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nytimes.com
February 4, 2007
Whatever Happened to Now?
By GUY TREBAY
When did today become such an impossible idea? What cabal was put in place to decide that the most interesting way to make culture relevant — or the fashionable part of it at least — would be to constantly dredge up the recycled past or, even sadder, the “future.” By this I am referring not to the actual fact of tomorrow (assuming it is a fact). I mean that dust-covered, capital-F version retailed by prognosticating fantasists since Jules Verne.
Futurism was so rampant at the spring collections shown in Paris and Milan last fall that you might have thought everyone was planning to bypass 2007 altogether and head straight for 2525. It was futurism of a particular sort, the B-movie kind. There were bubbly-beaded dresses at Lanvin that seemed to allude to molecular division. There were sequined tubes at Dolce & Gabbana that would have been just the thing for a fembot to pack on Zsa Zsa Gabor’s epochal 1958 trip to Venus (“The Female Planet!” as the tag line called it) in “The Queen of Outer Space.” There were designers who showed boiler suits or shiny stuff that looked like armor or else like panels from a solar desalination plant.
But where the heady perfume of jet fuel and nylon grew strongest was at Balenciaga, the show that inspired more excited noise that week than any other. The future that Nicolas Ghesquière, the Balenciaga designer, put forth was taken up by the fashion pack with such fervor that you would have thought he had single-handedly revitalized a business that has seemed in danger of running out of ways to mimic the sartorial habits of Sofia Coppola. Maybe he had.
It did not trouble many, when the collection was shown, that Ghesquière’s futurism could be easily traced to a few camp cinematic artifacts of the 1980s or that quite a lot of it resembled stuff from the closet of C-3PO. People seemed relieved to encounter a designer whose ideas derived from a past that was, let’s say, vaguely recent — or at least way closer to our own time than to the era of Edward VII. There were two camps clearly doing battle over the way women will look this spring during that week in Paris — the light-saber futurists versus the silk-rosette romantics. Most prominent among the latter was Marc Jacobs, whose often-noted gritty downtown street style has been burnished into something flossier and more Gallic since he moved to Paris. But even the Japanese designer Junya Watanabe found a way to pay homage to Marie Antoinette, everyone’s favorite historical cupcake, albeit in a typically androgynous way.
It was Alexander McQueen, however, who gave romanticism its most aggressive spin, presenting gorgeously severe corset dresses that had tiny wasp waists, hobble skirts and also trains and bustles. Some of the models’ hips had even been padded to the point where you had to wonder how a woman dressed that way might manage to wedge through a turnstile. But what a funny notion. Women don’t wear this stuff to work, of course. Everybody knows that. McQueen’s designs were fantasias, mainly, idealizations, and yet a question continually nagged at this particular viewer as the shows wore on: Of what?
Fashion holds no monopoly at this point on a general cultural unease with the present. Nor is fashion the only one of the fine or applied arts with a tendency to solve strategic problems by taking a stroll down memory lane. But unlike huge chunks of the professional music and art worlds, or the countless millions of amateurs playfully using cyberspace to torque art and music and narrative into novel forms, fashion feels behind the curve. It has gotten clunky. It is stuck in a reference loop. How “modern,” after all, can a collection that draws its inspiration from “Tron” be?
To a certain extent the problem may be a practical one, as the former Gucci designer Tom Ford once pointed out. There are the formal constraints of the object itself, he said, whether it is a dress or a suit or a coat or a hat. There is the coded history of costume and not-altogether-welcome back stories to deal with, extending more or less unchanged, as the art historian Anne Hollander has often said of the suit, two centuries or more. And there is the fundamental fact of the human body, not, as Ford is also fond of asserting, a very beautiful design. A lot of animals have more graceful anatomies than we do, Ford has also said. A lot tend to be better dressed. Yet, as the designer Miuccia Prada pronounced recently, during an impassioned conversation about the meanings of the metastasizing cultural contagion that fashion has become, the banality of much contemporary design starts from some deep and truly contemporary misunderstandings.
“People are losing the human dimension of fashion,” Prada said. (People are losing the human dimension of most everything.) “I don’t want to sound pretentious,” she added, “but they are forgetting the importance of adornment and clothing, which is profound. They forget that even when people don’t have anything, a way to express themselves is with their bodies and their clothing.”
Is this the place to point out that far from preening ourselves lovingly, with a kind of Biblical forgiveness, our body anxieties are now pitched so high that they emit a terrible, strange whine? Or they would were people still able to mobilize faces paralyzed by Botox or stiffened into alien doll shapes by sutures and Restylane. That the nip-and-tuck culture is symptomatic of some troubling social pathology can hardly be called a secret. The wonder, though, is why you hear so little about the breakdown of futurism’s great promise, that in technology lies the true path.
It might be straining the point to say so, but fashion, too, seems to have gotten caught up in the shortcomings of technology. It is seductive to romanticize the future as it was supposed to turn out, the way Ghesquière did: people wearing articulated armor suggestive of intergalactic samurai, happy chic robot slaves that, in the “Jetsons” scenario of your childhood, cooked and cleaned and zipped around doing the vacuuming on little wheels.
In that charming vision of what lies ahead, the notion still held that it was people who would tell machines what to do and not the other way around. Humans would give the voice prompts. That isn’t precisely how it turned out. Who, after all, has not had the experience of having to distort diction and talk like a robot in order to become intelligible to a computer remote?
These overall cultural jitters seemed to be at least partly what Hussein Chalayan, the designer inevitably referred to as fashion’s resident intellectual, was referencing at his show, where a large numberless clock that spun out of time sat at the head of the runway. Models paraded onto a stage and then stood stock still in ethereal classical frocks that, one by one, mechanically morphed or peeled apart or flew up like curtains or lifted away from the models’ bodies altogether. Chalayan’s particular brand of technological wizardry was poetic in the setting (an arena) and charmingly clunky (“smart” fabrics were used as well as microprocessor technology, not so different from the kind that pilots toy boats on ponds). But it was also weirdly disquieting, and the reason was that, as a finale, a young woman was sent out and made to stand as a remote control stripped off her clothes and left her naked onstage. Cupping her sex with her hands, the woman stood there for what felt like some very long minutes, trembling, vulnerable, dehumanized.
“What has happened is that we are all consuming so relentlessly that we are losing sight of basic human values,” the designer Vivienne Westwood remarked last month in Milan, where she was showing her new fall men’s-wear collection, oddly enough titled Peep Show. Westwood was talking in a general way about the image glut and the way consumers have grown mentally fat from ingesting such a constant stream of images that they have ceded, or even lost, the ability to do anything other than react. The cultural effronteries Westwood built her career on, in the days when she and Malcolm McLaren more or less invented the look of punk, have no contemporary analogy. The culture is passive, she said. The visual arts are dominated by pastiche. The context of no context, an idea that George W. S. Trow wrote about in 1980, anticipated with surprising precision the state in which we find ourselves now.
“My own definition of culture is the cultivation and export of humanity through art,” said Westwood, aware that the view she was voicing might seem quaint to those who prefer a certain coolness in their cultural engagement. How many other designers, after all, would go on record proclaiming the innocence of the American Indian movement leader Leonard Peltier at a fashion show. (Actually, one: Anna Sui printed a line supporting Peltier in the program of one of her shows, right after the credits for makeup artists and models.) “If we are not careful,” Westwood said, “we won’t know how to see the world in a human way anymore.”
In other words, we may be so caught up in the solipsism of consuming and in the virtual that we miss the now altogether. Long Nguyen, the Vietnamese-born editor of the cult fashion magazine Flaunt, said as much recently in Milan. “Most designers have lost the now completely,” Nguyen added. “The gap is getting further and further between what designers are putting out, what they’re doing and how people are actually living and what they wear,” he said. Designers, Nguyen added, understating the case perhaps, “seem to have a different vision of how to live life and what to live life for.”
Not only that, a number of them (or the entities that employ them) seem to be moving aggressively away from the limiting physical dimensions of real life to produce “collections” like the one that is being promoted by the British label Boudicca, elements of which exist only online, or the Dior line called High Jewelry, which made its debut last month on the island Belladone, a Second Life destination in cyberspace. If there was a single buzz word being used to describe designers’ offerings during the Milanese men’s shows, which offer clothes for next fall, the word was “futurism.” It was same sort of backward futurism that you could have seen just a few months earlier at the women’s shows for spring.
And if there was a unifying sense during a week in which an awful lot of the stuff those self-same designers put out resembled uniforms designed for male slaves in an Ed Wood schlockfest, it was of stubbornly willed isolation from what some of us think of as current affairs.
If you don’t count the momentary blip that Corporate Social Responsibility made on fashion’s screen, there is not much around to suggest a new climate of engagement. At the fashion shows in Milan, everyone seemed so mesmerized by the image in the cultural rearview or else the shimmering demands of their BlackBerry screens (and aren’t most messages received on these P.D.A.’s basically about the fact of their own occurrence?) that you would hardly imagine that there existed a world outside.
Will this have changed by the time the fashion migration settles in New York this week to appraise the fall 2007 season — a heel-clacking herd of chic wild beasts descending on the Bryant Park tents? I myself tend to doubt it, but there are those in the business who think otherwise. “I sound like an activist, but I truly believe that there’s the beginning of an awakening going on in the business,” said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, “a feeling that we’ve all lost our values a bit, and we need to start operating with more consciousness.”
Barneys, to that end, plans to inaugurate a line of “organic” clothing with the denim designer Rogan and to establish some new rules of engagement for designers who want to sign on to the company’s enlightened goals, perhaps as a way of enabling us to dress for the future by helping to ensure that there may actually be one. Fashion, Gilhart added, has allowed itself to become so besotted with image abstractions that people have forgotten about “the basic political issues of consuming: who made this, under what circumstances, of what materials? I’m not saying some huge shift in consciousness will be everywhere. But I can definitely feel a shift.”
Occupationally, Gilhart is an early adopter, of course. She was quick to get on board when Ghesquière’s futurist spaceship hovered into view in Paris. Recently, her focus has tightened, as she adjusts to what she calls a “whole level of consciousness I see coming into the industry.” If it seems wishful, not to say at some level delusional, when Gilhart talks about linking fashion to global politics, the shift in direction at least makes a welcome detour from intergalactic travel in someone’s remakes of space tunics by Pierre Cardin.
Why not, after all, try the present? “One thing that I hate is selling dreams,” Miuccia Prada said one day when we met during a trip she had made to New York. “If you really want beauty in your life, do something with your ideas, but in a real way. Don’t hide in some luxury fantasy, some idea of fashion. Live with some sense that there is a larger world around.”
