Op-Ed: FASHION IN 2025 IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO COPY
In his 2010 book Retromania, the music critic Simon Reynolds deftly sketched out how recent pop music had descended into pastiche by endless recombination of past styles. Whereas virtually every decade of the 20th Century until the 2000s had its musical movements, even though they began referencing the past as early as the 1970s, he saw an alarming lack of innovation in the 2000s. The question Reynolds posed at the end of the book was even more alarming; what happens when enough time passes from the time when culture stopped innovating? What will be left to copy when all we have is pastiche? Though Reynolds talked about music and touched upon fashion only cursorily, his analysis could also be applied to fashion. It’s the end of 2025 and I think enough time has passed for us to provide one possible answer – what happens is overwhelming blandness.