Fashion over hype clothing1/21/2024 ![]() Savvy brands have cottoned on to that, evolving their pieces and collections, rather than ditching one aesthetic and jumping to a brand-new one each season,” Buzasi says. “Consumers are far more conscious about their buying decisions than they ever have been. ![]() “The industry is going through a period of major disruption,” says Carla Buzasi, managing director of trend forecasting agency WGSN. Read more: 5 Things To Know About Louis Vuitton’s Time-Travelling AW20 Show In the case of Louis Vuitton, Victoriana blouses and handbags fashioned after VHS cassettes are appealing to a generation of analogue-loving slo-mo fans. In a curious twist of aesthetics, stylists are now taking inspiration from what individuals might look like dressed in cult finds from Depop. The flying suit, the pleated midiskirt, the heritage-check blazer, trench coat and tailored trouser suit are all considered evergreens, changing in colour and proportion over the seasons. Consider the turnover rate in trends over the past few seasons. The goalposts are moving because our appreciation of fashion, and what we need and value in our lives, is in transition. “Fashion was treated like an addiction – the It-bag, the It-shoe – the new new new,” says Roland Mouret, who has navigated seismic changes in the business during his 30-year career.ĭecelerating at all levels of the business – from producing excess samples (often, a third of the samples produced in a collection never see the light of day) to the pyrotechnics of the show set – is rapidly becoming a virtue and a sign of an enlightened way forward. And thanks to the digital revolution and the birth of influencer culture, there were ever more channels and people to declare “in” and “out”, and wave the “been there, done that” flag of boredom. ![]() As a result, billions of pounds’ worth of clothes piled up in our wardrobes and in landfill, and businesses groaned under the weight of unsold stock, yet scaling back was perceived as a failure. Over the past decade, designers and brands scaled up production, delivering a minimum of four collections a year, with monthly drops, see-now-buy-now initiatives and a tidal wave of collaborations. It seemed you were either in fashion, lapping up the trends and sporting the new, or you were relegated to the boondocks. Sex, money and power were the unholy values that drove fashion – constantly heralding what was new (thousands of brands entered the market, millions of products launched), bolder (£12,000 jeans covered in crystals), bigger (floor-length crocodile trench coats, 7in heels) and more outrageous (one-wear statement gowns). The “must-have” frenzied 2000s are already looking like a fuzzy, unbelievable past. ![]() If you still have one duster-wrapped in the back of a cupboard, then lucky you it should be treasured anew like an ancient relic of fashion’s glorious hype era. That translated as some of the classics Prada is known for (fine cashmere knits, semi-sheer slip-like midiskirts, enveloping tailored coats) and even a poignant reprise of the bowling bag, one of the original It-bags, which came to symbolise retail hysteria in the new millennium. Miuccia Prada’s resolution was to simplify and present “less useless stuff”. Read more: What To Expect From Jean Paul Gaultier And Chitose Abe’s Couture Link-Up How does fashion, the poster child of guilt-free consumption, built-in obsolescence, move forward in 2020? In this wake, the grand architects of 21st-century fashion are calling for a breather, a different perspective. Where once a designer’s prowess was judged by an ability to flip between extreme trends collection by collection, proposing sharp shifts in silhouette, colour and mood (kooky modesty gave way to extravagant camp, which in turn flipped towards bourgeois classicism in the latest hyper-speed cycle), the new watchwords of luxury are restraint, quintessential and core. Against a backdrop of climate change, material scarcity and consumer fatigue, the very notion of disposable seasonal trends – the currency that fashion has dealt in since the proliferation of ready-to-wear in the 1960s – is increasingly irrelevant.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |