You often wonder how inspiration strikes fashion designers: do they travel to far away places? Do they visit hundreds of museums and exhibitions to admire the work of obscure artists? Do they spend an incredible amount of time in secret archives? Maybe.
Or maybe all fashion designers actually organise secret meetings where they sit around a table, collectively think about ideas and then divide among themselves colour charts, moods, themes and film references. This would explain why at times you get collections by very different designers referencing the same exotic country, the same style/movie icon or the same historical period of time.
If this is the case maybe, at one of these secret meetings, somebody must have brought a photocopy of the catalogue for the 1982 "Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design" exhibition, since some of the themes tackled by the designs included in that event, resurfaced here and there in current collections.
Tisci may have mentioned Aelita as a somewhat distance reference for his Givenchy S/S 2012 Haute Couture collection, but then you have all the Asia-inspired moods that came out during New York Fashion Week, some of them displaying not just the usual qipao derivations, but a strong fascination with samurai armours, one of the inspirations behind some of the Italian designs in that early fashion and architecture event.
"Intimate Architecture” actually included quite a few designs by Gianfranco Ferré and Armani, all inspired by samurai attire. The Ferré section featured garments (from a 1982 collection) characterised by wide and stiff rectangular collars designed to dramatically frame the face of the wearer; corseted dresses with stiffened torso pieces and obi-sashed tapered coats that moved from the kimono but had a somewhat sleeker shape and silhouette and were inspired by the costumes in the battle scenes of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.
Two years earlier, in 1980, Armani moved from samurai dress, using metallic satins, textured coils that mimed the protective ribs of the Japanese warriors' chestplates and a samurai-inspired .bustier made of flattened panels that recalled the plates of medieval armours.
Some elements from these collections – in particular Ferré's stiff collars and panels and Armani's ribbed samurai leather pieces with obi sashes – reappeared in Proenza Schouler's Autumn/Winter 2012-13 collection.
Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez claimed they were inspired by a Nepalese vacation but, somehow, their crisp poplin jacquard and stiffened pique shirts with neat collars and angular folds, bulky jackets with flat panels and oversized loose pants, indirectly referenced those early fabric armours by Ferré.
The dresses with interwoven strips of leather that created grids and ribbed samurai armours in black and orange and black and navy, seemed instead direct derivations of Armani's A/W 1980-81 collection inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha and by the Italian designer's idea of protection.
More quilted styles followed, at times decorated with embellishments of birds and Oriental symbols borrowed from traditional costumes, but reinvented in a Kagemusha-meets-The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sort of way.
Interestingly enough, Proenza Schouler also adopted the Kagemusha palette, that is orange/red, black and blue, with occasional splashes of gold.
Now, the East, Oriental motifs, samurai armours and inspirations borrowed from Kagemusha often appeared in fashion, so, while this may not be a case of blatant plagiarism, it still proves that we are not in front of pure moments of genius as most of the members of the press may want you to think. After all, these are no new shapes/colours and, if these designs are tangible proof of high craftsmanship, well, so were the Armani and Ferré designs referenced in this post.
In conclusion, it wouldn't hurt to start distinguishing what's truly original from an updated and modern remake, and stop describing some of the contemporary collections (especially those by young American designers promoted and supported by Anna Wintour & Co...) with grand words, pondering a bit more about them and checking how the past is not only referenced, but it's too often blatantly copied in the present.
It would be even better to maybe also start wondering why contemporary designers are so ready to protect their own creations and defend copyright laws when they themselves actually move from - and very often copy - previous designs.
PS Suggestions to fashion designers: I would like to remind you that Ronaldus Shamask and Stephen Manniello haven't been copied for quite a long time, so if you can quickly jump on their bandwagon now, you will probably be among the first ones to copy - pardon, I meant "pay homage to" - them in the next season...
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Another fascinating and incisive post. It demonstrates beautifully the folding of fashion onto its own history, a pleating together of historical moments. It also demonstrates what happens when everything is accessed through images, already mediated, rather than from primary research, another example being in the recent Tisci post. An honest acknowledgment of sources would not diminish the value of their beautifully crafted clothes, but rather enrich our sense of fashion as a vibrant cultural medium that is always throwing new light on its own heritage.
Frustratingly this tendency is often exacerbated by fashion journalists, (perhaps very young ones!) who seem to have little knowledge of either own field or of a broader visual culture.
Posted by: wildstrawberries | February 18, 2012 at 03:59 PM