image source: W Magazine
If it weren’t for Twitter and Instagram I would have no idea what’s going on in fashion right now.
I could say it’s because keeping track of the runway seasons is challenging when the passing days and weeks are nearly all the same. I could also blame my disinterest on the fact that I’m not particularly keen to get dressed these days. That’s a particularly bad excuse, but one I’m willing to use nonetheless. Anyways, I share these disclaimers so that you can make an informed decision about whether you want to take my thoughts with one or two grains of salt.
Not checking on every collection myself means I’ve been reliant—for the first time in a long, long time—on the opinions of critics I follow and trust. Their tweets and Instagram stories, sometimes their write ups, have guided me through the first however many days of Spring 2021 fashion month. Looking at fashion through this detached lens allowed me to see the different factions of the industry more distinctly, perhaps more clearly.
As this pandemic presses on and the industry insists on trying to remain as close as possible to pre-pandemic standards, this week I realized that for all the people and departments I’ve held responsible for the industry’s downfall I’ve given fashion critics a carte blanche. And with this realization I’ve spent the last few days thinking about what happened to the guardians of fashion and why they’re needed more than ever.
Better Living Through Criticism, a book by film critic A.O. Scott, details the importance of the push and pull that happens between creator and critic. The creator takes in their personal inspirations, global happenings, local vibes, whatever shred of imagination they’ve managed to hold onto and they make something. The critic’s job is sharing not only details of the thing itself with the public as well as analyzing it’s conceptual, technical and creative merits, but also comparing and contrasting it with comparable outputs to assess the state of affairs—both within a given industry and across the arts as a whole.
It can’t be said enough that fashion is first and foremost a tactile, visual distillation of cultural, political, economic and sociological conditions at a given time. Critics play an important role in facilitating a conversation between industry insiders and outsiders by offering both sides perspective to enhance their understanding of a collection’s broader significance. The best fashion critics make nuanced assessments of the references and implications, big and small, of a collection.
When it comes to fashion, this push and pull between creator and critic has ranged from fruitful to hilarious. In the documentary Dries, Van Noten talks about how his FW 2001 show wasn’t well received by critics (or customers) and how the feedback made him reassess the direction he was heading in. Fruitful. Hilarious, on the other hand, I mean in the sardonic sense. Cathy Horyn was banned from Carolina Herrera and Dolce & Gabbana shows for writing unfavorable reviews while Robin Givhan’s front row seat at Chanel was rescinded after she criticized the brand’s former designer, Karl Lagerfeld. It’s hilarious in a Molière kind of way.
This relationship between critic and creator is a dialectic of sorts, which has pushed fashion, art, music, theater, film, writing and every other form of creative expression forward. Though criticism has negative connotations, it is in actuality a very loving endeavor.
For someone to follow a complicated microcosm of individuals and entities with the attention required to produce cogent and thoughtful assessments of a niche ecosystem—making it interesting to people who are already in the know and engaging for people who could care less—means that criticism cannot be done well without some degree of passion. Whatever draws a critic to their industry of choice certainly varies, but they are united by an underlying hope that in critically engaging with a creative and their work they can work together to help the creative endeavor as a whole (and the creator) realize its (and their) full potential, for everyone's benefit. In any creative sphere, the hallmark of meaningful criticism is the force of careful considerations and absence of provocative jibes.
To that end, and as a slight aside, there’s no place that I’m more acutely aware of (and frustrated by) Vogue’s commercial mandate than when I go to vogue.com to see pictures of all the collections. Though I appreciate vogue.com for democratizing runway access I usually forgo reading the collection reviews on the platform because they lack any critical thinking—all I read is fear-of-losing-advertising-money disguised as either praise or a tepid recognition that a collection was in fact made that season.
When it comes to fashion, critics were once an essential part of the ecosystem. Fashion critics used to be people that could almost single handedly launch talents, help designers course correct if they’d strayed too far from their point of view, sway retail orders and ultimately bridged the gap between runways and consumers in the years when laypeople didn’t have immediate access to a collection. For better or worse, consumers having direct access to a collection in real time through vogue.com, social media and digital runway shows available to the public has neutralized a critic’s opinion, as well as their influence.
Because people can now access images to form their own opinions, a company can assess a collection’s performance through analytics and influencers can directly affect how people spend their money, the apparent need for cogent, thoughtfully written assessments of this ivory tower industry is rapidly declining. In fact, critics have gotten into the habit of writing innocuous nothings about a show’s set design, who was in the front row and small factoids about the collection’s inspiration as a way to either evade a bad review or, in other instances, try to offer the reader something they couldn’t see from watching a show online.
This long winded soliloquy on fashion criticism comes from the fact that I’m utterly puzzled by the discourse surrounding fashion right now—especially when it comes to Couture Week.
Couture is by far the most beautiful, frivolous, technical, impressive, creative and extravagant branch of fashion. For conglomerate brands this collection corroborates the narratives of heritage and luxury that allow them to sell licensed merchandise at exorbitant prices. For smaller brands, couture offers a different approach to creating clothes that transcend the limits of utility and convention. In many ways couture maintains a collective nostalgia for times when glamour and effort were a part of everyday dressing. Now, more than ever, Couture Week seemingly offers a degree of sartorial escapism, the respite we all need from the sartorial ennui caused by months of sweatpants and straightforward dressing.
The key word is seemingly because this has not been my experience of Spring 2021 Couture Week...at all.
I’ve thought about it, and thought about it some more, but I can’t seem to find any merit in the full couture collections that have been shown over the last few days with everything going on. What’s the point of making bespoke gowns, which have a shelf-life of six months at the current turnover rate, when it doesn’t seem like our circumstances will drastically change in that time? How can we stand by this pointless expenditure of materials and resources? And with all the resources many brands have access to, why are the clothes so lackluster?
In some ways the answers to those questions are ostensibly self-evident. Economically speaking, the ecosystem of designers, textile producers, manufacturers, PR and marketing firms, retailers and logistics companies are too entrenched in pre-pandemic operations to adapt to changed needs and a new pace of life. I recognize that. However, I’m still stunned that the vibe is still mostly “business as usual,” particularly from fashion critics.
The commentary coming from fashion pundits at established publications and some of the new-age, digitally native critics are following the same unsettling approach. They make brief allusions to the ways in which a designer has integrated considerations for life during the pandemic whether it’s noting a more somber color palette, the flowy silhouettes that are supposed to represent the comfort we seek in all aspects of life these days or making allowances for tactless imaginations of what better times ahead could look like. And then they speak earnestly about the clothes, using language and frameworks of pre-pandemic fashion criticism.
This dissonance magnifies the fact that fashion is still operating exclusively by and for the pursuit of novelty for its own sake—as it has been forcefully doing over the last 7 years—which conceptually, technically and aesthetically speaking is yielding collections with very little substance and too much fanfare. The digital age has made our appetite for novelty insatiable and as far as industries go, fashion is equipped to deliver novelty in visually grabbing and personally fulfilling ways—even if it’s only temporary. While these issues precede the pandemic, the current climate has made them more noticeable.
This season’s Couture collections have explored novelty through the lens of bombastic beauty. And the utopian version of the world designers and critics alike are endorsing, one in which intense beauty can be a meaningful distraction from fear and discomfort, is troubling. This is where I long for courageous designers like Alexander McQueen who challenged us to confront the ugliness, the truth of our real world and more critics like Suzy Menkes, Horyn, Givhan and Pierre A. M'Pelé aka @PAM_BOY, whose sharp observations offer nuanced appraisals of the clothing itself without isolating the work from the real world that exists beyond the runway. I worry that in this current conceptualization of fashion, which employs beauty primarily for escapism, we’re missing a real opportunity to use fashion as a conduit to make some sense of the complicated feelings and realities brought to light by these unprecedented circumstances.
What the empty criticism and dull runway shows reveal is pervasive uncertainty—the designers don’t know what to make and the critics are struggling to assess what they do end up making. I want critics to write plainly about poorly conceptualized and/or executed collections. I want critics to tell brands to get rid of pre-fall and resort collections if they consistently produce poor collections for those categories. I want critics to tell a designer that the shoes were boring and the clothes were too flagrantly commercial. Because although the continued pageantry of fashion shows would substantiate the idea that the industry is “persevering,” it’s becoming increasingly difficult for all the bygone methods for creating and criticizing to bear the weight of this exhausted system.
As far as I’m concerned, the question that remains is this: are we approaching the tipping point or has the paradigm shifted beyond the point of return?
I’m not sure so in the meantime, though I’ve dedicated neither the attention nor time to write cogently or thoughtfully on any single collection, here are a bunch of little thoughts on collections I’ve briefly scrolled through after seeing the initial Twitter takes. Since I’m not officially a critic and recently watched Pretend it’s a City I’m allowing myself to be a little acerbic this time. And also because in my personal and professional opinion, this week was truly a mess and I can’t find many silver linings:
image source: Vogue Runway
I don’t know what happened at Schirapelli. That collection was a meaningless, shortsighted attempt at feminist fashion.
image source: Vogue Runway
As much as I love Iris Van Herpen it was disappointing she made no effort to expand the scope of her designs. To create and design in a vacuum as she did with this collection is lazy and myopic.
Of all the years to launch a line of children’s clothing during couture week, Thom Browne certainly picked the wrong one. $750 for a kid’s cardigan after the year we’ve had is tone-deaf.
image source: Vogue Runway
Area’s debut couture collection was great. At 14 looks it was concise and a little odd, bold and delightfully unwearable in the way that only couture can be. For those reasons I also thoroughly enjoyed Viktor & Rolf (they used fabric scraps from past collections to make clothes with much needed lightness and absurdity) and Charles de Vilmorin (zany and incredible).
image source: Vogue Runway
Fendi was a flop. Considering Kim Jones has called on a collaborator for almost, if not, every single collection he’s made as the creative director of Dior Menswear, I was interested to see what Jones was capable of doing on his own. The collection lacked any sort of coherence and it was difficult to get past that mother of the bride dress he put on Kate Moss. The shimmery blush + green two-piece set was perhaps the strongest look of the collection.
image source: Vogue Runway
Armani Privé was actually very nice, but once again I’m confused why the team decided to make an entire 50-look collection with garments that are entirely unwearable for the time being. Whoever said “common sense is not so common” was obviously a 19-year-old fashion intern who’d seen enough and decided to pursue quantum computing instead.
I think it’s important to note while everyone tweeted about how white the casting was at Chanel I saw nothing about Armani, whose show also featured a cast of predominantly white models. Where were the critics with that note?
Signing off now, with wishes for better criticism in the coming weeks and this bit of wisdom: