Designer Greatness and Generational Debate

[christianef]

Half a dozen, and many different brands :-) SZ is just an epicenter of a certain style, and that style has definitely gotten a little bit more mainstream, so it's very easy to get a bit jaded about this aesthetic and the designers we champion (and by the way, I personally champion MANY more than what's discussed here), but make no mistake - we are a black drop in a rainbow fashion bucket. So, yeah, I think they are waaaay on the fringes... and that's just the way I like it.

relatively speaking, yes. but relatively speaking tommy hilfiger had a bigger influence on menswear than slimane. places like monamoore and many more carry all these 'in the corner' brands and sell out almost automatically. obviously in comparison its very small scale, but ive worked in a boutique that sold womens CDG, junya, ann, rick etc almost exclusively to well off elderly women who were maniacs for it...so on the fringes probably but not to the extent it would compromise access to it at all very much. i just find the 'if you dig for it its still there' position a little misleading...a billion blogs all with the same picture of mary-kate in a givenchy studded leather isnt really digging.

[Faust]

I suppose we both need to adjust our scales, christianef ;-)

[Johnny]

Zamb why were Dior and Chanel not as revolutionary as most people suppose?

[zamb]

Zamb why were Dior and Chanel not as revolutionary as most people suppose?

for the similar reasons as to why this was regarded as directional and groundbreaking, when it was just a copy of this



only done by a much more popular and press worthy individual at a bigger house


I am busy in the studio now , so I will develop my argument in greater detail later tonite.............................

[Macro]

what fascinates me: the different perceptions of 'greatness' that are peeking out of this thread...
is a great designer someone who:
1. designs a body of work whose collective appreciation comes after the demise of the designer/line through influence on newer generations?
2. designs a body of work which captures mass attention instantly and achieves 'fame'?
3. designs a body of work which never sees collective appreciation, but achieves 'cult' status?
4. designs a body of work which transcends all criticism, achieves 'fame', influences future work, and is remembered?

It's all a question of formula: What does it for you, and what blend will coax you into your convictions? At the end of the day, fashion is art, and art is subjective... As critics of art we can wax theory, count fans, and play catch with philosophy, but to me art is personal. Our attraction/resistance to certain forms is the result of our development as humans, as our minds and hearts are maturing everyday, thus our taste changes (even slightly) daily. I don't mean this to undermine anything, just a thought i'm working on at the moment :)

Also, I think only someone in #4 can only TRULY be great, yet I don't believe an artist such as this comes along very often... a great designer/artist changes the way people view the world... I guess the question in this thread is whether or not it matters HOW that is accomplished... in other words, what impact do you see validating an artists perception as being 'great'?

I have my opinions, yes. I think Giorgio Armani, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme De Garcons, Maison Martin Margiela, and Alexander McQueen are fantastic contemporaries with incredible bodies of work which have, in their own way, further developed the relationship between the clothes we wear and the dance we do for the world. Are they 'great'? I don't know... time will tell for me :)

thanks for reading.

D

[Faust]

McQueen for sure. The guy is amazing. But what about Gaultier? I think he can be counted one of the greats, no? Cutlural rebellion - check. New direction - check. Influence of other fashion designers - check.

[Johnny]

i think we're trying to land on something that's not just subjective, and in fact that is what you seem to have done Macro. i tend to agree with what you say about category 4.

zamb i don't think people thought that pice was directional or groundbreaking; they thought it was interesting and a nice thing, but then someone discovered it was a copy, and the issue became of plagiarism, rather than whether he was truly a revolutionary designer. i don't know so much about dior, but i don't think chanel was a plagiarist. she may have taken aspects of existing traditional or uniform-based clothing and used them as an influence, but i do believe that what she produced changed who women dressed and how they considered dress.

[zamb]

McQueen for sure. The guy is amazing. But what about Gaultier? I think he can be counted one of the greats, no? Cutlural rebellion - check. New direction - check. Influence of other fashion designers - check.

there can be no considerations of a great designer without Gaultier being involved in the argument.
While i do find some of his work at times to be cheesy, to me he is the single most relentlessly creative designer there is. He might have toned down abit now, but to look at his body of work it is unquestionably a seriously impressive series, a body of work that covers a really broad scope for a creative.
I think he also occupies a really interesting place in fashion.
Being significantly younger than Karl Lagerfeld, I would say that he is the most realistic link we have between the old Couturiers and the Modern Designer, He used to work for Andre Courreges and Pierre Cardin. It is also interesting that he owns the most "modern" Couture house in paris,
the story of how it came to be is rather interesting.
He wanted the Job at Dior, it is said that mr Arnault thought him to lack the polish and Sophistication required to be a designer at Dior, (in part because of Gaultiers associations with television program Eurotrash) Arnault Ultimately gave the Job to Galliano, while offering the givenchy job to Gaultier.
JPG took this as an insult and decided that he would develop his own couture. Some of the most impressive works ive seen has been from his couture house.....................

[zamb]

i think we're trying to land on something that's not just subjective, and in fact that is what you seem to have done Macro. i tend to agree with what you say about category 4.

zamb i don't think people thought that pice was directional or groundbreaking; they thought it was interesting and a nice thing, but then someone discovered it was a copy, and the issue became of plagiarism, rather than whether he was truly a revolutionary designer. i don't know so much about dior, but i don't think chanel was a plagiarist. she may have taken aspects of existing traditional or uniform-based clothing and used them as an influence, but i do believe that what she produced changed who women dressed and how they considered dress.

Well you have to understand the context in which they both worked,
Dior Started his company after world war II,
at the time of the war there was a significant limit as to how much yardage of fabric could be used in a womans clothing,
Diors Company if my memory served me correct, was originally funded by investors who owned fabric mills, this enabled him to use excessive (by this I mean more than the wartime limits) amounts of fabrics in his designs.
If one should do a research on the prewar fashions of the 1930's you can see that some of the silhouettes, he created had existed before the war, the term "New look" was only new compared to the drab that women wore during the wartime and not the prewar fashions........
Chanel is another Matter,

[eat me]

uh, this gets rather exciting.

zamb, no need to be offended. I am not diminishing Slimane's body of work or his achievements. As I said, I believe he is an amazing designer. However, to me his impact wasn't as profound as Chanel's, for example. Not yet at least. Johny is probably right in stating that we are trying to pin down what effectively is a subjective opinion. And while true, I wasn't yet breathing at the time of New Look, I did spend time reading books on history of fashion, so to suggest that my opinion is uneducated is wrong. It's just different. You mention the PR works of Dior's New Look, yet their PR for Slimane which propelled him into the universal stardom and credited him with the invention of 'modern menswear silhouette' you chose to overlook. They both own it to PR (partially). That his tailoring was elegant and impeccable doesn't make him an innovator, it's not what he is credited for, so it's of no relevance to this topic.

Again, no need to argue. Hedi is great, it's just to me he is still not quite up there. I think, Chalayan is probably one of those designers I could say is a modern innovator. But then again, do you see many people wearing airplane-dresses or LED blouses? Me neither. It's not only about showing revolutionary design on the catwalk, it's also about making people wear it. As you said yourself:

I think his work is rich with ideas that can be developed to send fashion in completely new directions...

So until that happens, it's a niche. And so far I see that one of the criteria for 'greatness' is to bring that innovation to mainstream fashion to change its direction. If we will agree that this isn't necessary, than I'll happily agree with you - Chalayan is truly a great modern innovator.

[Jumbo Blimp Jumbo]

When considering greatness I always come back to a quote by Virginia Woolf who wrote:

The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults—indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all—but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective.

For me, someone who I consider to be not just great, but one of the true masters is Alaia. His is truly "a mind which has completely mastered its perspective." Often his work clashes with my own aesthetic and I find his work too revealing and sometimes overly feminine, but his love of the craft and his understanding of a woman's body always draws me in. I think that that is one of the true indications of greatness--that even if we do not completely share the designer's aesthetic we cannot deny their mastery. The true master is always looking inwards, always refining.

Another quote which I find befitting of this man is by Jean Renoir. How perfect:

The cult of great ideas is dangerous and may destroy the real basis for great achievements, that is the daily, humble work within the framework of a profession.

[ronin]

Name one common thing between Ann Demeulemeester and Proenza Schouler.

Most people have a hard time reading their names out loud?

Just a few thoughts, since I find the topic very interesting, especially the part regarding the generational debate.

I think that a possible contemporary inability to achieve greatness in the world of fashion would be tightly linked to how that world evolved, with, as someone stated earlier, a growing high-end market, hence a growing need to produce 'high-end' clothing, thus its conception and production becoming more industrialized, with loss of quality in both processes. From my point of view, the flock of new 'it' designers makes it hard to notice a serious breakthrough, fresh faces being expected and presented globally, the eyes and the mind being overwhelmed with designs that claim to be special and different from one another, when after a while all you see is bland copies and overused concepts. How 'new' designers are talked about in the media reminds me of a debutante ball, a line of girls who may all wear a different dress or hairpin but in the end all look alike once you zoom out to the whole picture. Of course that should make an actually revolutionnary breakthrough even more visible, but I don't think it is the case. Except for a minority who takes interest in a particular fringe of designers, you just have too many directions to look at to truly see one focal point.
I think that we became more critical, the constant call for novelty turning into weariness, and easy access to information allowing us to notice and analyse every influence there is. Once all the influences of a design have been identified, people are tempted to consider it less creative, forgeting that, as somebody also stated, 'great' designers from the past, the ones commonly considered revolutionnary like Dior or Chanel, were also heavily influenced and did not pull out their trademark looks out of a hat.
This is probably another symptom of the ambient nostalgia, with people stating in advance that everything has already been done before and nothing truly creative can come up anymore. That, and the growing disgust with people trying to hard, the suspicion as to who is truly an artist at core and who is faking it for the fame and glory.
So, I think that all these factors make us more critical of designers of our time, thus less likely to declare someone 'extremely good - I'm not even talking about 'great' here. Maybe, like I said, a minority (like people on this forum) isn't touched by this phenomenon, but I'm not sure greatness is defined by the call of a minority, as authoritative as it is.

Unless, and it seems rather obvious, greatness comes to the 'masses' through its influence over years, not necessarily acknowledged as such at first, except by a minority who studies the topic very closely. I think this phenomenon may be accentuated nowadays, since the media tend to draw attention to specific designers who are definitely not chosen according to their talent, let alone their greatness.Thus, the masses (and I use the term with no condescendecy) are tempted to declare 'great' at one given time someone who they will forget about a few years later.
This reminds me of how some painters have been declared great post-mortem, even though they were ignored during their lifetime, and not only contemporary artists. I guess the difference lies in the goal of the conception, since a designer makes clothing that will almost immediately be sold, be bought and used by consummers. (I may be ignoring painters who worked for a specific client on a command, but those don't match with this pattern.) But is a great designer necessarily one who makes clothing that is actually worn? Can't he be great through haute couture never worn outside of a show? Influence can be huge even under the form of something shown just once, even if it has never been seen by the masses it did influence in the end.

To try and give a personnal answer, I think innovation is key, not only in design, but in the approach to design. Being driven by a personal philosophy, of a specific goal, is also important to me, and innovation in this field matters a lot. Influence, of course, is major, and this is the main reason why I think greatness can hardly be judged contemporary to someone's work.
Still, influence alone is not a sufficient criteria to me, especially when it is not conceptual of esthetical. For example, I consider Slimane to be a major designer of our times, but I would not call him great : he started a revolution in the world of men's fashion, but, as someone wrote before, it is not only linked to his designs or his approch. Actually, I would definitely call him great in the familiar sense of the term. Even if his designs were enough to start the revolution, in the end it turned out to be a commercial (how brands market menswear) and behavioral (how consumers react) one before all. Well, that's how I saw it, I am no specialist of Slimane or contemporary menswear market so I may be missing a major point here.

I am somewhat unsure of consistency as a criteria, even when it comes to the designer's philosophy. If someone makes a revolutionary work and sticks to the philosophy and global aesthetics for several years, interesting in deisgn and philosophy, acknowledged as influentatial, and then suddenly stops for some reason and starts making less interesting designs or there is a shift in his approach, will it make his early work any less great? Can he still be considered a great designer, for what he was at a certain time? (genuine question)

[Faust]

Great post, ronin, and welcome.

Most people have a hard time reading their names out loud?

Took me a while to remember what the answer was, haha. Barneys bought the first collection from both.

Just a few thoughts, since I find the topic very interesting, especially the part regarding the generational debate.

I think that a possible contemporary inability to achieve greatness in the world of fashion would be tightly linked to how that world evolved, with, as someone stated earlier, a growing high-end market, hence a growing need to produce 'high-end' clothing, thus its conception and production becoming more industrialized, with loss of quality in both processes. From my point of view, the flock of new 'it' designers makes it hard to notice a serious breakthrough, fresh faces being expected and presented globally, the eyes and the mind being overwhelmed with designs that claim to be special and different from one another, when after a while all you see is bland copies and overused concepts. How 'new' designers are talked about in the media reminds me of a debutante ball, a line of girls who may all wear a different dress or hairpin but in the end all look alike once you zoom out to the whole picture. Of course that should make an actually revolutionnary breakthrough even more visible, but I don't think it is the case. Except for a minority who takes interest in a particular fringe of designers, you just have too many directions to look at to truly see one focal point.
I think that we became more critical, the constant call for novelty turning into weariness, and easy access to information allowing us to notice and analyse every influence there is. Once all the influences of a design have been identified, people are tempted to consider it less creative, forgeting that, as somebody also stated, 'great' designers from the past, the ones commonly considered revolutionnary like Dior or Chanel, were also heavily influenced and did not pull out their trademark looks out of a hat.

Strangely enough, I had the same conversation in my class today (about art). I think there is always room for the new, but I also think that some designers pave the way and others follow. That does not make the followers bad. Everyone is influenced by someone. Nevertheless, sometimes something happens in the right time at the right place. And influence is different from copying. Let's just say, there can only be one Black Square.

There is also, of course, rebellion. Chanel did what she did in opposition to the establishment. Then she became the establishment, and Ann Demeulemeester did her thing in opposition to Chanel. Etc. etc. etc.

This is probably another symptom of the ambient nostalgia, with people stating in advance that everything has already been done before and nothing truly creative can come up anymore. That, and the growing disgust with people trying to hard, the suspicion as to who is truly an artist at core and who is faking it for the fame and glory.

It's their problem. "There were never any good old days, they are today, they are tomorrow. It's a stupid thing we say, painting tomorrow with sorrow."

So, I think that all these factors make us more critical of designers of our time, thus less likely to declare someone 'extremely good - I'm not even talking about 'great' here. Maybe, like I said, a minority (like people on this forum) isn't touched by this phenomenon, but I'm not sure greatness is defined by the call of a minority, as authoritative as it is.

Unless, and it seems rather obvious, greatness comes to the 'masses' through its influence over years, not necessarily acknowledged as such at first, except by a minority who studies the topic very closely. I think this phenomenon may be accentuated nowadays, since the media tend to draw attention to specific designers who are definitely not chosen according to their talent, let alone their greatness.Thus, the masses (and I use the term with no condescendecy) are tempted to declare 'great' at one given time someone who they will forget about a few years later.
This reminds me of how some painters have been declared great post-mortem, even though they were ignored during their lifetime, and not only contemporary artists. I guess the difference lies in the goal of the conception, since a designer makes clothing that will almost immediately be sold, be bought and used by consummers. (I may be ignoring painters who worked for a specific client on a command, but those don't match with this pattern.) But is a great designer necessarily one who makes clothing that is actually worn? Can't he be great through haute couture never worn outside of a show? Influence can be huge even under the form of something shown just once, even if it has never been seen by the masses it did influence in the end.

Greatness does not come from the masses, popularity does. Throughout history, canon has been determined by the minority who were charged with this task because of their education, intellectual strength, and expertise. (Please, no throwing postmodern mud at me, you know what I mean)

To try and give a personnal answer, I think innovation is key, not only in design, but in the approach to design. Being driven by a personal philosophy, of a specific goal, is also important to me, and innovation in this field matters a lot. Influence, of course, is major, and this is the main reason why I think greatness can hardly be judged contemporary to someone's work.
Still, influence alone is not a sufficient criteria to me, especially when it is not conceptual of esthetical. For example, I consider Slimane to be a major designer of our times, but I would not call him great : he started a revolution in the world of men's fashion, but, as someone wrote before, it is not only linked to his designs or his approch. Actually, I would definitely call him great in the familiar sense of the term. Even if his designs were enough to start the revolution, in the end it turned out to be a commercial (how brands market menswear) and behavioral (how consumers react) one before all. Well, that's how I saw it, I am no specialist of Slimane or contemporary menswear market so I may be missing a major point here.

I am somewhat unsure of consistency as a criteria, even when it comes to the designer's philosophy. If someone makes a revolutionary work and sticks to the philosophy and global aesthetics for several years, interesting in deisgn and philosophy, acknowledged as influentatial, and then suddenly stops for some reason and starts making less interesting designs or there is a shift in his approach, will it make his early work any less great? Can he still be considered a great designer, for what he was at a certain time? (genuine question)

Of course not. One cannot expect continuous masterpieces. Picasso is probably the most admired artist of the 20th Century and it took him less than ten years to realize that cubism is dead. But he is admired for cubism. Milan Kundera's last several books were shit, but it does not take away the genius of Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the least. And the list goes on...

[ronin]

Thanks for your answer Faust, and thanks for the welcome.
About your last point, I agree, but I often see designers or musicians being criticized because their recent evolution doesn't match their early work, and I feel like when it happens, any consideration of greatness towards the artist fades away (at least for a while), even though considerations of greatness towards their work remains. I guess you can still consider them great in a certain period if time, just like their greatness can be assessed in a certain cultural context.

I also agree that greatness doesn't come from the masses, I consider that final influence on the masses can be an indicator, but I realize it's not necessary. What you said about rebellion and establishment made me rethink it. I tend to think that a sign of greatness (as in major evolution and major impact, though I don't think of it as a definition), would be a shift in the establishment as a result of the artist's work. It may become a new standard, or simply something accepted, recognized as a part of culture. But I'm not sure I can picture the work of Ann Demeulemeester becoming the new standard, maybe I'm too narrow minded for that, still, it doesn't make her any less great. Yet, I think it had an influence on other designers, not really followers, designers who may not have tried to be inspired by her work, but whose vision of clothing and maybe the fashion industy has changed after seeing her work. I would say the same of Martin Margiela. So, maybe primary influence dissolved to become not directly perceptible, but I think the work of mainstream designers, maybe five or ten years later, was finally influenced by it. Of course, every publicly shown designer's work has some kind of influence on the whole community, but I still think that some influences are stronger than others, and to me it is part of an artist's greatness.

(I realize I made several typing mistakes in my previous post, I apologize for that.)

[Faust]

Ronin, designers like Rick Owens, Number Nine, Damir Doma have freely acknowledged Ann's influence on their work. But, yes, of course her work is not popular enough to become like Chanel and thank god for that. I was merely giving an example of how one generation produces culture through opposition.