Death of the Fashion Visionary?

[iluvjeisa]

You can blame the creative direction at magazines too for being afraid of taking risks and catering to their own own interests and pawning it off on those who can't think for themselves. It's amazing how many younger people will look at what the older powers-that-be tell them to look at. It's like the music industry, it's all homogenized to sell.

There needs to be a weeding out of old school thinking for anything adventurous to really happen. Anyone taking a huge risk will risk alienating themselves for an entire season. That's the reason you have so many lines from the same houses, they're all safety nets that are more like sifters for money falling out of your pockets, not unlike a Coinstar machine. You know they take 8% off the top, right?

I think you hit the nail on the head there. Yes, fashion critique seems to have hit a new low. It's really predictable - nobody seems to know anything more than what is wrong, what not to wear and possibly what "positively reeks POWER". There seems to be far too much concern in business interests and almost no personal positive taste.

In a way that is clever, of course, because having personal taste means, most often, that that taste will become out of style.

It's nothing that's different, in that sense, between fashion, music or movies...they all suffer from the same thing; Business has taken over to such an extent that artistic credibility no longer matters, there is no crucial mass of individuals at the top of these businesses with an inner core of personal taste.

 

[Madhuri]

I'm aching for a fashion experience. A Dior Haute Couture SS 04, a McQueen FW 06, a Balenciaga FW 06, a Tom Ford Gucci/ YSL show, you know what I mean?...a show that moves you, or at least stirs emotions that go far beyond "oh, that's really pretty."

Are you guys talking about the clothes or the runway show? Designers can do all types of tricks on the runway but at the end of the day people need to be able to wear the clothes in their everyday life. I'm less concerned about what takes place in a 20 minute show attended by a select few than what is actually available for my closet.

 

[MUXU]

firstly i want say this is a great thread, i enjoyed reading everyone's comments as i rarely read all the comments.

ok, what i have to say is probably all over the place, since i suck at things like this. i just put down whatever that comes to my mind

i do have to say one of the reasons why i end up choosing to do men's wear design as a study is because i find the women's wear industry becoming wayyyyyyy too saturated and defined and boring. where as i find the less explored industries like knitswear, children's wear and men's wear more exciting for a designer than women's wear which is just filled with dead designer houses taking up the space.
im sure there are great visions out there but just not put forth into the spotlight. i have to say, Scott and susiebubble's blog does a great job at introducing indie, unknown designers, even if some of them i dont agree with aesthetically.

personal view on fashion...i think fashion should be wearable or worn afterall, or else it will just be costume. i think vision and fashion is a little different. vision lives in a designer's dreams, fashion lives in the wearer's dreams. the best way to go for now is to combine them both together. alexander mcqueen is a master at doing this. having both vision and fashion in one dose. i find it ridiculous that a designer have to take sides. it's like artists that take sides.
but of course, what exactly IS vision anyways? we have been talking about vision vision vision but no one really said anything about what their definition of vision is.

i also read talks about exclusivity. i find it interesting.
i know i am still young and all, but sometimes i debate whether i should keep my to-be house very small and exclusive to a loyal fan-base or go platinum. my intuition tells me i will be more content if i keep small

i find the fact that there is this danger excitement around the fashion industry to be interesting. this unknown lurking around the corner. i can naively say i want to change men's wear, i want to show more than what we see now on the runway. i want to show the things that other designers don't dare to show because they are men themselves. i want to make men's wear design and women's wear design into one. i want to design uni-sex fashion that makes me wonder how much further can i explore androgyny.

 

[esquire]

everything looks old

Suzy's ideas are old, Sarah's reviews are biased therefore old.. seems that almost everyone who has power is trapped in circle of safe statements... fashion critique is dead... who believes on those people?

nobody seems interested in really what matters and how to move on but just in big money translated into advertising as it still seems to be a keyword to understand contemporary thoughts.. again old ideas. Same models, same celebrities, same blah blah bla

the technological advancements of the fashion industry are rarely commented or praised, the "freedom of expression" which IMO should be the big statement of our times has been subdued in order to accommodate the commerce.

Almost everything seems pasteurized, minimized ( not in a nice way) , the same of the same, without identity... not to say coward.... designers seems to lost their ideals to make the naturally unhappy Mr Wintour Happy ... looking trough several runway images I have the sensation that what we call "trend" is a flourished way to say "I've seen this already" or " I can wear it without social disapproval"...

I'm bored... very bored.

 

[rangerrick14]

I agree with you; I've stopped reading fashion reviews really unless they're by Cathy Horyn or Robin Givhan. They are two of the few journalists who are not afraid to piss of designers even if it gets them uninvited to shows like Armani. But they have journalistic integrity.

I am hoping for a point when fashion will blow up again and excite us and stop being so democratic. Lets face it we live in a world ruled by comglomerates who want everything to be available for the masses and so the clothes are watered down and everyone is too afraid to tell the king he is not wearing any clothes.

It feels like the 90's before grunge and heroine chic when everything was just pretty. Whether you liked it or not that era of provocative moved people and got them talking. We just need people have a vision and stick to it. I've allways wanted to be a visionary like Blow or Roitfeld.

 

[rangerrick14]

Maybe we just need more big editors, stylists and journalists who are truly in love with fashion as an expression of art meets commerce.

 

[Fontenrose]

Great article. So the same thing that has happened to the models, is also happening to the designers. All hail the great global corporation.

brand managers now believe that too much focus on the designer is detrimental, if that person then leaves, especially for another company

 

[Fabulyss]

But designers aren't supposed to spoonfeed fashion to us!!

If one has any sense of personal style at all, they pick and choose pieces from here and there and put them together in a magnificently fresh way. It's not as if you're forced to wear the head to toe 'watered down' stuff.

I mean, the wearer can be a fashion visionary him/herself, no?

 

[palais_de_tokyo]

karma to fabulyss...

she's very right, even if the industry (ick... i hate that term for fashion) provides less creative material, one can always combine things in a new or astonishing way.

very well proven by the sartorialist, where often the pieces people wear are not so special by themselves but put together may blow you away.

and i might like to add: a few years ago everybody was going 'trends are an illusion' or 'styling and fashion has become so diverse... there are no rules anymore', which - at least in theory - was a wonderful thought... nowadays i get a feeling there is some kind of need inside people's heads back to this trend-orientated view of fashion... which i find truly sad and limiting...

just my 2 cents

 

[Mota3089]

Whether it is visionary or not Fashion will never die. People will always shop and that is the bottom line.

 

[Scott]

appreciate the compliment,muxu!

i don't think there is a death per se...i think one just need to explore beneath the piles of dictatorships in the industry to discover the real ideas,creativity and vision. and that's not say that those qualities are unattainable or inaccessible because there are talents that do have the capabilities as mcqueen to bride a gap between those and commercialism...meaning having your works reaching people in a sellable respect,i mean. the main aspect for me in any designer is integrity,whatever their aesthetics or design approach is,and i tend get that with indie designers more than anybody.

 

[telepathicgoat]

I like the fact that there are people like scott being actively part of a solution, or at least an alternative way to look at fashion.

That's the problem with this topic, there isn't a proper definition for a visionary.

And personally, if there is a problem with new visionaries, I don't think there's room for them, because in the last couple of years everything has been focussed on indivuality and democracy in fashion.

Again, take a look at all the blogs, all comments etc. EVERYTHING seems to be related to our private life. If it doesn't fit this way of thinking it's not good enough. (Maybe it's an American way of thinking, not sure)

Yesterday I had to read someone's comment who was talking about unwearibility of Marc Jacobs (!!!!!!!). And I just have to accept it, because everything nowadays is personal and individual and blah blah. AND everyone nowadays has to form an opinion...

This society is all about consumption, consumption, consumption. There is no time anymore to get bedazzled by something we experience, if we don't get it served to fit our lifes....

BAH! Maybe I'm rambling now... sorry

By the way, the definition for visionary has changed throughout time, I guess. Society has changed... So has the definition...

 

[Fabulyss]

karma to fabulyss...

she's very right, even if the industry (ick... i hate that term for fashion) provides less creative material, one can always combine things in a new or astonishing way.

very well proven by the sartorialist, where often the pieces people wear are not so special by themselves but put together may blow you away.

and i might like to add: a few years ago everybody was going 'trends are an illusion' or 'styling and fashion has become so diverse... there are no rules anymore', which - at least in theory - was a wonderful thought... nowadays i get a feeling there is some kind of need inside people's heads back to this trend-orientated view of fashion... which i find truly sad and limiting...

just my 2 cents

Thank you
I completely agree with you as well, only lately I've been seeing trends permeate The Sartorialist as well (they're all starting to look the same(

 

[Scott]

and that's why i've abandoned the term avant garde aeons ago. it's become such fodder in the last years....like a trendy label the mainstream fashion world deems not so understandable or safe. which is appalling. and honestly,in that vein you speak of,palais de tokyo,it just seems to me,people percieve the creative world as a group of outrageous,out of touch dynamics who only put on shows with no actual substance and that's simply not the case. for me i can love the quirkier aesthetics of bernhard as much as i can i dunno,the quieter,simpler works of branquinho or ackermann.

 

[fourboltmain]

I think what needs to happen is people need to start supporting local and underground designers more. But the biggest problem is people need to be more open-minded in general. Here, it doesn't seem to be a problem, but in the great context of things, ask anyone on the street to name 5 fashion designers.

You'll get something like 'Umm... like... LV, Dior, oh! And I love what Coco Chanel is making these days!' only because they're so well branded and diluted that they've become household names like Kleenex and Ziplock. And when the majority of people are content with brands they associate with wealth and style, why go out of your way to top yourself? The brand name is worth more than the actual product at this point, exactly every corporation's goal.

'LVMH operates over 1,900 stores worldwide. Its current business plan aims to tightly control the brands it manages in order to maintain and heighten the perception of luxury relating to their products.'

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LVMH

 

[Paula Mattoso]

Well, I think a renaissance/revolution is approaching soon and a new crop of designers will be there to supply this new demand for "dressing-up" that is inevitable I feel.

I like that...! as a designer myself i believe that an unique group of ppl in the world are starting to have this vision about fashion design. Its easy for us who are inside the industry to understand the marketing game involved but some consumers are blinded to what they think is stylish, pretty and "wereable" [a brainstorm related to marketing strategies.]
It makes really hard for designers with the organic talent to create something fresh and original to appear. But the revolution is approaching soon - Salvatore de la Moda- and to save who is bored with some of this uniformed crap we see out there...

 

[palais_de_tokyo]

and honestly,in that vein you speak of,palais de tokyo,it just seems to me,people percieve the creative world as a group of outrageous,out of touch dynamics who only put on shows with no actual substance and that's simply not the case. for me i can love the quirkier aesthetics of bernhard as much as i can i dunno,the quieter,simpler works of branquinho or ackermann.

i don't know if i understood your post correctly, but i think you misunderstood me. i do appreciate the more (even if i don't appreciate that term in fashion) avantgarde designs a lot, but that does not at all mean, that i can not be very much intrigued by more down-to-the-base designs or stylings. on the contrary. i just think there wouldn't be the things we see in "down-to-the-base" design, if there had not been some avantgarde first.
that is my point.

and by the way - i don't think that there are actually any items that are really unwearable... (whereas i have to admit, that this might be true only to mens fashion, as i don't really follow the women's collections) having spent a lot of time in small towns and still dressing up was a part of daily fun. i completely disagree on the idea of localized fashion. you can pick more extravagant clothing in hohocus or springfield as well... it's a bit easier in paris, nyc or london. but in truth it's a choice from within...
(a little off topic - sorry)

 

[Scott]

^i was adding to what you were saying about how something may not look really special but once you put it one and wear it with something else,it can take on this new life. so in that,it makes me frustrated that some people misunderstand the more creative side as basically circus folk with no touch of reality.

 

[Multitudes]

And personally, if there is a problem with new visionaries, I don't think there's room for them, because in the last couple of years everything has been focussed on indivuality and democracy in fashion.

Again, take a look at all the blogs, all comments etc. EVERYTHING seems to be related to our private life. If it doesn't fit this way of thinking it's not good enough. (Maybe it's an American way of thinking, not sure)

This society is all about consumption, consumption, consumption. There is no time anymore to get bedazzled by something we experience, if we don't get it served to fit our lifes....

This way of thinking is not bound to any nationality, the borders are gone,
the national state doesn't exist any more ...
it's a capitalist way of thinking!

But you are right though about subjectivity and so on ...

By the way I remember a similar thread ...

fashion now so boring

 

[palais_de_tokyo]

^i was adding to what you were saying about how something may not look really special but once you put it one and wear it with something else,it can take on this new life. so in that,it makes me frustrated that some people misunderstand the more creative side as basically circus folk with no touch of reality.

oh - i get it - sorry then... i think we're on the same page there then...