Once upon a time in a century far away, the fashion industry was generally aimed at two things: producing garments and accessories and doing so according to very high standards. There was also another purpose: selling a fashion collection and making sure people who bought a specific piece also invested into something that would have lasted them for quite a few years.
As stated in previous posts on this site, ordinary people with ordinary jobs often hoped and managed to save money towards a designer piece to wear on a special occasion and that designer piece was usually passed from generation to generation.
Indeed, from a consumer's point of view, the best creations ever designed and put on the market are not even those ones who eventually ended up in a museum archive, but the garments that were worn so much that eventually they had to be thrown away. This was actually considered as the biggest success story for a designer: knowing that what you created was loved so much that the person who bought it wore it continuously. Yet one key requisite to allow somebody to keep on wearing something is its washability. Sadly, recent designers have proved that the concept of washability does not go well with contemporary trends.
Burberry's A/W 2013 collection entitled “Trench Kisses” and inspired by model Christine Keeler, better known for her involvement in the Profumo affair, included quite a few rubber raincoats, shifts, and knee-length skirts also crafted from rubber and matched with heart-printed pants.
Marios Schwab's went for transparent embroidered plastic trench coats and dresses or PVC inserts to trace the calligraphy by Tunisian artist Nja Mahdaoui carved on dresses and coats.
Vynil and rubber appeared also in Jonathan Saunders's designs and were mainly employed for curled up flowery motifs on coats and dresses or for bodices and bustiers. Saunders often mixed these synthetic materials with natural fibres such as mohair.
Even Erdem, master of the embroidered floral motif, couldn't resist the PVC lure, though in his case the material only appeared in a coat dress woven with gleaming PVC. Known for her passion for plasticky textures, Simone Rocha added a rigid plastic skirt in a toirtoiseshell print in her new collection.
Then there was that embarrassing triumph of vinyl that was Meadham Kirchhoff's collection, the sort of collage of designs that somebody like Armani looks at and laughs thinking, I'm safe for another 25 years.
Another case of designers hailed as geniuses even though some of us have started harbouring serious doubts, Meadham Kirchhoff managed to find the missing link between Victoriana, erotica, S&M and the uniforms of the assistants in Mary See's candy shops and translated this mighty discovery using almost no cutting and tailoring skills. Black vinyl appeared in jackets, coats, ruffled aprons and ample laser-cut vinyl lace ruffled skirts.
So let's go back to the washability trend: in a way it may have started with an abundance of rubbery looks that appeared on the runways in the last few seasons (remember Marc Jacobs's A/W 2011 collection with its latex tops and ruffles?) triumphing in Christopher Kane's S/S 13 collection with its plastic ruffles (that can be bought from any well-stocked haberdashery shop...) and injection-moulded rubber bows and lace, even though also Kane's new collection seems to have a few items that, given the fragile fabrics and appliqued motifs won't probably be washable (do you dry wash a curled up feather? And what do you do with a jumper entirely covered in feathers, you wash it and then blow dry it?).
While it is true that synthetic-looking materials add new surface effects and clashing textures to a garment, and that latex and PVC have been used a lot in the last few years to add sexual heft to a collection, it is also true that some of these materials are pretty uncomfortable, unpractical and, very often, unwashable. In fact the main point is that these designs are not thought with us pariahs in mind (eh, yes, keep on talking about the big lie of "democratising" the fashion industry...), but for people who only wear things once like poseurs and clothes pegs à la Anna Dello Russo.
It's funny, though, to see so many partially washable or totally unshawashable looks on teh runway right when Vivienne Westwood told The Daily Mail that the Duchess of Cambridge should wear each of her outfits "over and again” as that's very good for the environment.
Oh well, at least there is one thing to be happy about if, like me, you are part of the fashion pariah club rather than the fashion pack: apart from the fact that we won't certainly be the smelly ones, we won't be also responsible for polluting the planet to follow a trend.
It makes you wonder, though: what will happen to these looks in 30-40 years' time? Will they break and therefore self-destroy themselves (plastic and rubber age quite badly if not properly protected...) or will they end up in museums in special sealed glass boxes so that their stink won't kill visitors? The doubt, as usual, remains.
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