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The new fashion forward
In the 21st century, asks Sarah Mower, why are designers waiting six months to sell their collections?
BY Sarah Mower | 22 September 2010
Shearling aviator jacket, £2195 by Burberry
Beige leather jacket, £3150 and felted wool and leather coat, £2129, both by Céline
It seems such a long time ago that the autumn/winter collections were shown that it's almost a shock to look back at the photographs now. Since then, we've had pre-spring collections, couture shows and an outbreak of summer street fashion never predicted on any catwalk - and the spring shows themselves are almost over.
Such is the insanely accelerated speed of the fashion world that the clothes appearing in shops now already seem not to be the latest thing, their significance lost, having long ago been chopped into readily digestible chunks and sucked dry through overexposure. An example: I'm guessing you might not have bought anything beige yet, but if you are warming to it, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you'd already been put off, merely on the basis of seeing so many trend pages, including our own, exhorting you to wear it. It's only natural - the mere suggestion of a must-have is enough to send some of us off in the opposite direction. Or perhaps you're suspicious of putting money on something so 'everywhere'. And yet that's quite ironic, really, given that camel, until now, has always been considered a synonym for 'long-wearing, classic investment'.
No one, be it designer, buyer or retailer, thinks this saturation of information and the pressure to produce novelties is a clever way of carrying on, although most have bowed to inevitability and carry on regardless, privately sobbing over unreasonable schedules and the impossibility of being creative at such short order.
Actually, when I come to look again at the revival of the minimalist Nineties - the big visual story of the season - I'm wondering if it could be construed as the entire industry's unconscious longing to wipe out the folly of the past 10 crazy years along with the mess it created for itself.
I have absolutely nothing against the way of dressing that was channelled on autumn's runway - in fact, it echoes the style I wore back then, when androgynous schoolboy trouser suits, mannish tailored coats, plain A-line skirts and white shirts were considered edgy. In the Nineties, if anyone remembers, the strictness of that vision started as a kind of counter-cultural stance against both the baroque and overtly sexy look of mainstream fashion and the girly, boho slip-dress and cardigan outbreak that swept Notting Hill.
The radically sorted-out, slightly intellectual anti-element is partly what I loved about the original feel of minimalism: the way Helmut Lang, Prada, Jil Sander and Martin Margiela used plain, conventional classics in a subversively coded way, while allowing you to pass at work as a serious person. It was the apotheosis of my generation's kind of feminism - a system of dressing that, for the first time, didn't mean having to wear boilersuits and DMs like our pioneer elders.
This winter's echoes of the Nineties miss all that, of course. What we're looking at now is far more feminised. I don't remember soft blouses and high heels back then, and no one obsessed about handbags - in fact, it was regarded as naff to show them on a runway, so much so that the rebellious Marc Jacobs, in the first season he took over at Louis Vuitton, could bring himself to show only one bag, on which the logo was embossed to make it as invisible as possible.
Second time around, the sense of an underground force rising is absent, because the impetus has come from somewhere else. This season's sensible workwear looks are a reflection of the fact that its main protagonists, Phoebe Philo at Céline, Stella McCartney and Hannah MacGibbon at Chloé, have all reached that thirtysomething life stage in which a professional woman, possibly with young children, needs to pull herself together, sartorially speaking. And, in a nutshell, it was the redressing of that balance we saw being played out at the shows.
Certainly, there were male designers, chiefly Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy and Michael Kors in New York who picked up on the Nineties vibe, too - Tisci, because it was the style he absorbed while studying at Central Saint Martins, and Kors, because he sensed it was a good moment to revisit his own past and offer a deluxe version of super grown-up NYC dressing, camel coats and all.
But, as logical and welcome as all that might be, just referencing a simpler time can't bring it back - whether it be in the Lang/Margiela/Sander sense, or in the nostalgic Fifties way Marc Jacobs put out at Louis Vuitton (with every model sporting a Speedy bag). Untangling the crazy knots fashion has tied itself up in is a self-inflicted set of problems it has never had to face before. As the real impact of the internet hits fashion, it seems to me there are only two ways of short-circuiting what has evolved into a ridiculous, antiquated cycle. One is to actually deliver the goods when a woman's consciousness is primed to make an impulse buy, when it is fresh (ie, as the shows are happening), which might solve the 'gone off it' syndrome that, like the fate of beige, can kick in later. And the other is to do just the opposite - to keep doing non-faddy things that don't scream 'news', but, instead, stoke desire on a slow, continuous, long-term burn.
When we look back on autumn/winter 2010, we might remember it as the time when this reconfiguration started. You could date one side of the shift from the evening of 23 February, when, immediately after the Burberry show took to the runway, globally livestreamed from a marquee at Chelsea School of Art in London, the fabulous shearling aviator jackets Christopher Bailey showed were there, for sale, at a click of the mouse on the Burberry website.
Within a month, before summer had even started, there were women proudly walking around in their autumn sheepskins. Was that a glimpse of the future? Natalie Massenet, the e-tail guru of Net-a-Porter, thinks it has to be. Interviewed by The Business of Fashion, she said designers should stop showing clothes a season ahead and simply devote catwalk time to unveiling collections immediately available to buy in the shops or online.
Provided everything was kept secret until the big 'reveal' (unlikely, but still), that could also snooker fast-fashion copyists, at least for the six weeks or so in which designers could, for once, rightfully be seen as the ones who originated the ideas the high street scrambles to knock off.
A kind of an idealistic, Brave New World vision, it sounds dumb but isn't, when you look closer. Very big brands that can afford to produce stock upfront in the hope that it might be an instant hit might be able to cope with using their catwalks as, essentially, home-shopping events for broadcasting the sensational items of the season. If you're small, though, you can't take that financial risk. And in any case, I see a simultaneous movement that goes against the old psychology of 'fashion' as something flashy and novel to grab and wear at the same time as everyone else.
Consistent, unchanging, under-exposed, even boringly good things now have a real allure. I caught myself thinking about this when I kept returning to admire a single Stella McCartney outfit - a look of such low-key nothingness it is, I'm beginning to think, brilliantly symbolic. What could be so compelling about a pair of grey trousers, a round-necked grey sweater and a pair of pointy court shoes? Well, it proves this designer genuinely knows how to cut a pair of trousers, that she is proud enough of them to show them unadorned and that, if you go to her store, you will find items of equal quality - and that is valuable shorthand for it being a business a woman can trust.
It's a principle Phoebe Philo is obviously working on at Céline, keeping her designs, such as that for her classic box bag, consistent and avoiding hype, over-availability and over-trendiness at all costs. Even as fashion rushes on from the Nineties - who knows what the revisionary headlines from the spring collections will be in the next few weeks? - I sense that slowing things down, doing them properly over time and waiting for rewards in the long-term is shaping up to be the real underground revolution.
telegraph.co.uk
In the 21st century, asks Sarah Mower, why are designers waiting six months to sell their collections?
BY Sarah Mower | 22 September 2010
It seems such a long time ago that the autumn/winter collections were shown that it's almost a shock to look back at the photographs now. Since then, we've had pre-spring collections, couture shows and an outbreak of summer street fashion never predicted on any catwalk - and the spring shows themselves are almost over.
Such is the insanely accelerated speed of the fashion world that the clothes appearing in shops now already seem not to be the latest thing, their significance lost, having long ago been chopped into readily digestible chunks and sucked dry through overexposure. An example: I'm guessing you might not have bought anything beige yet, but if you are warming to it, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you'd already been put off, merely on the basis of seeing so many trend pages, including our own, exhorting you to wear it. It's only natural - the mere suggestion of a must-have is enough to send some of us off in the opposite direction. Or perhaps you're suspicious of putting money on something so 'everywhere'. And yet that's quite ironic, really, given that camel, until now, has always been considered a synonym for 'long-wearing, classic investment'.
No one, be it designer, buyer or retailer, thinks this saturation of information and the pressure to produce novelties is a clever way of carrying on, although most have bowed to inevitability and carry on regardless, privately sobbing over unreasonable schedules and the impossibility of being creative at such short order.
Actually, when I come to look again at the revival of the minimalist Nineties - the big visual story of the season - I'm wondering if it could be construed as the entire industry's unconscious longing to wipe out the folly of the past 10 crazy years along with the mess it created for itself.
I have absolutely nothing against the way of dressing that was channelled on autumn's runway - in fact, it echoes the style I wore back then, when androgynous schoolboy trouser suits, mannish tailored coats, plain A-line skirts and white shirts were considered edgy. In the Nineties, if anyone remembers, the strictness of that vision started as a kind of counter-cultural stance against both the baroque and overtly sexy look of mainstream fashion and the girly, boho slip-dress and cardigan outbreak that swept Notting Hill.
The radically sorted-out, slightly intellectual anti-element is partly what I loved about the original feel of minimalism: the way Helmut Lang, Prada, Jil Sander and Martin Margiela used plain, conventional classics in a subversively coded way, while allowing you to pass at work as a serious person. It was the apotheosis of my generation's kind of feminism - a system of dressing that, for the first time, didn't mean having to wear boilersuits and DMs like our pioneer elders.
This winter's echoes of the Nineties miss all that, of course. What we're looking at now is far more feminised. I don't remember soft blouses and high heels back then, and no one obsessed about handbags - in fact, it was regarded as naff to show them on a runway, so much so that the rebellious Marc Jacobs, in the first season he took over at Louis Vuitton, could bring himself to show only one bag, on which the logo was embossed to make it as invisible as possible.
Second time around, the sense of an underground force rising is absent, because the impetus has come from somewhere else. This season's sensible workwear looks are a reflection of the fact that its main protagonists, Phoebe Philo at Céline, Stella McCartney and Hannah MacGibbon at Chloé, have all reached that thirtysomething life stage in which a professional woman, possibly with young children, needs to pull herself together, sartorially speaking. And, in a nutshell, it was the redressing of that balance we saw being played out at the shows.
Certainly, there were male designers, chiefly Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy and Michael Kors in New York who picked up on the Nineties vibe, too - Tisci, because it was the style he absorbed while studying at Central Saint Martins, and Kors, because he sensed it was a good moment to revisit his own past and offer a deluxe version of super grown-up NYC dressing, camel coats and all.
But, as logical and welcome as all that might be, just referencing a simpler time can't bring it back - whether it be in the Lang/Margiela/Sander sense, or in the nostalgic Fifties way Marc Jacobs put out at Louis Vuitton (with every model sporting a Speedy bag). Untangling the crazy knots fashion has tied itself up in is a self-inflicted set of problems it has never had to face before. As the real impact of the internet hits fashion, it seems to me there are only two ways of short-circuiting what has evolved into a ridiculous, antiquated cycle. One is to actually deliver the goods when a woman's consciousness is primed to make an impulse buy, when it is fresh (ie, as the shows are happening), which might solve the 'gone off it' syndrome that, like the fate of beige, can kick in later. And the other is to do just the opposite - to keep doing non-faddy things that don't scream 'news', but, instead, stoke desire on a slow, continuous, long-term burn.
When we look back on autumn/winter 2010, we might remember it as the time when this reconfiguration started. You could date one side of the shift from the evening of 23 February, when, immediately after the Burberry show took to the runway, globally livestreamed from a marquee at Chelsea School of Art in London, the fabulous shearling aviator jackets Christopher Bailey showed were there, for sale, at a click of the mouse on the Burberry website.
Within a month, before summer had even started, there were women proudly walking around in their autumn sheepskins. Was that a glimpse of the future? Natalie Massenet, the e-tail guru of Net-a-Porter, thinks it has to be. Interviewed by The Business of Fashion, she said designers should stop showing clothes a season ahead and simply devote catwalk time to unveiling collections immediately available to buy in the shops or online.
Provided everything was kept secret until the big 'reveal' (unlikely, but still), that could also snooker fast-fashion copyists, at least for the six weeks or so in which designers could, for once, rightfully be seen as the ones who originated the ideas the high street scrambles to knock off.
A kind of an idealistic, Brave New World vision, it sounds dumb but isn't, when you look closer. Very big brands that can afford to produce stock upfront in the hope that it might be an instant hit might be able to cope with using their catwalks as, essentially, home-shopping events for broadcasting the sensational items of the season. If you're small, though, you can't take that financial risk. And in any case, I see a simultaneous movement that goes against the old psychology of 'fashion' as something flashy and novel to grab and wear at the same time as everyone else.
Consistent, unchanging, under-exposed, even boringly good things now have a real allure. I caught myself thinking about this when I kept returning to admire a single Stella McCartney outfit - a look of such low-key nothingness it is, I'm beginning to think, brilliantly symbolic. What could be so compelling about a pair of grey trousers, a round-necked grey sweater and a pair of pointy court shoes? Well, it proves this designer genuinely knows how to cut a pair of trousers, that she is proud enough of them to show them unadorned and that, if you go to her store, you will find items of equal quality - and that is valuable shorthand for it being a business a woman can trust.
It's a principle Phoebe Philo is obviously working on at Céline, keeping her designs, such as that for her classic box bag, consistent and avoiding hype, over-availability and over-trendiness at all costs. Even as fashion rushes on from the Nineties - who knows what the revisionary headlines from the spring collections will be in the next few weeks? - I sense that slowing things down, doing them properly over time and waiting for rewards in the long-term is shaping up to be the real underground revolution.
telegraph.co.uk
