It is inevitable if you have studied the history of fashion, if you're an academic or a fashion writer with a solid knowledge in this subject, to feel a sense of uneasiness when watching a catwalk show in the company of key people from the industry or when reading some of the show reviews on the main fashion sites or magazines. Mind you, the sense of uneasiness is not caused by the fact that you are out of your depth, it derives from something else.
Most times and in both cases you will be confronted by enthusiastically positive comments: if you're experiencing live the catwalk show you will even see occasional people crying as if they had just gone through a mystic experience, and if you're reading the review, you'll note the persistently annyoing use of the dreaded exclamation mark to highlight that what they saw was fantastically terrific. So you start experiencing that sense of uneasiness, thinking you're the odd one out, you're the crazy one seeing/not seeing things. Or maybe there's nothing wrong with you, but we're just living through a collective fashion hysteria (augmented by an unhealthy fear of losing your advertisers).
Take Raf Simons' Haute Couture collection for Christian Dior. For the occasion, the Maison’s traditional couture venue - the Musée Rodin - was transformed with mirrors and a scaffolding structure that may have looked as borrowed from the opening scenes of William Klein’s Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo?
Entitled "Moonage Daydream", the collection started (and closed) with overturned cupcake liner-like full pleated skirts covered in coloured ribbons in green, orange, yellow, red, and blue, that echoed the voluminously well defined silhouettes of the New Look designs.
Futuristic elements were introduced via see-through vinyl capes decorated with delicate flowery prints; sequin-encrusted A-line mini-dresses in bright shades matched with thigh-high acid-bright vinyl boots and featuring cut outs and openings that provided the designer with the possibility of adding a further spatial dimension in just one garment; striped body-con jumpsuits pointed instead towards glam, while knitted jumpsuits with graphic motifs were maybe relics of a time when Ziggy Stardust favoured Kansai Yamamoto, or references to Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara’s A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) concept knitwear.
There were actually further elements that pointed towards the future and Space Age such as the short coats reminiscent of André Courrèges and the dresses cutaway at the sides and fastened by a silver ring, the same process that was applied to the hairstyles with extension ponytails fastened with colourful double rings (reminiscent of infinity symbols) designed by Simons to create interlocking abstract shapes, a look worthy of an Amazon out of a sci-fi film (a style now known in some fashion circles as the "couture ponytail" View this photo).
Simons actually acknowledged that in this collection there was a combination of different decades - the '50s, '60s and '70s - represented by three keywords, romance, experimentation and liberation, with a strong Bowie link (see also the soundtrack mixing Bowie songs and Japanese Glam rock).
Everything was exquisitely made by the "petites mains" - from the complex textures and surfaces, to pleats and embroideries, guipure dresses and silvery decorations - everything was perfectly presented, but there was a point to make: there weren't too many new ideas in this collection, though there were a lot of remixed pieces.
The plastic fantastic capes with floral branches pointed towards Schiaparelli's early experiments with rhodophane that resulted in her cape de verre; the transparent plastic corset donned by one of the models seemed borrowed from Barbarella's wardrobe; the stripy jumpsuits and dresses were combinations of André Courrèges' Spring/Summer 1965 collection (that, in the last few seasons, has displayed the annoying tendency of resurfacing every two years on the global runways...) and Pierre Cardin's striped bodysuits; the mini-dresses matched with thigh high boots were reminiscent of Cardin's mini-dresses paired with second-skin stretch boots; jacquard motifs on the psychedelic catsuit also called to mind the bold geometries of Cardin's dresses as modelled by Hiroko Matsumoto.
Funnily enough, in multiple interviews, Cardin often stated that he was inspired throughout his career by space discoveries and by the moon in particular, elements that have informed these creations and the previous Haute Couture collection designed by Simons for Dior.
Yet the main point to make about today's fashion is not the degree of derivation you can spot in a contemporary collection. The point is that now we can definitely celebrate the subtle transformation of Takeji Hirakawa's "Fashion DJ" into a professional "Fashion Remixer" (a figure actually born with Miuccia Prada...). And while - that's true - a remix can be better than the original version, if fashion is a box of Lego-like blocks that can be arranged and recreated without genuinely innovating anything (quiz: provide the name of one single contemporary designer who patented their own fabrics/materials), then we can all be fashion designers. Maybe, when we see the next perfectly polished remixed collection, we will have to point this out at the next influential editor who stands up and excitedly shouts "He’s recreated woman!" like Miss Maxwell in Polly Maggoo to fictitious designer Ducasse.
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