i like to call our period as "Reckless Elegance", do you agree???
I'm not sure. I think you'd have to explain it further. Which period? The whole of post-war design? Or SS10? Or the last decade?
I probably didn't explain my original post too well, but what I'm personally most interested in is to develop an understanding of whom should be seen as avant garde now. I understand that to get to that we might need to place our analysis in a historical context. One can't grasp what might be seen as new, radical and influential without some reference to that which it departs from. It's a relative term.
A word about elegance. With Susannah Frankel, I think the 00's were characterised by a return to a particular type of elegance. A couture influenced, embellished, classicism harking back to the 40's and 50's and beyond. In the aftermath of 911, a collective hankering for modes of dress evoking a time of greater certainty, solidity, safety. A time when the West (the Allied Forces at least) stood victorious and proud.
Can a backward looking retroism be seen as avant garde? I'm not sure it can. For much of the 00's the fashion game was perhaps about recycling retro influence without producing 'costume'. Viewed from a perspective of distance much of this work might in fact be starting to look costumey. Not only lacking an avant garde sensibility but, as essentially costume, fashion without fashion? Love him as you may, one might cite Galliano as the high priest of this movement.
I found McQueen's AW09/10 show interesting. With the funeral pyre/bonfire catwalk installation of props from his old shows heaped up and sprayed black and the recycling references, I felt it was a retrospective remembrance of the decade passing. 'Dior viewed through the prism of Marilyn Manson' (Blanks I think), it perhaps sought to sound the death knell of 'that' sort of retro elegance.
And for sure, with all the edges shorn off, once the 40's thing is, again, recycled for this winter in it's commercial manifestation on the high street and on certain media personalities, and when we view what is being worn in real time now with an eye influenced by SS10, the retro classicism and any couturish embellishment, looks all too 'lady', costumey and seriously ageing.
There have of course been times in post-war fashion history when 'elegance' has been pushed almost completely aside as a sartorial concern, when it's all been about youth, 'edge', sex, art, and/or 'street'.
One might take a view that it's those phases which are the most avant garde, the phases when fashion is pushed 'forward', that somehow elegance is antithecal to the avant garde - it's opposite.
I think that would be wrong though, an oversimplification. For SS10 I think we have a new elegance. It's an elegance of purity of line, form and palette. It's finding beauty in simplicity. It's a form of unfussy, uncluttered, unshowy elegance. (Unshowy in the sense of not gauchely forcing one's material riches in the face of others).
We've mentioned the influence of Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein already but it's there also at, unsurprisingly perhaps, Jill Sander; in places at Givenchy, Bottega Veneta, Issey Miyake, Jonathon Saunders, Narciso Rodriguez and others. On the face of it one could include what Phoebe Philo has done at Celine as part of this turn toward a more minimalist elegance but I'm presently drawn to see that collection as in fact merely bland and mundane - which, it has to be said, is where minimalism can head off once it's (hopefully) attendant artistry is snapped off and disgarded in the process of a commercial dumbing down. There are also places in the much lauded, and, I feel, worth a revisit, SS10 collection of Stefano Pilati for YSL, where an interesting take on a minimal elegance shines through. As, unquestionably, it does in the hands of Bruno Pieters for SS10.
I am working on a more detailed exposition of what I'm seeing here both for my written and visual work. An article in one form or another is likely to appear on my forthcoming blog. Much of my remaining work centres around the question is this minimalist turn just 90's retroism or can it in fact be seen as something new, avant garde perhaps. And, potentially, in answering that question to further understand what lies within and without the new elegance.
There is also the question of the new minimalism's influence into spheres nominally outside of itself. To what extent is fashion as a whole taking a minimalist turn?
Whilst of course you wouldn't call him a minimalist, I think it's possible to read Gareth Pugh's new vision for SS10 as so influenced in it's heightened simplicity of palette and line, that, relative to what went before, his work has eased into being softer and more understated. A new lightness. Relatively of course.
A sea change at Gucci also. Whilst SS10 Gucci should perhaps be 'positioned' with the 'young and fun'/ 'clubby' collections (Balmain, D&G, Louis Vuitton, Giles, DSquared, Versace, Top Shop Unique, Proenza Schouler(?), Erin Wasson, Twenty&Twelve etc) it is undoubtedly the most minimalist influenced of these collections and, in some ways, perhaps, the freshest and most relevant for that.
To dwell on the 'young and fun/clubby' sector a little further this is another growth impetus for SS10. Some of the brands mentioned above of course have an element of youth written into their dna but not all. Marc Jacobs decidely and unreservedly repositioned Louis Vuitton there for SS10. Further, many designers, some whose brand dna might not have been well able to take it, (ie Michael Kors) made largely failed attempts to 'young-down'. Of course young and fun is in many ways the opposite of a concern with the avant garde. Being avant garde probably connotes some measure of intellectual weight. But wait -
There is nothing contradictory about intellectually saying, with the nihilists or post-modernists perhaps, that a concern with making some artistic or political statement is ultimately futile so let's just ****ing party (like it's 1999). Hedonism as statement of course sits particularly well with fashion. Carsten Holler, for instance, got there in the artworld with his slide installations but, as indeed Holler demonstrates, hedonism as message is perhaps best promoted in the form of an applied art. And, I'd say, within fashion in particular.
Of course, intellectually opting for hedonism is far different from being imprisoned by it as the one unilinear reality of all existence. Arriving at hedonism from the intellect, one at least has a way out, the ability to opt for other realities. But, to pull back a second, the point is that it IS possible that pure hedonism can be an avant garde statement. It just depends on the context and how one arrives there. The influence of Decarnin is perhaps highly relevant here. Whether any designer or designers shift the scene funward from a position of intellect rather than from purely commercial concerns I'm not yet sure. I suppose the difficulty is that it isn't really that difficult to say '**** it let's party' and how many different ways can there be to say it.
So, I believe SS10 has a double lightness. The pared down, easy breezy lightness and elegance of a natural, uncluttered minimalism. And a turn toward youth, fun, hedonism. In many ways of course the underpinnings of these sheddings of 'weight' are polar opposite. Minimalism at root being not only a rather, indeed deadly, serious message not only of the bad taste of conspicuous consumption, but of course about avoidance of ecological apocalypse.
What the season is not about though, what looks decidely wrong, is anything that harks back to a pre 1990's, showy, glitzy, couturish, embellished, chintzy, conservative, retrobound, mother-of-the-bride type 'elegance'. For instance the way almost the whole of the underwear-as-outerwear trend was presented was off in that it was just too frou. Nina Ricci for instance looked like some awful nylon static accident waiting to happen. Perhaps then it was an ironic collection but I think not. Just off.
Perhaps we might say that it's a time to face the music in two senses. To stop dissavowing the psychic castration of Western supremacy represented by the image of the collapse of the twin towers. And to now get beyond the delayed and therefore massive banking collapse recession that followed. Yes followed. To now stop seeking the comfort blankets of the mythical past sartorially, but to accept the new reality for what it is and get up and dance anyway. But also, to be aware, very aware, of the possible end game of over-consumption, of overheating not just an economy but a planet and to present ourselves accordingly in a wholly less bejewelled and bedazzling fashion.
It's unquestionably a moment in history when Western Capitalism ceases to hold all the aces/answers, in which, without reforms and new outlooks, it risks some sort of fundamental demise. So a time in which we become just a little bit more receptive to new ideas and change and which, therefore, the edgier designers play a part in defining the new ways of being, of living and thus dressing and indentifying, uniting even. Perhaps.
Of course though, as intimated in another post, the runways may well be the wrong place to look for the mode of dress of a new tribe. The winds of change start blowing elsewhere to be picked up upon by designers subsequently. The fashion industry being, after all, an industry. We can though, read the runways as a distillation of the mood of the times and understanding the direction of things can bring us to an insight of what might be coming next.
