concepts our technology has given us. We know this because the trends are more complex combinations as we seek new forms and more sophisticated ways of representing our modern selves. Fashion also is in the hands of creatives who look for inspiration from the obvious to the more esoteric, doing what artists in other media do, which is to translate their observations into the medium they are most familiar with, communicating their impressions via their language of craft speciality. Among the many observations is our penchant to have these obvious dichotomies, and sometimes the most obvious way to show these is to be blatant such as what was seen in collections from Jason Wu, Fausto Puglisi, Roksanda Ilincic, T by Alexander Wang, Versace, and Yeohlee. These had items that were literally bisected, showing the melding of two personality aspects that relate yet are unique, melded together to make a whole.
Be it in this manner of construction or in the element selection hybridization that Van Der Hamm dd years ago (that is very much with us today), we continue to play with dissection and splicing as we look to break away from convention to find our new voice. It's how we learn to create. First the imitation, then the combination, then the permutation, and then the innovation. How these flashes of concept approach will influence or inspire may not require much of a wait; juts as the last remnants of Pre-fall have eked out, Fall/Winter collections are ready for their debut. In fact, by the time you read this, you should see them start to arrive in the media and we'll see what and how fashion has evolved, and what aspects of our characters are being appeased. Who knows, maybe it might appeal to your dichotomies within.