The Fashion Entertainment Complex is fit to burst
Fashion is everything, everywhere, all at once - but don't despair Demna. It might just be the future.
How much is fashion about entertainment, and how much about the clothes? If you’re still scrolling through Oscars fashion, you’ll know what I mean. Insiders say the red carpet is a straight forward pay to play these days - the viral value of the world’s biggest stars in the world’s prettiest dresses means you’re unlikely to get someone pitching up in a rental or an upcycled version of something they wore earlier. The attention stakes are just too high: have you actually watched Everything Everywhere all at Once? No, but I loved Michelle Yeoh’s Dior couture.
It’s been this week’s big debate since Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia decided to come back from his “situation” (as he charmingly calls the brand’s brush with child pornography and anti semitism), with a stripped back PFW show that was ‘just about the clothes’. “Fashion has become a kind of entertainment, but often that part overshadows the essence of it, which lays in… the way we create relationships between body and fabric,” he wrote in notes for the show. A bit rich coming from a designer that filled the windows of Harrods with piles of unwanted Vetements clothes, put ‘Ye’ on a mud filled catwalk and collaborated on a Simpsons episode, but as Demna found out, you go around starting fires and one day you’ll get burned. From now on, Demna declared, “fashion can no longer be seen as an entertainment, but rather as an art of making clothes.”
Making clothes - remember that? It’s almost ancient history. Fashion today is about supermodels and scandal, viral pregnancy and robot moments, logos and partnerships, theatrical catwalks and costume and set design. It’s about grabbing the attention economy for a tiny, hot second so you can shake out the coins and flog more handbags, quickly, and then grabbing it again, quickly, before someone else gets there before you. As the author Alec Leach argued in a BOF op-ed piece “Social media has upended our relationship with fashion. While platforms like Instagram and Twitter have democratised fashion, they have also had catastrophic consequences for the way we treat clothing as a society…. fashion is now about spectacle more than ownership. The age of social media has made clothes disposable — even higher-quality garments now have a cultural lifespan of weeks, not years… This is excellent news for Big Fashion and its bottom line, because as a result we buy more clothes than ever. But it’s terrible for the planet, because our reckless shopping habits are at the root of fashion’s enormous environmental impact.” Or, could it be the key to a more sustainable future?
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