long *** rant incoming sorry yall i feel like babbling 🫦💋🚬
if we're being strict and reactionary while defining what makes fashion/fashion designers intelectual, for a designer to be considered intellectual he or she has to have a solid academic background (they must have a PhD or whatever) but imo its a very old fashioned, and quite frankly useless criteria.
modern fashion is a tricky subject bc its inherently paradoxical, its made up of images/descriptions (a system of signs if you will lol), is not purely about garments, the physical product in itself, but something more abstract: a chanel tweed tailleur for example is not just a jacket, it goes beyond that: its a symbol of a certain class, a savoir-faire, an institution and even a cultural perception of french identity. I think every designer working today has to operate in this system and to me what makes a designer intelectual is the awareness of how this very specific environment works and how to play in it/around with it.
in this sense miuccia, rei and margiela are extremely intellectual designers, not bc they imbue their work with arty/niche references but bc they understand how fashion works, in the economical and social sense: what they produced was both a reflection of our times AND an anticipation of how ppl would dress/relate to clothes also (this is a very very very personal opinion and by this definition all the greats would be intellectual designers but w/e lol).
Fashion students and designers nowadays are striving for the intellectual """look""", associated with phoebe/martin/helmut, but they're not very interested in knowing why it is considered cerebral, they take the media's definition of what an intellectual design is and run with it lol. i think blazy gets an unfair heat bc of this, he never positioned himself as an intellectual figure but ppl project this image onto him: he studied in belgium, he's part of raf's clique, he worked at margiela and with phoebe, all things associated with intellectual design lol
I'd argue that there's also this distinction the west makes, thanks to early modernity, between body and mind, where the body and every activity related to it is seen as lesser separated from the mind, where the important things happen and funnily enough fashion's medium is the body, as a result someone like pieter or raf basically ignore the body and operate solely on ideas bc consciously or subconsciously they think fashion is lesser than furniture design or architecture.
the dude from marni, raf post-jil sander and pieter's alaia are examples of a complete denial of their medium/support, they dgaf about the body everything is an experimentation that results in awful useless clothing bc they exist in a vacuum, not fully aware of fashion's system. the media might hype up pieter's alaia and raf's prada but they wont stand the test of time bc they're empty, innocuous, an unhumorous farse disguised as a cerebral output (pieter gets a pass bc he seems like a sweetheart, raf and his old *** still wearing oversized sweaters can puff away marlboro lights in a gallery in the middle of bumfuck nowhere while discussing why sterling ruby's paint diarrhea is the second coming of cy twombly)
