Controversial Opinions on Fashion

[Lola701]

I badly want to see Stefano Pilati back to something big. I was in love with his YSL looking like pajamas.

When you are seen and portrayed as « difficult » by your boss, who he is the second most important executive in the industry, it’s difficult to expect something big.

‘I want him to do something more substantial than Random Identities though…

 

[Nimsay]

LVMH basically stealing Johns name from him essentially ensured nobody with any business sense (vis a vis gen x and gen z) will want to do any business with them. Thats part of why theyre struggling for real talent - people arent willing to sell their NAME anymore.

 

[whatdoyoumean]

The peak moments of fashion throughout history were controversial, it's the very core of how fashion works.

 

[LadyJunon]

The peak moments of fashion throughout history were controversial, it's the very core of how fashion works.

Lots of them still are apparently.

I always laugh when casual observers of fashion clutch their pearls at the slightest suggestions of sexuality, nudity or androgyny. It gets even funnier when they claim to be fans of designers like YSL.

 

[whatdoyoumean]

Lots of them still are apparently.

I always laugh when casual observers of fashion clutch their pearls at the slightest suggestions of sexuality, nudity or androgyny. It gets even funnier when they claim to be fans of designers like YSL.

Hahahaha indeed You couldn't have illustrated my point with a better example!

 

[KoV]

I understand the concerns with fast fashion, but I believe it serves a purpose in providing affordable trends and inclusive fashion choices. While sustainability is important, acknowledging the accessibility and democratization fast fashion offers can lead to interesting discussions on the future of the industry.
modest dresses canada

I think an argument could be made that it's the people who have the least (and who are ostensibly the beneficiaries of fast fashion democratization in your point) actually stand to suffer the most from it. Either because they're the ones being exploited in factories or they're the ones most vulnerable in climate crises some say are partially caused by fast fashion manufacturing. H&M or Shein or whatever don't give a flying f*ck about access for all, they care about accessing everyone's dollar. I'm glad middle class young adults can afford to do a major haul of the latest H&M x Such-and-such Brand collab, but I'm not sure their desire to be trendy is a greater good than the climate or an impoverished person's working conditions.

And I say that as a giant hypocrite, having just ordered from Gap last night lol. But I have sort of a defeatist I'm just a drop in the bucket attitude about it, I can't actually make an ethical argument in favor of what I did. Most people who shop at fast fashion brands could, I believe, afford "slow fashion" if they just consumed less and formed spending habits more in line with their actual needs. And I get it, it's hard. We're all so influenced by marketing and lifestyle p*rn. I'm not saying the solution is to shame anyone wearing H&M and expect people to pinch their pennies and only buy Dior, but it's hard for me to accept any argument that fast fashion is good in the long run (and often, even short term) for anyone other than whatever billionaire is making bank off it.

 

[Drusilla_]

I'm glad middle class young adults can afford to do a major haul of the latest H&M x Such-and-such Brand collab, but I'm not sure their desire to be trendy is a greater good than the climate or an impoverished person's working conditions.

Same, and I also think framing wearing fashion trends as some kind of fundamental rights issue is some bullsh*t - the way fashion media have been trying to change the language around it from things like 'wearing' to "participating in trends" like it's some kind of academic group project and not just.....an outfit, makes me roll my eyes.

also - coming from one of the countries where the garment manufacturing is done, I have NO patience with spoilt Western brats of any age whining about their "right" to self-expression as if their having $10 tshirts is more important than the working conditions and pay of the people who actually make those clothes and who have far more severe problems than 'does this outfit look cute on tiktok and can I get free returns, I NEED to have trendy clothes to feel good'.

 

[chungkyekye]

i'm not that keen on how fashion progressed in the 2010s on a whole and i think that it's probably due to a huge deep problem that happened during this time or at least the area i'm from - a lot of incredibly skilled people working in the industry retired or just died during this period. i'm not referring to any famous individuals but people that actually worked in fashion. specifically people doing the ironing, sewing and pattern cutting. you had people who just did ironing for their whole lives or just stitching buttons their whole lives and this group of people have shrunk into down to a handful...these were people who could 'rescue' a badly stitched together garment just by ironing - it was incredible or at least i thought it was really incredible anyway lol.

there's just not enough people picking up the mantle of 'the-making.' when you combine this huge skill gap in making clothes and couple it with social media and 'creative imagery on demand' its just 'mmmmmmmm' when you can more or less hide shoddy construction, manufacture quality and whatnot. and this is just one root of the problem...the magnitude of it is even worse when you think of it in relation to other things.

that is not to say there aren't skilled people right now, but this is from my personal observation.

 

[Cocteau Stone]

there's just not enough people picking up the mantle of 'the-making.' when you combine this huge skill gap in making clothes and couple it with social media and 'creative imagery on demand' its just 'mmmmmmmm' when you can more or less hide shoddy construction, manufacture quality and whatnot. and this is just one root of the problem...the magnitude of it is even worse when you think of it in relation to other things.

As sad as it is to say, it is surprising at how many designers and students looking to be great designers still don't know a lot of the basics needed to actually make something look decent. Even if the garment in aesthetics is off, when they don't know how to iron, alter the tension on a machine, change a needle, know what kind of needle or threads to use and even the simple difference that comes with working with different fabrics/weights, it really makes things far more worse to look at than it already is.

You honestly can't be prepared at the amount skill based stuff that comes along with fashion from a technical point of view that you have to finesse. It can get pretty overwhelming. But because this kind of stuff is a huge learning curve, a lot of people nowadays can't really be bothered picking it up or evolving due to these skills being inherently "hard" to learn so they get stuck in their ways. It is also one those things that honestly makes me question certain lecturers and professional practitioners, because they can be the worst cases for this kind of thing.

 

[Nimsay]

The Michael Kors acquisition of Versace is the best thing since Gianni.

Gianni gave us enough to build a whole house on. Kors making the house focus on Gianni-only codes is smart. finally giving whatpeople have wanted from Versace for 30 years.

I think they paused Atelier Versace - I guess. Thats disappointing. I oddly think PPP would be great at Versace. with such a tight charge - do remixed OG Versace - he might excel.

 

[HazJW]

Kim Jones is perfectly fine, people do way too much about him in both directions.

 

[gallianostan]

rewatching his old collections for givenchy and i just have to say that julien macdonald received an egregiously unwarranted amount of hate. this designer's tenure at givenchy wasn't anywhere near as bad as people claim it was, and i will die on this hill. hold some of his shows in the fashion weeks of 2024 and they would rightly leave the remaining propositions in the dust. he was maligned from the start!

 

[Nimsay]

Yea his collections were exquisitely put together which is why he got the chance. His best was SS2004.

 

[mellowgloom]

-When I look at most models being called ‘gorgeous’, I often think to myself ‘Are they gorgeous, or are they just skinny and white with high cheekbones?’ because I’ve been looking through the catalogue and baby, the amount of face diversity is staggeringly low. When everyone has the same exact features—big lips, sharp cheekbones, wide jaws, 12 pack abs—how has the fashion world not gotten absolutely bored with all of these built-for-p*rn bodies and faces. There is no true variety, no true willingness or interest it seems to deviate outside the same retrodden ground to the point of an aesthetically incestuous orouboros of mirrors.

-Similarly, what is determined to be an aesthetically pleasing face in the West is very much based in Eurocentrism and eugenicist fantasies firmly tacked to xenophobic and racist paranoia of “miscegenation”. That there happen to be a few mixed race or non white models sprinkled here and there on the Parisian and London runways does not erase the issue. Yes I understand that there exists even stricter and more stringent guidelines for beauty in places such as Korea, Japan, and China due to their high levels of racial/ethnic homogeneity, but that does not mean regions of the world with the level of cultural and ethnic diversity as ours should still counterintuitively hold to similar racial/ethnic homogeneous ideas of beauty.

-Models should consist of a variety of body types, and restricting yourself to just “skinny” limits your creativity. If you can only make pieces that look good on a beefcake or a scrawny stick, how can you truly say you are exercising your talents to their fullest extent, that you are capable of properly executing certain concepts? Just off the top of my head—Fecundity, Fertility, Birth, all associated with roundness, not just some sylph-sized elves prancing in a forest. Curves can do much to lend to illusion, to compel fabric to sit and lay in a certain manner that creates even more stunning silhouettes and imagery. Are you going to tell me you’re going to take a rail thin woman, dress her up, and present her to me as Fecundity or Mother Earth? Nah.

 

[Deleted member 141309]

This is not a controversial opinion, this is a vanilla and snowflake opinion on mass market fashion, and if it touches high fashion, then it totally erases the history of what is couture, how it should be presented and why models look like that. I am not sure how MFW, PFW and LFW with all their brands can not be Eurocentric, the idea is ridiculous: they are European brands with European heritage and history, owned by European people, presenting in Europe for European fashion magazines and European fashion journalists, using European casting directors and mostly focusing on European culture and often market.

If you want to see more POC people including of Asian descent, just look at Asian, African or sometimes American brands. I don't see many white faces in African or Asian fashion shows and magazines outside of a rare non-Asian appearance on Vogue Japan and China that used to happen way more often before. And I would focus on more mass or underground fashion for that. Haute couture and luxury brands are supposed to strive for the ideal: which is a skinny, toned, youthful body with appealing features. We may grow old, lose our shape due to diseases or laziness, be unlucky to gave genetics to be short and bulky, but we are not the core audience and we are simply unlucky – that does not make the beauty standard different. Models are called models, because the are supposed to present clothing in the most attractive way possible, they came from the usage of mannequins and designers establishing proportions where their creations look most appealing with regards to shoulders/waist/hips proportions.

One may find various people sexy, attractive, pleasant, and many people do (such as it was in Rubens time, or how now "dad bod" is extremely popular among men standards, while being skinny is actually considered unappealing outside of fashion), but this does not make a fashion standard that is built upon many iterations and historical reason to display couture creations in the best way possible, hence models should ultimately be living versions of mannequins (therefore the model in French language is exactly that: "mannequin").

 

[Nimsay]

Like i have never been so bourgeoisie to actually think the business class genuinely is concerned about me. Such decadent concerns and thoughts. The product of ultra cushioned westerners growing up in unimaginable luxury. When you guys do this stuff Im embarassed by the west.

 

[MulletProof]

rewatching his old collections for givenchy and i just have to say that julien macdonald received an egregiously unwarranted amount of hate. this designer's tenure at givenchy wasn't anywhere near as bad as people claim it was, and i will die on this hill. hold some of his shows in the fashion weeks of 2024 and they would rightly leave the remaining propositions in the dust. he was maligned from the start!

Not really. It was beyond mediocre for its time. You need to put everything into context and judge it based on what was happening simultaneously, resources, competitors, etc., instead of trying to extract it out of a timeline and plug it into almost a different industry and reevaluate it based on that. It's like taking something like Luar F/W 2024 and plugging it into Athens Fashion Week and thinking criticism was unwarrented. The bar varies by time and location, and sadly for Julien, the bar was really high when he was at Givenchy. He could be seen as fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity of a lifetime with abundant resources... or a fool who enjoyed a unique time in fashion and couldn't see it and decided to go on autopilot, churn out whatever and waste it. Or both.

Julien Macdonald, Menichetti, even Lindsay Lohan, their collections would leave 'the remaining 2024 propositions in the dust' and unfortunately that doesn't mean they weren't bad and even atrocious at the time they were made, it only demonstrates how fashion's a s*ithole right now.

how has the fashion world not gotten absolutely bored with all of these built-for-p*rn bodies and faces.

I feel like you answered your own question. 😆🫢

I'm going to shamelessly recycle my own post from October of last year because.. too ill to type it all over again but there really seems to be an intentional effort to overlook the dynamics of good ol' capitalism, either because it's too much to grasp or because the complexity of a conglomerate requires extra work or because, by not doing so, you can comfortably stand firm on an archaic mentality, or maybe naïveté and delusion just reigns, but no, when a company has exploded into a monopolistic conglomerate and has no interest in being confined to its original small region but makes gigantic efforts to be global, its format should be global, simple as that. Its market and targeted demographic have changed when it becomes or is acquired by a transnational company whose goal is to profit and in the process, decimate anything that remotely resembles and poses a thread to that label by aggressively taking over the market in freakin’ Nicaragua, in Almaty, in Chongqing, in every corner of the world they can squeeze themselves into. The regional demographic this was confined to is a thing of the past the moment you push this internationally and similarly, the language and dynamics within the company have already changed so why on earth would you still use, say, only Frisians to advertise in Paraguay? lol, or be like ‘oh yeah our founder was a local so we can only use locals’.. is the brand local? not anymore. A business needs to be judged in present time, not for what it used to be. I don't want to trigger European villagers' buttons but.. go American, learn how to adapt your product instead of being like 'yeeeess we have the second richest man in the world, but please make sure this still looks local 😩'.. which one do you want? it's like asking Pepsi to continue its pharmacy format and only feature Swiss models because they were founded in some town in North Carolina with a large Swiss population. They haven't been a North Carolina-only company in years, and they can't afford to be one. And that's a drink, it's far trickier when you're pushing products relating to appearance and class.

 

[gallianostan]

Not really. It was beyond mediocre for its time. You need to put everything into context and judge it based on what was happening simultaneously, resources, competitors, etc., instead of trying to extract it out of a timeline and plug it into almost a different industry and reevaluate it based on that. It's like taking something like Luar F/W 2024 and plugging it into Athens Fashion Week and thinking criticism was unwarrented. The bar varies by time and location, and sadly for Julien, the bar was really high when he was at Givenchy. He could be seen as fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity of a lifetime with abundant resources... or a fool who enjoyed a unique time in fashion and couldn't see it and decided to go on autopilot, churn out whatever and waste it. Or both.

Julien Macdonald, Menichetti, even Lindsay Lohan, their collections would leave 'the remaining 2024 propositions in the dust' and unfortunately that doesn't mean they weren't bad and even atrocious at the time they were made, it only demonstrates how fashion's a s*ithole right now.

even for his time, macdonald's propositions were nowhere near as bad as people claim. i definitely stand by my original point. and lindsay lohan at ungaro is just a completely different kettle of fish, not even a fair comparison. she was a C-list actress. macdonald was an actual, qualified designer lmao

 

[Lola701]

Not really. It was beyond mediocre for its time. You need to put everything into context and judge it based on what was happening simultaneously, resources, competitors, etc., instead of trying to extract it out of a timeline and plug it into almost a different industry and reevaluate it based on that. It's like taking something like Luar F/W 2024 and plugging it into Athens Fashion Week and thinking criticism was unwarrented. The bar varies by time and location, and sadly for Julien, the bar was really high when he was at Givenchy. He could be seen as fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity of a lifetime with abundant resources... or a fool who enjoyed a unique time in fashion and couldn't see it and decided to go on autopilot, churn out whatever and waste it. Or both.

Julien Macdonald, Menichetti, even Lindsay Lohan, their collections would leave 'the remaining 2024 propositions in the dust' and unfortunately that doesn't mean they weren't bad and even atrocious at the time they were made, it only demonstrates how fashion's a s*ithole right now.

It was terrible but also so confused! He had 1 good RTW collection and for the rest, everybody was puzzled.
As Isabella Blow famously said, Julien was Karl’s knitwear designer, not a Couturier…

Time embellish many things. Despite loving Galliano, McQueen and having a soft spot for Julien, they all were terrible for Givenchy.

It’s no surprise that the only designer Hubert met was Riccardo.

 

[gallianostan]

if the five or six designers following the departure of the house's founder were all terrible for it, perhaps the problem isn't the designer but the house itself...