Dear Shaded Viewers,
As we enter a new year and are about to begin another season of shows and collections, with retail and magazines showing us the now and the designers showing us the next, I am thinking about fashion today, and of how creativity was only a few short years ago.
On entering a Chanel show, back in the day, when it was under the creative direction of Karl Lagerfeld, we took a step into wonderland, the scenery design of the setting led us to immediately start conjecture on what story might be about to unfold. Chanel’s star sign of Leo, the remote country her convent school was in, her years riding her lover Étienne Balsan’s horses; it was possible to overlay each season and every show with a narrative, even if it was not necessarily the narrative Kaiser Karl had in mind, we were offered magic.
During the years Diana Vreeland worked at Vogue she was a story teller, every issue was a jewel, every page an offering “The eye has to travel.” The Christmas Issue of Vogue USA was a gift to the reader and those issues still hold enchantment decades later. When Grace Coddington offers her work, it is all about a narrative and her stories combine beautiful clothes with a thought process that strengthens and underpins the visuals, watch her in “September Issue” na sits and object lesson in what the title “stylist” truly means. When Alexander McQueen threw his collections at us, each season a challenge, it was with a dense concentration of thoughts presented as drama, amazing clothes but delivered to the spectator with intense passion as well. Polly Mellon or Franca Sozzani would not dream of just showing “clothes” they immersed the reader and viewer in a vision of where and how the pieces transcended mere fashion and became inspirational tools in their hands. Polly Mellon for example worked alone with no assistant on “The Great Fur Caravan” story with Verushka and a seven foot tall male model, possibly the most expensive Vogue fashion shoot ever with sixteen trunks of clothes which appeared across twenty six pages in October 1966. On the other hand, when she styled Nastassja Kinski with a snake, she added a bracelet which Mrs Mellon later said was a mistake. When Franca Sozzani was inspired by the untapped potential of black models to create it was a phenomenal success. The original run of the issue sold out in the U.S. and U.K. in 72 hours, Vogue Italia has just rushed to they then reprinted 30,000 extra copies for American newsstands, another 10,000 for Britain and 20,000 more in Italy.
Although he could overelaborate, and indeed overpower a collection, with story telling John Galliano enchanted audiences with shows that could have run on Broadway for years, from trains arriving filled with models dressed in haute couture to Opera Garnier fin de siecle parties. Once upon a time, glossy magazines opened on pages and pages of exotic locations, cinematic scenes unfolding as we turned those pages. Even fashion luxury names used their multiple pages of advertising as more than just shots of the new collection to shop from. Valentino for example exerted huge energy and budgets on pages of glamorous images of seduction, luxury, craft, and the finest quality everything.
Are we now, dominated by the business of fashion, by data and sales, and today the advertisers and the big brands push demands on how their clothes are shot? Where once magazines had mystery and the editor’s names, the teams behind the creation of the stunning visuals were known only to insiders, now we fix prices and name the manicurist. Is everything an open book too much, and have we let the daylight in on the realms of fantasy, and are we allowing the uninformed bloggers and influencers to run the show? Hanan Besovic of @ideservecouture rightly says that if your feed comments are all correcting statements you’ve made on social media, you should check your facts, yet followers, likes and numbers seem to matter more than content.
Aspiration and dreams, “give them what they never knew they wanted,” all this has seemingly vanished. Of course, Vreeland and Galliano spent way over budgets, of course Franca caused huge controversies, but isn’t that what fashion should be about?
From the merveilleuses to the New Romantics, from the bobbed hair in the 1920’s to the safety pins of the 1970’s we need newness, excitement, and challenges. Designers and stylists, editors and models who are prepared to push barriers, boundaries and indeed taste. Even in the 1990’s we saw designers and stylists using models like Jenny Shimizu or Eve Salvail who had a boldness we don’t see today at luxury or glossy magazine level.
Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, and Claude Montana were not in the business to offer neat, commercial looks, their influences took seasons to filter down, their flights of fancy seemed impossible to imagine anyone in “normal “life wearing. Yet the raw edges, the deconstruction, the huge shoulders all slowly found their place on the high street and indeed keep reoccurring. This is because their strength as ideas was so new it wasn’t a seasonal “flash in the pan” trend but something which sprung from the designer’s heart and mind. The stories Vreeland, Coddington, Sozzani and Mellon created look as extraordinary now as they did when they first appeared.
So, story telling from studio to runway, from initial concept through to advertising. Is it woke, political correctness, concerns of money making or simply the times we live in? Has budget stopped Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga sweeping us into such amazing stories as the climate apocalypse or a weird version of United Nations? I am sure there are reasons, and of course there are still ideas and stories being used as the pulse and life blood of fashion. Stephane Rolland, Charles de Vilmorin, Robert Wun, and others offer us excitement, beauty, and shows that sweep us into a magical kingdom of fashion. Vanity publishing, biannual projects and limited-edition magazines can offer teams on tiny, or nonexistent, budgets working for love and passion.
When you look at the wild glorious stories Michael Roberts did for Tatler, inspired by Cecil Beaton or Jean Cocteau, one wonders if today’s designers, editors, and stylists are informed enough, educated enough or indeed passionate enough to pull these kinds of narratives together? Or have the money men and the business men taken complete control of all creativity in pursuit of “the bottom line” and does having a million likes on a post count for more than a well-crafted review by a respected writer?
I have great hopes for the future, but I hope that in 2025 we start to see respect for knowledge and experience, for the passionate informed commentator, the truly inspired designer, and the imaginative stylist; and most of all, the story tellers.
