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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    NYT article on Fashion Zeitgeist



    I found Mr. Trebay's theory very interesting and relevant to today. I am not sure if the connection between "fear and loathing" (as my man Hunter would put it) and fashion is there, but the way he makes it entirely plausible.



    LINK




















    March 6, 2008

    Fashion Diary


    Fashion Sees Its Shadow











    Paris




    HUGE crowds gathered last summer at the Russian pavilion of the Venice Biennale
    to see a three-screen video installation by a collective known as
    AES+F. Filled with dreamy computer-game landscapes, scary monsters,
    rocket ships, carousels and nearly naked post-pubescent models engaged
    in elaborate mock battles, ?Last Riot? was the apocalypse rendered
    pastel and made chic.




    The artists set the piece to Wagner, as artists often have when the leitmotif is The End. This strategy worked for Francis Ford Coppola
    when he needed to hit the doom button (and drown out the rotor wash) in
    ?Apocalypse Now,? and it also worked pretty well when Bugs Bunny was
    playing Josh Brolin to Elmer Fudd?s Javier Bardem in the 1957 cartoon ?What?s Opera, Doc??




    Whether the end is nigh is rarely the point. What matters is that,
    when people fear shifts in the cultural tectonics, they tend to reach
    for myth and the verities. And, while it may seem like a stretch to
    extend this observation to a sphere as ostensibly superficial as
    fashion, it was hard to come away from the season just ended here
    without thinking that dressmakers are spooked by the cold breath of
    change.




    Like the battle scenes in ?Last Riot? (Miuccia Prada?s
    favorite piece at the Venice art fair, by the way), the Paris season
    gave the impression of being a valiant defense of the ramparts of chic.




    And there were good reasons for this. Faced with overwhelming shifts
    in the way clothes are manufactured; with the widespread dispersal and
    pirating of information on the Internet; with markets broadening to
    encompass not just familiar consumer elites, but entire swaths of the
    globe; and with the knowledge that their boldest efforts seem puny
    compared with the chess moves being enacted by the multinational titans
    who employ them, a lot of designers are befuddled. What should they do?
    Change careers? Why not, instead, reach into the costume trunks and,
    like the pretty combatants in ?Last Riot,? take up a wooden swords and
    play pretend.




    The recurrent themes of the season?s playacting were nostalgia,
    full-blown romanticism and crypto-religiosity. These were everywhere
    visible, but most particularly at Alexander McQueen, Givenchy, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent.




    The McQueen show, titled ?The Girl Who Lived in a Tree,? was
    inspired by a fable the designer concocted about a maiden who lives in
    a six-century-old elm in his English garden, and who comes out at night
    ?to meet a prince and become a queen.?




    Because the designer has recently toured India, the queen in
    question was probably Victoria. But Mr. McQueen?s was not so much the
    image of the dour and hard-headed sovereign of historical record as of
    a Raj Barbie, a creature from a music-hall pantomime, clad in what one
    critic described as ?ballerina-length, multi-flounced dance dresses,
    each more insanely exquisite than the last.?




    She was a skinny queen, too, trussed up in corsets that added a note
    of perversity easy to read as a clue to a control fetish, something
    autoerotic. When a designer takes a girl ? a wraith, really ? like the
    English model Lily Donaldson and binds her waist, it?s hard to avoid
    thinking of how unruly the world must seem from inside his skull.




    No one can really blame designers for trying to conserve themselves
    or to regulate the growing demands on creativity. ?People are becoming
    overwhelmed,? the D. J. Michel Gaubert remarked last Thursday, as he
    stood by an oval portal to a luminous biomorphic tent constructed
    inside the Grand Palais for the Yves Saint Laurent show.




    Mr. Gaubert, a seasoned D. J. who has spent decades creating aural
    backgrounds for labels like Saint Laurent and Chanel, noted how the
    increasing rapidity of fashion?s production cycles seems to affect
    everyone. ?Look at the number of outfits people are showing,? he said.
    ?Look at how many shows there are a day. Look at how many cities and
    markets buyers have to think about.?




    Even the shows themselves are getting faster, it seems, an
    impression confirmed if one happened to see a video that accompanies a
    costume exhibition Christian Lacroix
    assembled from the archives of Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In it, the
    1980s-era mannequin Dalma is seen sauntering the catwalk at a Lacroix
    show, pausing, posing, cocking her head, twirling, making a moue.




    In those days, Dalma was known as a fairly peppy character on the
    catwalk (as opposed to, say, Iman, who moved so magisterially she
    should have been accompanied by tugboats). Yet compared with either of
    those two, models now break from the gate like sprinters. They almost
    have to in order to make it up and back a 90-foot runway in time to
    whip backstage for the next change of clothes.




    ?The demands on everyone are constantly growing,? Mr. Gaubert said,
    referring not just to the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections, but
    also to the couture presentations some labels produce, as well as
    precollections and resort collections and ? ka-ching! ? accessories.




    ?People can?t keep up,? he said. ?The demand is insane.?




    So, perhaps in response to this, designers retrench. They embrace
    conservative ideas and the clothes that suit them. They look backward.
    They outfit models as an army of automatons, the way Stefano Pilati,
    the gifted Saint Laurent designer, did. His pale-faced cadres wore
    black lipstick, had eyes obscured by black-bowl wigs and bodies encased
    in clothes of a stark geometry rarely seen outside the Vatican.




    ?I don?t think you want to go out advertising a brand anymore,? Mr. Pilati told Style.com after the show.




    Mr. Pilati was not alone in balking at the idea of becoming a logo machine. At Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquiere
    produced a collection that was as much about formalist feats as about
    anything as banal and frivolous as grabbing an after-work cocktail. At
    Prada in Milan, Miuccia Prada showed a collection of stark widow?s
    weeds. At Lanvin, Alber Elbaz made ribboned dresses that summoned up
    Victorian mourning clothes. And at Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci presented
    dresses that had a renunciatory feeling. They were clothes for a
    streetwalker who has forgone her wicked ways and taken the veil.




    Even the stylized clothes Marc Jacobs
    showed for Louis Vuitton were devout, at least in their allegiance to
    traditional French style ideals. A lot of people thought that Mr.
    Jacobs?s designs looked like monastic vestments, and some (well, I)
    found the heavy woolens and kooky conical headgear evocative of the
    uniforms (purple shrouds and two-tone Nikes) worn by the Heaven?s Gate cultists of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.




    Those benighted souls will be remembered, of course, for having
    committed mass suicide in 1997 with the help of vodka and
    phenobarbital, in the hope of meeting a spaceship they thought was
    hidden behind Comet Hale-Bopp. Everybody, as the artists who made the
    ?Last Riot? seemed to understand, is looking for a faith, however
    misguided or outright spurious.




    While some find it in the imagery and crafts of the past, others
    remain resolutely forward thinking. Few designers treat the idea of
    submitting to anything other than the zeitgeist with as much
    lip-curling disdain as Karl Lagerfeld.
    ?I don?t believe in anything,? he said recently in an interview with
    the French editor Olivier Zahm. ?I envy people who have faith. It must
    make things easier.?




    Yet Mr. Lagerfeld, who is now in his 70s, is being disingenuous. Few
    are more devout about promoting what one French critic called,
    correctly if pretentiously, ?the sacralization of consumer goods.?




    As if to prove this, Mr. Lagerfeld set his Chanel show at the Grand
    Palais this season on an immense carousel adorned with outsize versions
    of house classics like sling-back shoes, camellias, quilted handbags
    and ballerina flats. Fashion, he seemed to be saying, may not yet have
    attained recognition as a global creed. But it takes a true disbeliever
    to question its role as the outward expression of our deep faith in
    acquiring things.




    Markets may slump. The dollar may become the peso. China and Russia
    may turn the United States into a rest stop on the superhighway of
    global economy. None of that is likely to deter people from
    impoverishing themselves in order to possess the latest who-knows-what.




    ?Everybody knows the economy is terrible,? Stephanie Solomon, the
    fashion director of Bloomingdale?s, remarked last week as the sun broke
    through the winter clouds and gilded the city. ?But whatever happens,
    and I believe this with all my heart,? she said, ?there is always
    something special, that one unique thing, that one special object you
    want so much you?ll do without food to have.?





















    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • kira
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2008
    • 2353

    #2
    Re: NYT article on Fashion Zeitgeist



    Even the shows themselves are getting faster, it seems, an
    impression confirmed if one happened to see a video that accompanies a
    costume exhibition Christian Lacroix
    assembled from the archives of Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In it, the
    1980s-era mannequin Dalma is seen sauntering the catwalk at a Lacroix
    show, pausing, posing, cocking her head, twirling, making a moue.




    In those days, Dalma was known as a fairly peppy character on the
    catwalk (as opposed to, say, Iman, who moved so magisterially she
    should have been accompanied by tugboats). Yet compared with either of
    those two, models now break from the gate like sprinters. They almost
    have to in order to make it up and back a 90-foot runway in time to
    whip backstage for the next change of clothes.





    Perhaps this is one of the many things that prohibits the kind of gait that I am drawn to and yearn to see.





    Interesting theory indeed. Do you think that some designers are trying to conserve themselves or regulate the growth of demand, the key word trying? I think that it is quite hard to regulate or conserve one's creativity. Perhaps a sense of overwhelming demand hinders creative prolificacy and what appears to be a retreat or retrenching as a response could lead to a great renewal. Everything is cyclical.








    Distraction is an obstruction of the construction.

    Comment

    • Faust
      kitsch killer
      • Sep 2006
      • 37852

      #3
      Re: NYT article on Fashion Zeitgeist



      I just think when business is constantly in front of you it hinders creativity. The image of a careless Bohemian may be a cliche, but the business side is very time consuming. Part of the reasons why most designers don't mind selling their company to investors. Of course it may result in you being fired from your own company and inability to design under your own name (Jil Sander, Helmut Lang) or in closing of your company (Dirk Schonberger), or in erasing of quality standards (Ann Demeulemeester), but that's the game.



      I do remember Ann complaining that the stores are demanding deliveries sooner and sooner, which hampered her sense of calendar. Not everyone has to play that game, but if you want to be a big business, you will.

      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

      Comment

      • kira
        Senior Member
        • Mar 2008
        • 2353

        #4
        Re: NYT article on Fashion Zeitgeist

        Agreed. Time consuming and hindering indeed. Not that I think the careless Bohemian is the best either. It is finding the balance between the two if that possibility can exist. sometimes it wont.
        Distraction is an obstruction of the construction.

        Comment

        • clay
          Senior Member
          • Sep 2006
          • 284

          #5
          Re: NYT article on Fashion Zeitgeist

          [quote user="Faust"]


          I just think when business is constantly in front of you it hinders creativity. The image of a careless Bohemian may be a cliche, but the business side is very time consuming. Part of the reasons why most designers don't mind selling their company to investors. Of course it may result in you being fired from your own company and inability to design under your own name (Jil Sander, Helmut Lang) or in closing of your company (Dirk Schonberger), or in erasing of quality standards (Ann Demeulemeester), but that's the game.




          I do remember Ann complaining that the stores are demanding deliveries sooner and sooner, which hampered her sense of calendar. Not everyone has to play that game, but if you want to be a big business, you will.




          [/quote]




          a) Stores ( Buyers) also dictate what they want or what sells for them, and its hard for designers to ignore their requests (demands) often times. That will really kill your creative buzz quick! And the quality standards almost always go down. I'm fighting with a company , that I am freelancing for now, over the quality of a new line I'm designing for them. They don't see the value in investing in great fabric for first samples since they already produce crap on other lines and they have a healthy business. And for that matter they don't see the value in investing in me full time so I may control the quality of the product from start to finish, so my samples end up looking like shit( they don't seem to mind though)!




          b) O,S.- When did Dirk Schonberger go out of business??? They have his stuff in Century 21 now along with Cdiem( Just had to return a great pair of trousers cause they where too small).

          Comment

          • Faust
            kitsch killer
            • Sep 2006
            • 37852

            #6
            Re: NYT article on Fashion Zeitgeist

            Alas, my friend, this is the last of Dirk you will see. Better pick up a shirt, just because.
            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

            Comment

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