Rewind the tape of your memory to November 2015. Around that time Professor Helen Storey, an artist, designer and researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (a University of the Arts London research centre based at the London College of Fashion), launched the Dress For Our Time. The latter was made with a decommissioned tent that once housed a displaced Syrian family at the Za'atari Camp in Jordan.
The tent was gifted to the project by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the dress was made to prompt us to think about migration, displaced people and nurturing, protecting and safeguarding the planet and all human beings.
Since 2016 Professor Storey visited the Za'atari Refugee Camp and is currently involved in co-creating with the refugees a cross disciplinary educational, cultural and business programme focused on women and young girls at the camp, facilitated by and with local UNHCR Jordan partners. In the meantime, more migrants are crossing the Mediterranean, with boats arriving everyday in Italy.
Now, fast forward to another time, another place, say Florence, last Thursday evening, Virgil Abloh's Off-White show at Pitti Uomo.
The second prominent guest after J.W. Anderson, Abloh opted for a catwalk show-cum-installation in collaboration with American artist Jenny Holzer.
The artist edited for this event in Florence the contents of her "For North Adams" light projection on until 25th June at Mass MoCa. Holzer selected extracts of poems about war and exile by different authors including Anna Świrszczyńska, a poet and military nurse who worked and wrote during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and modern poets living as exiles in Europe and the US, among them Syrian-American Osama Alomar, Palestinian-Syrian-Swedish Ghayath Almadhoun, Syrian Khawla Dunia ad Iranian Omid Shams.
The poems were then projected on the facade of Palazzo Pitti, before and during the show, creating a visually intriguing effect since the extracts from the works looked huge compared to the models. Abloh seemed to have genuine intentions, after all his parents flew from Ghana and settled down in the States where he grew up, but something went missing at some point in the show, first of all originality, followed by honesty.
The clothes were Abloh's supposed take on tailoring, even though the sheer trench coats pointed at Margiela; the wide-leg pants in a floral fabric, the blazers with strategic zippers on the back that allow you to wear the piece in different ways and the voluminous tailored suits with strategic splits were a sort of conceptual exercise in deconstruction that reeked of raving gear from 1989 (see also the LED displays as interactive badges served as wearable tech on the trench coats and double-breasted jackets; they were also a reference to Holzer's LED panels) sprinkled with Raf Simons and Yohji Yamomoto among the others (in a way, it was as if Abloh was deluding himself of creating something new by changing the proportions of tailoring, as if it had never been done before).
There wasn't anything new therefore, but another confirmation that Takeji Hirakawa's "Fashion DJ" has become as the years passed a professional "Fashion Remixer".
There was also a rather disturbing inspiration, produced by the strange emphasis on a mix of electric blue and orange in padded jackets, hoods, shoes and oversized bags, and on diaphanous and sheer whites.
The former hinted at the safety gear migrants wear, the latter recalled the coveralls of the rescue teams helping the migrants in the Mediterranean.
The orange shade was also used for the Margiela-inspired (Abloh lifted the concept of colour as "temperature" from the Belgian designer) T-shirts sent to guests as runway invitations, that featured instructions for putting on a life vest on the front and the words "I'll never forgive the ocean", a line by Iranian exile Omid Shams, on the back.
It was almost as if Abloh had watched Gianfranco Rosi's 2016 documentary Fire at sea (Fuocoammare) and, rather than glimpsing the tragedy of death in the Mediterranean, he had considered the possibilities offered by safety clothes without looking at the body bags at the feet of the rescue teams or listening at the stories of the migrants (mind you, electric blue and orange was a combination of shades that also appeared in Balenciaga's A/W 17 menswear collection by Demna Gvasalia, another designer that seems to "inspire" Abloh).
Human rights, wars, migration issues, Syria and other assorted social issues all faded in the background when you tried to picture the clothes on fashionistas or the accessories such as cross-body bags and vintage cameras on your average super cool street photographer and blogger.
And that's when your eyes opened and you felt as if migrants and refugees were employed to give a context to an otherwise rather poor fashion show. Indeed the press notes did not feature any numbers about a catastrophe of global proportions, but, at the same time, did not forget to describe Abloh, the DJ, interior designer, collaborator of many musicians (among them Kanye West, Theophilus London and Sky Ferreira) and brands including IKEA, as "a multihypenate" creator.
In some interviews Abloh claimed the show was a sort of Trojan horse to wake an entire generation, but when a show finishes, most of us go back to our lives. In his case the clothes will be manufactured and go on sale, but he will not change anything in the life of the migrants he used as the background story for his show.
Sadly, Kanye West committed the same faux pas in February 2016 and at the time Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, had to apologise for using the phrase "migrant chic" to describe West's show.
Some fashion critics state that Abloh's brand (currently under the same umbrella group - Milan-based production and distribution company NGG-New Guards Group, founded by Marcelo Burlon with partners Claudio Antonioli, of multibrand boutique antonioli.eu, and Davide de Giglio - together with Burlon's County of Milan and Shayne Oliver's Hood By Air) represents fashion for the Millennials.
Its fast and furious super-edited remix of different ideas grabbed, stolen, chewed and revomited here and there is perfectly understandable, as this is more or less what social media do. Yet in this way we pigeonhole Millennials in a category of superficial, vapid people without any knowledge of history in general (and of the history of fashion in particular) or any real interest in contemporary events.
Maybe after attracting the attention of Millennials to the international refugee crisis, Abloh should have tried to get actively involved by pledging to donate part of the sales of the collection to a charity that helps refugees. But maybe that's not cool enough.
After all, Helen Storey went to work in a refugee camp and she is not prominently featured on famous fashion magazines nor considered a revolutionary saviour. Guess, that's what happens when you decide to actually change something and improve (through fashion) the living conditions of someone else, rather than simply look cool and generate hype.
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