I was pleased to read this recent interview with Louise Wilson on Cathy Horyn's On the Runway blog. I enjoy Cathy's interviews, and I found this interview particularly engaging as it touched on cultural themes that are very personally familiar, primarily the enormous amount of cultural stagnation we are facing:
"Did the industry plan that everyone would travel to the same countries, that everyone would have disposable means of income, that everybody would be quite bland? I recently interviewed someone coming to the MA program and they said the last film they had seen was “Valkyrie,” with Tom Cruise. I said, “You’re joking, aren’t you?” ...There are immensely talented people around but I feel huge vortexes of them are sucked into this mediocre world where nobody criticizes and it’s all terribly politically correct." [cite]
Despite the unprecedented level of access our culture at large now has to information, communication, material goods, and luxury replicas, I don't think it's making us any smarter, more critical, more thoughtful, or more imaginative. Instead, we're facing the Tumblr effect, in which all information gets virtually posted and re-posted without end, both in the sense that it never stops being posted and in that the information never reaches a culmination. Really cool pictures of audacious styling, inspiring quotes, viral videos - it's all shared endlessly. But what do people do with it? This is my question. I don't see a real response to various media or a progression of ideas. I only see replication of the idea, literally (that cool picture on every blog) and passively (one hundred different people on one hundred different days taking the same photo of a tea set with the light bouncing off the saucer). I never see any real action take place - a rebellion against stylized realism, an incisive satire of "edgy" fashion, anything that doesn't feed directly into the trends, thoughts, and assumptions of our times.
Years ago, Marc Jacobs gave an interview in which he shared that the role of designer was drastically different from even a generation before. In addition to designing, there was so much information the designer was expected to know, so much culture the designer had to engage in. Designers were now expected to read the same books as everyone else, keep up with pop culture, basically maintain the same references. At the time, I thought these very notions were ridiculous and the observations were mere complaints, the symptom of some anxiety. And I was right, though I didn't realize the anxiety was both cultural and personal. At times when less and less seems stable and controllable, when self-definitions crumble, the notion of safety in numbers can appeal, and I think it's this conceit that's partly responsible for the navalgazing the culture at large is currently engaged in. We may not know what it is to be American anymore or what the future will bring, but by God, we can all know and share in our experiences with the Kardashians/Rihanna/Octomom. Maybe no one looks good in Margiela's shredded jeans because they're ugly, but they're cool, so we'll all wear them. It boils down to safety, and it's all the more vicious and virulent a notion of safety not just because it's ultimately based in fear, but, more potently, because we're choosing to do it to ourselves.
I am not part of the fashion industry, but I enjoy reading my favorite fashion/style blogs daily. It has become a chore. I'm only an amateur, and yet it seems there's so much information you need to know just to keep up and be relevant. It's a daunting task just to keep up and nearly completely absorbing to get ahead, and this isn't even a description of skill, merely of retaining information. I cannot imagine the intense amount of pressure I'd feel if I were in the field, or the boredom, because all the information's the same. In a culture in which knowing and demonstrating the right information determines safety/competence/relevance, information itself quickly stagnates and discernment takes a vacation. It's less important to dress oneself well and appropriately for one's body type and lifestyle than it is to keep up and do as the Romans, a fact Wilson speaks to when she mentions the decline of style. As much technological innovation we have now and sheer possibility, never before witnessed, to create our own movements, speak for ourselves, and express our individual potentials, the effort is wasted on perfectionism and bleating to the beat of one collective drum. And while sharing the same information is crucial to a culture's survival - this is how culture gets transmitted - so is updating that information and infusing it with new life. Otherwise, you have a closed system in which nothing can get in or out. And as any systems analyst can tell you, without the exchange of (in this case) information, systems will fail.
"It might be very good for fashion if fashion goes out of fashion, and maybe nothing does happen for awhile and a few companies shut down. When the light turns away that’s when the new work will be done." [cite]
I can't speak to the industry aspect of this. In fact, although I love clothes and style and fit and makeup and ornament, I am not interested in fashion except in so far as it provides materials for - oh enlarging my idea about what's possible. I can't say it doesn't influence my life, of course it does - I look at Vogue and think about colour and shape and ideas about clothing and identity - I AM a part of the culture that produces this stuff.
ReplyDeleteBut I will say that in my experience there are any number of people out there making their own approach and thinking both fully and critically about how we cloth ourselves and what that means culturally and personally. A lot of them are crafters - knitters or sewists, historians and hobbyists - but what they aren't is anything the fashion industry is interested in.
It seems to me that you only have to maintain your pop culture relevance if you WANT to be inside that closed system. If you aren't, you can take what falls into your path, wed it to the past and your creativity and incorporate it into your own thinking.
This is disjointed I know - it just seems to me that if fashion isn't a closed system it isn't anything - it needs that self referential cycle to drive desire, to drive sales - because it is primary a business. And individually we have a choice about how shallow we want to be about the images and information that assail us, and a choice about how fear led we want out lives to be. And not just when it comes to getting dressed.