Has money killed fashion's avant-garde?
By Vanessa Friedman
Published: February 6 2004 17:33 | Last Updated: February 6 2004 17:33
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Oddly , what I remember most from my inaugural fashion week experiences back in the mid-1990s is car parks. Hearing the buzz, the whispers from editor to editor, about new designers showing – almost always it seemed – in car parks.
Driving around very late at night desperately trying to find said car park on the fringes of Paris or London or New York before the show started. Freezing outside car parks as, an hour and a half after the show was supposed to have started, the designer’s assistants were still not letting us in.
Freezing inside unheated car parks while sitting on wood benches that left splinters as mementoes. Getting lost in car parks searching for the (non-existent) loo. Becoming absolutely elated in car parks as a truly original, surprising, interesting show occurred, and made it all worthwhile.
There was Hussein Chalayan’s aerodynamic, woman-as-technology show in a car park, with dresses that moved in a techno ballet all their own; Alexander McQueen’s Highland r*pe and Fire and Rain show in car parks, as dramatic as tailoring ever could be. There were the debut shows of the Belgians Véronique Branquinho and Olivier Theyskens – romantic, gothic visions in car parks. Car parks, or their kin (Martin Margiela’s abandoned train station, for example; Robert Cary-Williams’ warren of decrepit rooms filled with chalky smoke) were the places to be.
And then, suddenly, they weren’t. Come the turn of the century, car parks, and all they had come to represent – new talent, usually without any money but often enough with palpable promise, challenging clothes, shocking styling – were, suddenly, being called "not worth it". "Why should we see them if they can’t produce?" said the retailers. "Why should we go see even more stringy black things that are never advertised?" said the editors. Once upon a time, if you didn’t get a ticket to a buzzy show, you tried to sneak in; now, those who don’t get tickets shrug their shoulders and go shopping.
Not that, there’s that much to see in car parks anymore. Half the designers who patronised the car parks got swept up into the mainstream – McQueen went to Paris with Gucci Group and the French fire inspectors put a damper on his extravaganzas; Theyskens closed his own line, joined Rochas, and started making cocktail suits – and a lot of the rest went out of business.
In 2001 the V&A held an exhibition called "Radical Fashion" showcasing the work of 11 designers, and it is telling to see what has happened to most of them over the years: Azzedine Alaia no longer shows on the official schedule; Gaultier is now designing for that bastion of traditionalism, Hermès; Helmut Lang is owned by the Prada group; McQueen by Gucci; Martin Margiela has launched a classic luxury line called 6; Issey Miyake has retired to concentrate on his fabric research; Vivienne Westwood is having a retrospective of her own; and Yohji Yamamoto is focusing on his lower-priced, accessible line Ys.
The conclusion seems obvious: radical fashion, or avant-garde fashion, or conceptual fashion – all words used to describe the same thing, which is clothes that push boundaries – has gone, well, out of fashion. Or to put it more bluntly, disappeared.
"It doesn’t exist anymore," says Maria Luisa Poumaillou, owner of a group of eponymous cult fashion boutiques in Paris and one of the great retail patrons of the avant-garde.
You can see the absence in the schedules for the ready-to-wear shows that begin this weekend.
In New York, which kicks everything off, Imitation of Christ (famous for its customised vintage) and Miguel Adrovar (who once made a show featuring Quentin Crisp’s old mattress and a Louis Vuitton bag as a skirt) are mere memories, the first having migrated to California, the second has been forced down to one show a year. In Paris, conceptualists such as Jurgi Persoons and Angelo Figus have gone out of business.
And in London, a city that, as the designer Hamish Morrow says, "has a need to represent newness and a ravenous desire to discover the next new thing"; a city which, according to Poumaillou, "was unmissable five or six years ago" for exactly that reason; well, in London, there are barely any names left to seduce the international crowd.
"Fashion goes in waves," says Anne Tyrell, vice-chairman of the British Fashion Council. "We are in a quieter period, yes, but that’s all it is." This is the London party line – the current state of affairs simply reflects another turn in the fashion cycle – but truthfully, talk to most insiders and they’ll tell you something deeper and more serious is going on.
"Money has killed the avant-garde," says Poumaillou. "The big groups have so much power that no one designer, no matter how talented, can go on their own anymore. As a retailer, you feel, no matter how beautiful something is, you are powerless to promote it because you’ll never see it in the press, you’ll only see Tom Ford this and Gucci that. Ten years ago women would come into my shop with Marie Claire magazine under their arm and show me pictures of clothes by Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester. In the past five years I can’t remember that happening once."
In the past five years the large design houses have consolidated and exploited their power over the glossy magazines to create a kind of quid pro quo situation in which advertising money – the lifeblood of a fashion monthly – are traded for editorial coverage (the insides of said monthly).
New designers, risky ones, may get a tiny picture and a few words in the news section, but the big, full-colour pictures are reserved for the paying customers. No payment, equals no pages, equals little press coverage. Put another way, Goliath is alive and well and his nickname is Gucci (and Armani, Dolce, Versace...).
"What’s the point of making nice clothes that no one sees? How can you fight Gucci and Prada?" says Belgian Dirk Bikkembergs, who has a personal stake in the matter.
As one of the "Antwerp Six", the group of Belgian designers that hit Paris in the early 90s like a tsunami with their raw-edged, beautifully tailored and shockingly essential clothing, Bikkembergs was part of the last wave of the avant-garde (his compatriots were Margiela, Demeulemeester, Dries van Noten, and Walter von Beirendonck).
Coming just after the Japanese designers Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Junya Watanabe dropped jaws with their deconstructed, voluminous, non-pretty approach, and just before the Brits Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan rocked London with their dramatic, emotional and cerebral work, they created a craze for the avant-garde that has not been seen since.
"When I had my first show, you really felt like fashion was exploding and you could feel the energy and hunger of people for that," says Bikkembergs. "But now, all you feel is that hunger has been satisfied – it’s gone."
"I always think I arrived at the tail end of a good thing," says Hamish Morrow, the British designer who explores the relationship between technology and elegance and who held his first show in London in 2000. That "good thing" was the spending spree of the 90s, when retailers and public alike embraced the idea of investing in fashion. It’s a cliche to blame everything on September 11 – and it’s an over-simplification – but there’s no question that the economics of a post-Twin Towers world came down hardest on the smaller, more individual, idiosyncratic designers. "Fashion is a business of confidence," says Morrow. "And when people aren’t feeling confident in their financial state, it suffers."
"If you are an avant-garde designer no store will take a big risk on you, because people aren’t buying, so you do small volumes, so no manufacturer wants to take you on because they don’t make enough, and then you have difficulty with your deliveries, and then retailers don’t want to take that risk and it all starts again," says Poumaillou.
"What’s really hard is the price war with the big houses," says Véronique Branquinho. "Shops used to be very interested in new designers and they would follow them for a few seasons and invest in them, but now they have to take minimums from the big houses, and so they have almost no money left over, and what they do have, they don’t want to risk. Plus they always want new stuff so they can get people to keep buying, and for big houses with lots of employees that’s fine – they can do pre-collections and cruise collections between seasons, but for me, with my 19 employees..."
"Also, customers now have this option of Zara and H&M," says Bikkembergs, "so they don’t understand why they should pay so much when they can get it for so little."
"Still," says Poumaillou, "I think something is changing." could it be that the big powerful houses have overstepped the mark and that the small designers are about to fight back?
There seems to be a consensus that the fashion world is in a state of flux (Tom Ford and Domenico de Sole leaving Gucci is only a part of it), and we are at a crossroads of some sort; that the world as we know it is being reformed in a way that goes deeper than the trendiness of being avant-garde or establishment.
"We’re at a point where gold can’t be any golder, fur can’t be any furrier, Gucci can’t be any more Gucci," says Bikkembergs. "There’s nothing any woman needs anymore. And she’s smarter, knows more."
In other words, "she" – that elusive, representative female consumer – may not want to be force-fed images and desire courtesy of advertising money; may not want to be told what she wants, full stop. May prefer to search and tease it out for herself, to find that one special thing no one else owns, or has read about. It’s possible the sling-shot is about to get shot, and Goliath lose some of his power.
"Everyone is looking for a way to make the customer interested again," says Poumaillou. "And I think the answer lies in a renewed emphasis on individual talent."
"The customer wants something with soul," echoes Branquinho. And, "I think we are at a moment where a lot is going to change," agrees Bikkembergs. "I think things are going to become more emotional."
The interesting thing about these words – "soul", "emotion", "individual" – is that while they don’t sound like words normally associated with the avant-garde (those words might be more like "black", "anger", "shredded" – oh, and "car parks") set against the last long-term fashion trends of aggressive sexuality and urban sport they actually seem fairly startling. As Olivier Theyskens says: "It feels more subversive to me now to make a pretty dress" than it does to make a shroud.
"Maybe this is a new kind of avant-garde," says Poumaillou finally, "all this elegance and couture finishes we are seeing." In which case, the avant-garde is not gone after all, but simply being reborn in new, romantic, covert form; in which case, it is just our old understanding of the word that has been, literally, slashed and burned to death, kind of the way the clothes used to be. In which case, pastel flowers may be the future form of the avant-garde. It sounds weird – but then, doesn’t it always?
They are literally having a laugh.
