Originally posted by New York Times
Is Fashion Still Cool?
By GUY TREBAY
<span style='font-size:15pt;line-height:100%'>Who killed the cool in fashion? What exactly was it that drained the excitement out of this fascinating, frivolous, inspiring, transformative, gossamer and endlessly diverting business, one that also happens to be among the largest employers in New York City?
It seems mere moments ago that the attention of mainstream America alighted on the humble garment business, transforming models into household names, designers into media darlings and movie stars into dress dummies whose forays onto red carpets became notable less for celebrity pixie dust than for the labels inside their clothes.
This interlude — roughly the mid-1980's to the late 90's — was a time when fashion was a cultural product generated on the streets of New York by members of a determined but slightly madcap cognoscenti made up of people not likely to find gainful employment in many other fields. Theirs was a world in which people employed deliriously kooky argot, in which fashion editors were heard to say of a dress that it was "worked to its finest inch of nanosecond perfection," where ingenious drag queens counterfeited tickets to runway shows, where obscure models were at the center of personality cults and where creative people found it perfectly acceptable to seek inspiration from the way that heroin addicts or homeless people put themselves together at the start of each day.
"Is cool still cool?" asked Anna Sui, a designer who served as an unofficial arbiter of fin-de-siècle cool in the cash-rich 90's. Throughout the decade, Ms. Sui's runway presentations were hipster catnip. One was as likely to spot the Beastie Boys perched in the front row of her shows of wittily girlish designs as the sexually ambiguous actor Jaye Davidson, with Kate Moss on his lap. Naomi Campbell once strutted Ms. Sui's catwalk in backless chaps. The standing-room crowd practically hung from the rafters trying to catch a glimpse.
Ms. Campbell now poses for second-string hip-hop clothing lines and seems destined for the scrap heap of demicelebrity. Ms. Moss, the onetime poster girl for loaded issues like eating disorders and heroin chic, has become domesticated as a new mother and part-time artist's muse. Isaac Mizrahi, former darling of the cognoscenti, has designed a collection for the mass-market retailer Target. Ms. Sui herself is now less engaged with scene-making than, like many other Americans, with corporate survival. As she prepared for her spring 2004 show in the tents of Bryant Park during another Fashion Week, which began Friday and continues through next Friday, Ms. Sui casually noted the passing of fashion as a crossroads of all things lustrous and desirable in a boom economy culture. "I'm not sure cool is even a concept anymore," she said.
This is far from the first time the point has been made. Two years ago, after the 9/11 attacks, fashion joined the rest of the culture in a period of self-appraisal, or at least of enforced sobriety.
If an irrepressible spirit of expression gradually returned to the business, it did so haltingly and burdened by an unexpected problem, one that had less to do with a terrorist menace than the subtler incursions of the corporate world. It was as if no one knew whom to consult for direction and where to look for the spirited, rebellious or else indifferent outsiders who have historically infused fashion with the unstudied vigor of their style.
Who would act the role played until it became parodic by people like Sarah Lerfel, the owner of Colette, the relentlessly chic Paris store, where no-name designers were the sine qua non, until it became hipper to wear designers whose products were most often encountered in duty-free shops — Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton? Who had anything like the spare time to challenge what scholarly journals used to call "the fashion system," when anyone with a pincushion was frantically trying to stay employed?
"Maybe the concept of edginess doesn't work anymore," Ms. Sui said, adding that the outsider postures of many musicians and entertainers now crowding the airwaves smack less of rebellious expression than careful market research. "You look at Pink, with her red hair and punk clothes, and you think she might be punk, but then she belts out a torch song," Ms. Sui said. "You watch the MTV Video Music Awards, and every single person is saying Coldplay is awesome, but they sound like Michael Bolton to me. You look at Christina Aguilera, and she has all the affectations of somebody who would be a rocker, and then you hear her songs and you think, Is this the Julie London of today?"
In other words, as the retailer and television stylist Patricia Field noted: "Fashion got flipped around. It got to be just about money and about industry, the way in the 80's the art world became an industry and was killed off."
James LaForce, a seasoned fashion publicist, said: "Fashion used to be about worlds upon worlds you didn't have access to. It was about decadence, excitement, a passion for clothes, that margin for error." Nowadays, Mr. LaForce added, "everything creative has to be done by formula from the moment you say you want to be a fashion designer. The chances for lightning to strike are rare."
In the not-too-distant past, said Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper magazine, "there was real excitement, some bated breath" about the surprises new designers might come up with. Ms. Hastreiter's magazine has been missionary in its pursuit of the new for almost 20 years.
"That's all gone," she said, "except for Marc." Ms. Hastreiter was referring to Marc Jacobs, a designer whose assertions that he is mystified by the aura of hip that envelops his every association ("I'm the least cool person I know," he has said) can seem coy.
Consider, after all, the irresistibly offhand allure of the advertising campaigns that Juergen Teller photographs for the Marc Jacobs collections and the phenomenally successful designs Mr. Jacobs commissioned from Stephen Sprouse and Takashi Murakami to add a dimension of superficial hipness to Louis Vuitton bags.
"Fashion has gone out into Middle America, where Fifth Avenue meets Main Street," Ms. Hastreiter observed, with a sly reference to ads for the Isaac Mizrahi collection picturing the designer at the imaginary and, one would have thought, implausible intersection of the two thoroughfares.
Few would grudge Mr. Mizrahi his affiliation with Target, whose knack for hiring insider talents and moving them onto a mainstream stage has proved to be a bottom-line success. But the man once beloved of the fashion claque for his theatrical éclat, his knack for tweaked historicism and his droll effeminacy clearly relinquished some of his insider credibility when he took up selling $15 blouses at his new address.
Or did he?
"The mainstream marketers have everybody figured out," said Evan L. Schindler, the creative director of Black Book, a fashion-oriented lifestyle magazine. "They know how to bottle the subversive, the margins, the fringe." When even ferocious protopunk drug anthems are sanitized to become jingles for television cruise line ads, as happened with Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," "you have to rethink your ideas of what it means to be cool," Mr. Schindler said.
It would appear that in fashion, as in music and other art forms, there is at the moment "no new movement, no strong movement of coolness," the filmmaker John Waters said. "I'm sure at some point the children will think of something cool to get on the nerves of the generation before them," he added. But, in fashion, an event like that seems pretty far off.
The truth of this becomes acute as Fashion Week gets under way with the industry celebrating the 10th anniversary of the centralization of the collections under the Bryant Park tents. It is no overstatement to say that in the decade since Seventh on Sixth, the fashion industry trade group, first consolidated a loosely organized collection of presentations into a twice-a-year multistage spectacle, the fashion industry itself has also been transformed.
Seventh on Sixth gave logistical coherence to the presentation of new designer wares. And the central location strikingly increased press coverage, leading to a glut of runway images in popular magazines and on network and cable television and turning designers into celebrities.
The value of blanket global media coverage of fashion in the form of sexy women strutting the catwalks in expensive clothes is not lost on Mercedes-Benz, Olympus cameras, Fiji water, North Fork Bank or Siemens mobile phones, which are among the nearly 20 official sponsors of this season's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.
What is much less clear is how much an association with, say, Ortho Evra, the weekly birth control patch, which will be staging an "every woman" fashion show on Tuesday at the Bryant Park tents, adds to the profession's allure.
"Traditionally, we thought of fashion as something that came from houses, editors, designers, experts, and that has very much gone by the boards," said Virginia Postrel, the author of "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness" (HarperCollins), a book that examines the cultural obsession with aesthetics.
"Part of what made fashion seem like high school," Ms. Postrel said, was the existence of " `in' groups, `in' people, who knew and decided what was cool."
The velocity of information flow is probably too great now for any group to sustain `in' crowd status for long. Magazine editors, for decades the creative autocrats of the business, have been forced to relinquish some of their power in favor of the consumer-friendly catalog-style editorials originated in Japanese magazines like Olive and Cutie and brought to a high state of polish by Lucky, Condé Nast's phenomenally successful shopping magazine.
IF there is any single trend among designers of the moment, it would seem to be one that unexpectedly mimics socially conscious movements like Slow Food and that favors unhip issues like political engagement and the sources for raw materials, and that actually entertains ideas less historically suited to fashion types than to policy wonks and nerds.
"Whatever we do, we don't call it fashion," said Angela, a member of the Manhattan design collective As Four, whose members live communally and eschew last names. "We have been very bored ourselves, lately," she said of fashion, criticizing its uniformity and the insinuating presence of corporate affiliations.
"It's like `The Devil Wears Prada,' " said Kai, a German-born member of the collective, referring to Lauren Weisberger's roman à clef about a magazine much like Vogue. "I don't understand why everybody is so willing to let themselves be taken over by other corporate identities, everybody all the time wearing gray and black. If your body is the host of your soul, why put it in a gray hut when you can build a fantastic house of gold?"
Few people in style history attained insider status faster than Miguel Adrover, a Majorca-born designer who became famous in an instant when his second collection was shown in 2000, only to be abruptly forgotten a year later, when he lost his design bearings, his media appeal and also his business. Mr. Adrover has emerged from this sobering experience with a philosophy better suited, it would seem, to a Peace Corps mission statement than to a business in which insiders rhapsodize about Hedi Slimane's new free-agent status or the cut of an Olivier Theyskens sleeve.
"What is fashion at the end of the day?" said Mr. Adrover, who now shows just once a year and whose clothes will be presented Monday night at the tents. Although they are termed a spring-summer 2004 collection, they are meant, he said, to be stylistically durable enough to be worn until they fall apart. "It is not enough to have buzz and show it off," Mr. Adrover declared. "It is not good that fashion is creating these unreal worlds."
Fashion is one frivolous undertaking that might benefit from regarding its own cultural impact more seriously, he suggested. "Fashion says something about the moments in which we live, and for a while now it has lost reality with what's going on in the world.
"People are gradually forgetting their individuality and how much power clothes have, that what you wear can get you sex or get you killed," Mr. Adrover added with emotion.
At various points in recent memory, Mr. Adrover's assertions might have smacked of disingenuousness or, worse, deadly earnestness. At the moment, however, they seem fairly cool.</span>
Interesting article that I thought I'd share.
chain mass production stores, 
I hope so! 
