Royal-Galliano
völlig losgelöst
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2005
- Messages
- 16,049
- Reaction score
- 696
I liked this and thought it wouldn't hurt to post it. 
---
Folk Wear for the World
by GUY TREBAY
PARIS - WHEN it comes to figuring out what drives fashion and what the people who make it may be trying to tell us, sometimes a light bulb goes on, literally. This occurred on Monday at the Viktor & Rolf show, when the Dutch designers staged a runway presentation that had each model entering a darkened space with an elaborate metal armature protruding from her clothing and equipped with speakers playing different strains of music and spotlights that framed her in a solitary nimbus.
The obvious message, that we are fast becoming solipsistic units of consumption, each moving around in an alienated personal theater of the self, barely merits a yawn. And the point could have been made less cumbersomely had each model come out with her iPod ear buds plugged in and illuminated in the eerie blue glow of a P.D.A. or a cellphone.
Behind a lugubrious staging that did little to disguise some fairly clunky designs was another and more urgent communication, one that already looks like a theme. You could detect it in the perverse high-heeled wooden clogs the models were made to wear at Viktor & Rolf and the patterns in the clothes — taken, the designers said later, from Dutch folk costumes and tapestry.
You could note it again at a Balenciaga show that invoked so many of what used to be called ethnic influences — kimono, ikat prints, folk embroideries from Eastern Europe, Moroccan coin ornaments, Peruvian peasant blankets and Tyrolean boiled wool — that it seemed like a luxury goods tour bus had crashed into an outlet of Crafts Caravan.
You could even detect the motif in a kooky gesture Jean Paul Gaultier made at his show, which opened with the Canadian model Coco Rocha performing a Celtic dance. (As it happens, Ms. Rocha was discovered at an Irish dance festival; those model scouts really get around.)
Good reasons exist to feel nostalgia for a time before industrial corporate culture had begun flattening the dimensions of the global landscape; fashion designers have no corner on that sentiment. But as the most obvious beneficiaries of cross-cultural pollination and the visual wealth of traditional folkways, designers who are sounding the alarm on global homogenization make a certain kind of sense. This is not to suggest that any of them were consciously doing so.
“It’s a street mix, with symbols and colors that are very multicultural,” Nicolas Ghesquiere told Style.com before the Balenciaga show. It was a curious thing to hear from a designer based in a place where memories of the 2005 class and race riots remain fresh and in a country where a platform of inclusion may turn out to have been a drag on the political aspirations of the Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency, Ségolène Royal.
It is probably worth remembering that Balenciaga is the property of the Gucci Group, one of three multinational luxury goods companies (Pinault Printemps Redoute and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton are the others) that among them control an estimated 500 global brands, and that the Viktor & Rolf label is backed by the French cosmetics giant L’Oréal.
What would fashion be, though, without contradictions? Take underfed models, a subject that just a month ago rated a full tabloid workup and that also inspired plenty of hand-wringing in the industry. What happened to the issue taken up so earnestly in New York at a news conference sponsored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue in the Bryant Park tents? The fashion pack switched continents. The skinny model thing disappeared.
Not a whisper was heard, over 10 days spent backstage in two cities — first Milan and then the French capital — about bulimia, anorexia or the fairly distressing (and by no means secret) reality that many models are thin not merely because they are 15-year-old gamines but because they smoke as heavily as road-workers and keep their metabolisms racing with the help of drugs like Adderall XR, the amphetamine-based stimulant prescribed for children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Those few models whose problems had seemed so obvious that their agents strategically pulled them out of the New York season were right back on the catwalks. If anyone felt concern for these poor stick figures, with their birdlike chests, their knobby knees and damaged expressions, the worry was hard to detect.
Why be surprised? As with so much else in an appearance business, surface is everything and illusion shades easily into outright falsity. “There’s so much about fashion that’s never real,” the Missouri-born cult designer Jeremy Scott said on Tuesday, standing in a converted church in the Marais where he was still casting that evening’s show.
Called “Happy Daze,” the show was Mr. Scott’s take on the malt-shop jukebox America of the ’50s, a time that looks a lot more hopeful and lively to someone born in the ’80s, as Mr. Scott was, than to anyone who happened to be alive at the time. It drew heavily on the thriving New Rave club scene that lately helped to put London back on the fashion map.
Days ago in Milan, 60 motley personages from the London club Boom Box were flown in by the organizers of the Florence trade show Pitti Imagine, to inject some life into the drowsy local scene. And it worked.
There was something completely tonic, in the context of a strong but clamped-down season, about the loony, unselfconscious spectacle of people like Kabir, a self-styled English fashion editor (of Drama, due in the spring) who wore a skirt as a cape and lamé trousers and also a crooked cheap toupee; or an apparition called The-O, who had styled himself in a tulle party dress of uncertain vintage, patent leather heels, with his lips and eyes smeared red and his head covered in a outstandingly ratty wig purchased at a thrift shop for 80 cents.
“The problem with these fashion people is that everybody’s wearing things that cost thousands and you don’t need to,” explained The-O, who lives in an East London squat and claimed never to spend more than $2 for an article of clothing. “You can look beautiful for just a few pounds. Add a bit of fake blood. That’s always good.”
If the revitalized London scene has yet to produce design stars with commercial prospects (Gareth Pugh, hailed as the most promising newcomer on the scene, actually canceled the orders he got when he showed his first collection, “so as not to tarnish the label’s potential by having it in too many retail outlets,” as he explained to the French magazine Numéro), it has served to remind people that the center needs the margins in order to survive.
Fashion is “going to break in half,” Mr. Scott predicted, unless a way can be found to reconcile the growing division between the global label machines and bands of independent creators looking to articulate personal visions through the medium of clothes. There is too much sameness, at the same time, too little connection between the fantasies being retailed by big fashion houses and the mixed-up, economically sensible way that most people really dress.
“Too many people are making clothes that look realistic and plausible on the runway, that are never going to happen,” Mr. Scott said. Why? They were never meant for production in the first place. “So much of it is just a piece of boring something to promote an image, to sell underwear, handbags and perfume,” said the designer, wrapping himself against the chill in a wool poncho whose pattern of eyeballs probably looks even more trippy to someone at one of the so-called New Raves.
“I make fashion to provoke, to make you smile, whatever,” said Mr. Scott, who is ranked No. 31 on The Face magazine’s list of the most influential people in fashion. “It can’t just be about consuming goods.”
[nytimes.com]
---
Folk Wear for the World
by GUY TREBAY
PARIS - WHEN it comes to figuring out what drives fashion and what the people who make it may be trying to tell us, sometimes a light bulb goes on, literally. This occurred on Monday at the Viktor & Rolf show, when the Dutch designers staged a runway presentation that had each model entering a darkened space with an elaborate metal armature protruding from her clothing and equipped with speakers playing different strains of music and spotlights that framed her in a solitary nimbus.
The obvious message, that we are fast becoming solipsistic units of consumption, each moving around in an alienated personal theater of the self, barely merits a yawn. And the point could have been made less cumbersomely had each model come out with her iPod ear buds plugged in and illuminated in the eerie blue glow of a P.D.A. or a cellphone.
Behind a lugubrious staging that did little to disguise some fairly clunky designs was another and more urgent communication, one that already looks like a theme. You could detect it in the perverse high-heeled wooden clogs the models were made to wear at Viktor & Rolf and the patterns in the clothes — taken, the designers said later, from Dutch folk costumes and tapestry.
You could note it again at a Balenciaga show that invoked so many of what used to be called ethnic influences — kimono, ikat prints, folk embroideries from Eastern Europe, Moroccan coin ornaments, Peruvian peasant blankets and Tyrolean boiled wool — that it seemed like a luxury goods tour bus had crashed into an outlet of Crafts Caravan.
You could even detect the motif in a kooky gesture Jean Paul Gaultier made at his show, which opened with the Canadian model Coco Rocha performing a Celtic dance. (As it happens, Ms. Rocha was discovered at an Irish dance festival; those model scouts really get around.)
Good reasons exist to feel nostalgia for a time before industrial corporate culture had begun flattening the dimensions of the global landscape; fashion designers have no corner on that sentiment. But as the most obvious beneficiaries of cross-cultural pollination and the visual wealth of traditional folkways, designers who are sounding the alarm on global homogenization make a certain kind of sense. This is not to suggest that any of them were consciously doing so.
“It’s a street mix, with symbols and colors that are very multicultural,” Nicolas Ghesquiere told Style.com before the Balenciaga show. It was a curious thing to hear from a designer based in a place where memories of the 2005 class and race riots remain fresh and in a country where a platform of inclusion may turn out to have been a drag on the political aspirations of the Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency, Ségolène Royal.
It is probably worth remembering that Balenciaga is the property of the Gucci Group, one of three multinational luxury goods companies (Pinault Printemps Redoute and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton are the others) that among them control an estimated 500 global brands, and that the Viktor & Rolf label is backed by the French cosmetics giant L’Oréal.
What would fashion be, though, without contradictions? Take underfed models, a subject that just a month ago rated a full tabloid workup and that also inspired plenty of hand-wringing in the industry. What happened to the issue taken up so earnestly in New York at a news conference sponsored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue in the Bryant Park tents? The fashion pack switched continents. The skinny model thing disappeared.
Not a whisper was heard, over 10 days spent backstage in two cities — first Milan and then the French capital — about bulimia, anorexia or the fairly distressing (and by no means secret) reality that many models are thin not merely because they are 15-year-old gamines but because they smoke as heavily as road-workers and keep their metabolisms racing with the help of drugs like Adderall XR, the amphetamine-based stimulant prescribed for children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Those few models whose problems had seemed so obvious that their agents strategically pulled them out of the New York season were right back on the catwalks. If anyone felt concern for these poor stick figures, with their birdlike chests, their knobby knees and damaged expressions, the worry was hard to detect.
Why be surprised? As with so much else in an appearance business, surface is everything and illusion shades easily into outright falsity. “There’s so much about fashion that’s never real,” the Missouri-born cult designer Jeremy Scott said on Tuesday, standing in a converted church in the Marais where he was still casting that evening’s show.
Called “Happy Daze,” the show was Mr. Scott’s take on the malt-shop jukebox America of the ’50s, a time that looks a lot more hopeful and lively to someone born in the ’80s, as Mr. Scott was, than to anyone who happened to be alive at the time. It drew heavily on the thriving New Rave club scene that lately helped to put London back on the fashion map.
Days ago in Milan, 60 motley personages from the London club Boom Box were flown in by the organizers of the Florence trade show Pitti Imagine, to inject some life into the drowsy local scene. And it worked.
There was something completely tonic, in the context of a strong but clamped-down season, about the loony, unselfconscious spectacle of people like Kabir, a self-styled English fashion editor (of Drama, due in the spring) who wore a skirt as a cape and lamé trousers and also a crooked cheap toupee; or an apparition called The-O, who had styled himself in a tulle party dress of uncertain vintage, patent leather heels, with his lips and eyes smeared red and his head covered in a outstandingly ratty wig purchased at a thrift shop for 80 cents.
“The problem with these fashion people is that everybody’s wearing things that cost thousands and you don’t need to,” explained The-O, who lives in an East London squat and claimed never to spend more than $2 for an article of clothing. “You can look beautiful for just a few pounds. Add a bit of fake blood. That’s always good.”
If the revitalized London scene has yet to produce design stars with commercial prospects (Gareth Pugh, hailed as the most promising newcomer on the scene, actually canceled the orders he got when he showed his first collection, “so as not to tarnish the label’s potential by having it in too many retail outlets,” as he explained to the French magazine Numéro), it has served to remind people that the center needs the margins in order to survive.
Fashion is “going to break in half,” Mr. Scott predicted, unless a way can be found to reconcile the growing division between the global label machines and bands of independent creators looking to articulate personal visions through the medium of clothes. There is too much sameness, at the same time, too little connection between the fantasies being retailed by big fashion houses and the mixed-up, economically sensible way that most people really dress.
“Too many people are making clothes that look realistic and plausible on the runway, that are never going to happen,” Mr. Scott said. Why? They were never meant for production in the first place. “So much of it is just a piece of boring something to promote an image, to sell underwear, handbags and perfume,” said the designer, wrapping himself against the chill in a wool poncho whose pattern of eyeballs probably looks even more trippy to someone at one of the so-called New Raves.
“I make fashion to provoke, to make you smile, whatever,” said Mr. Scott, who is ranked No. 31 on The Face magazine’s list of the most influential people in fashion. “It can’t just be about consuming goods.”
[nytimes.com]
where is it headed
