Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Don't Expect a Genius Designer at the Fashion Week

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    Don't Expect a Genius Designer at the Fashion Week

    Read this depressing article. Wow, has it come to that? Guy Trebay supporting the age of mediocrity? Full article here.
    Wanted: Genius Designer

    By GUY TREBAY
    WHO will be the Next Big Thing? That’s the question that perennially fuels the rave of creativity, stitchery and circus nerves that is New York Fashion Week. It’s the tease that attracts the thousands of designers, buyers, editors, photographers, stylists, models, bookers, trend forecasters, sharp-tongued blogosphere sibyls and the strung-out accountants who attempt to ride herd on all of the above to the Bryant Park tents twice a year. It’s the dream we all dream of a sartorial Lotto win.
    Even with an economy dazed and numbed, the United States remains the world’s largest market for fashion, and New York is unquestionably the center of the global fashion image machine. True, consumer pocketbooks seem to be on temporary lockdown. But the assembly line keeps cranking all the same; the maw must be fed.
    But who will do it? Cast a seasoned eye across a landscape ornamented with scores of shows during the next nine days (officially Fashion Week runs today through Sept. 12) and what’s immediately apparent is that while fashion is healthily supplied with journeymen there is no clear visionary, no obvious genius in sight.
    “The business is much too safe,” Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barney’s New York, said last week. “There’s just too much money at stake.” Thus, we should not expect a season in which designers go out on a limb and propel models down catwalks in get-ups concocted from seaweed or kitchen utensils. (Both have actually happened.) This is not to suggest, as Ms. Gilhart also noted, that New York is suffering from talent shortfall — far from it. Among many others, we have the team of Proenza Schouler, with their knack for making middle-of-the-road design seem indie and cool. We have cartoonish pop cultural gadflies like Isaac Mizrahi, and chaste classicists like Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein. We have elder statesman like Oscar de la Renta and Ralph Lauren, who, far from seeming moss-covered and passé, have been more alert to shifts in the cultural marketplace than some who were zygotes when those men first hit professional stride.
    We have loopy design theoreticians like threeAsFour, holding up the fort for Downtown Style. And — back from a barkeep hiatus in Majorca that followed his Big Apple flameout—we have Miguel Adrover, the man who captured the imagination of the fashion establishment with clothes made from a recycled mattress and Yankees caps.
    Still, there is no world-beater. There are no names that suggest clear-cut potential both to reshape fashion and somehow with it the global culture of style. There is no one, to take the obvious example, likely to replace Yves Saint Laurent, who died in June and seemingly took with him not merely a genius for conjuring glamour from whole cloth, but also for draping his designs to suit the mood of his time.
    What seems disorienting about this absence is that fashion is no longer a discipline of interest mainly to female consumers and a cult of aesthetes. Like it or not, fashion has become something larger, a viral cultural force that sometimes seems only incidentally concerned with clothes. Cocteau wasn’t kidding when he said style is a simple way of saying complicated things — a point the United States Olympic Committee clearly noted (American teams may not have dominated in the medals, but in the parade of nations they killed the competition in jauntily classic Polo Ralph Lauren uniforms), as do politicos. Were the Dead Sea scrolls subjected to more exegesis than Michelle Obama’s floral print sheath at the Democratic National Convention in Denver? (Thakoon, by the way.) The voices of the blogosphere say, No.


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

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • lowrey
    ventiundici
    • Dec 2006
    • 8383

    #2
    could anyone tell which genius designers came up with these outfits:









    my bet is on J. Crew
    "AVANT GUARDE HIGHEST FASHION. NOW NOW this is it people, these are the brands no one fucking knows and people are like WTF. they do everything by hand in their freaking secret basement and shit."

    STYLEZEITGEIST MAGAZINE | BLOG

    Comment

    Working...
    X
    😀
    🥰
    🤢
    😎
    😡
    👍
    👎