I honestly never thought that the architectural post about Cino Zucchi's "Copycat" installation would have inspired so soon a post on the copycat theme in fashion.
I must indeed thank Proenza Schouler who gave me with their Spring/Summer 2013 collection enough inspirations for this post.
It was interesting to see how the global fashion media praised Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough even before seeing the collection, highlighting how new financing and a brand new store are positive signs of success in their career.
The design duo has definitely grown up, journalists enthused, showing everybody they are doing things for real. But let's move onto what was dubbed as their most "ambitious collection so far".
Hernandez and McCollough managed to mix in their collection all the right ingredients from digital images and neon shades to perforated light leather, collages of bright coloured snake and iguana skins remixed with pictures taken from the Internet and modern gladiator sandals. In a nutshell trendy, desirable and saleable pieces. Yet they weren't new.
The oversized coats maybe echoed Nicolas Ghesquière's designs for Balenciaga's (though also Rodarte's S/S 13 collection seemed to be a rip off of Ghesquières' "futurobotic" looks for Balenciaga...), but they weren't the main problem.
Indeed the duo also included in their collection a specific inspiration, Gerhard Richter, who led them to the creation of graphic faded/woven effects into their dresses and skirts.
Bizarrely enough, Richter was the main inspiration of Gabriele Colangelo's S/S 2012 collection. You could argue that 100 people could move from the same inspiration and obtain 100 different results and that is absolutely true, but, somehow, Proenza Schouler managed to obtain the same effects seen in Colangelo's collection.
The Italian designer, inspired by light and movement in Richter, imitated his technique and pictorial flows, altering images via a special and complicated process and incorporating in his jacquards a yarn that couldn't be printed. As a consequence, whenever he printed images upon his garments, Colangelo obtained a sort of corroded effect (in the first picture in this post: Proenza Schoulder S/S13 on the left and Gabriele Colangelo S/S 12 on the right).
Yet that wasn't enough. For some strange twist of fate, towards the end of the collection the designers sent out dresses with images of crowds that seemed to be a more desirable reinvention of the dresses seen at the Olympic Games (the ones with the prints of the volunteers who weren't selected for the games, see second image in this post).
One of these designs and some of the bags were sprinkled with silver grommets, a detail that calls to mind other grommeted designs (see third image in this post and further information here: grommeted bag by Proenza Schouler on the bottom/left side; jacket on the top/left side by Givenchy, jacket on the right in black and red by Balenciaga). In a way, though, this is just a small detail compared to the Paco Rabanne-"inspired" coloured metallic hardware bags (fourth image in this post: on the left a bag from Proenza Schouler S/S13 collection, on the right a Paco Rabanne bag).
On Wwd.com Hernandez and McCollough stated the new collection is inspired by “the Internet, the images you’re bombarded with and the collage of information that you get every day”.
Other sites added they used Tumblr as a point of reference and while it is impossible not to be inspired by the Internet and by the fluid flow of information we are daily bombarded with, in a way we are sacrificing genuine research in the name of quick and easy inspirations (mind you, this can be said also about museums focused on making money with cash cow exhibitions: check out the "Punk and Chaos" exhibition scheduled for next year at the Met – couldn't they come up with something slightly less obvious?). The other problem then is a copyright issue (same as for fashion designs with prints of artworks from specific museum collections): the designers should have credited and paid the authors of the images they used since they printed them on highly commercial products.
As that Paul Valéry quote in the "Copycat" post said, "That which resembles nothing does not exist", but I feel terribly confused about a lot of things. Is it indeed so easy to remix and rip off things (as it happened with Proenza Schouler's A/W 2012-13 collection) and still be praised? Or is this just Proenza Schouler's revenge against other companies copying from them? What kind of example are we giving our fashion and design students and wouldn't it be better to invest time/money in researching new technologies for fashion or travelling/collaborating with other professionals (if your financial resources allow you to do so) rather than just sitting in front of a computer looking at Tumblr pictures? The doubts remain, but, if I were Colangelo, rather than feeling gutted, I would feel proud about myself. After all, his S/S 12 collection will still be fashionable next year.
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