CIRCLE WIDENING

Paper Castle Press is proud to introduce the wonderful Scott Stephenson, writing exclusively for New York Fashion Week’s first days. Thank you Scott! A toast!

“In the loop”

by Scott Stephenson.

“If fashion were a shape, it would be a circle. It wasn’t always. In the beginning it was not a shape at all, it was a straight line – like a runway – of continuous one-way innovation. As progression occurred there was simply no need to revisit or curve the line back to the past. March forth.

The belle époque era and its monumental powdered-extravagance made way for the roaring twenties. The corset was loosened, discarded and blood circulation was restored. Waists were dropped, and a little leg was exposed. Chanel discovered jersey, and Josephine Baker discovered Paris. The thirties brought with it Elsa Schiaparelli and surrealism, Madeline Vionnet and bias cuts (see almost anything Rick Owens, or Lanvin’s Fall/Winter 09 collection for recent examples of bias cut brilliance) and Cristobal Balenciaga’s structured and stiffened couture.

A blazing path of progress the fashion industry continued to travel in a straight line, passing through each year with propositions of the unknown, leaving a trail of shock and awe.

During the forties, fabric rationing under the War Production Board’s L-85 Guidelines insisted on a lean narrow tailored silhouette with small structured shoulders (a personal favourite). Gone were the days of excessive drape and decadent cowl necks. Until, Monsieur Dior engulfed the fifties with his nipped waist, soft shoulder and blossomed skirt (no fabric rationing going on here), aptly named the “New Look”.

The sixties were unreservedly swinging and liberating. And the seventies was all anti-fashion, white studded disco fever, and hippies.

Marching on into the eighties when fashion met money, and those two have been positively inseparable ever since. Gaudy was grand; as was copious excess, power, Montana, Mugler and Alaia. Hello, Jean Paul Gaultier’s men in skirts, double strength hair spray and marketing moguls like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. This is also when the Japanese were unleashed unto Paris, except Kenzo who arrived during the ‘70s. They concomitantly put (knitted) holes in ideals (sweaters and the like), and proceeded to write their own chapter on innovation; I salute!

The runway started to get a little bent once it entered the nineties. Minimalism was new and sparse, bringing tasteful austerity and a general appreciation of design as form. Helmut Lang kept the line going straight into the land of the new with his layering, techno-fabrics and a still-copied minimalist touch. Bravo. But a short moment later during this decade, the unthinkable occurred, the end of the line was made, and it whipped back around to the beginning forming a complete circle, whereby fashion would feed off itself. The loop was formed and it has proved difficult ever since to break the well-trodden cycle.

The designer became a stylist. And fashion became a sinuous world of re-hashing, re-interpreting and re-releasing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it often allows for designers to improve on the foundations left before them. They can engineer garments and historical details in a way that makes it more accessible to contemporary life. The circle is rich with information, bygone techniques and nostalgia, ask John Galliano, he can tell you all about the benefits of a bit romanticized fashion history.

But in recent times the circle has become too literal and too predictable. So much so that it is entirely plausible to predict what will come next. The reprehensible world of trends has emerged. “Boho” came about from the seventies. We’re in the midst of the eighties, having exhausted slogan tees, offensive fluorescent colours and club-kid-kicks, we’re now dabbling with the late eighties of power shoulders, hardcore hardware and licked fringes. So what will be next? The nineties, right? If the minimalists are involved again, I certainly hope so. But at the same time and to a greater extent, I yearn for something completely new.

The rate at which fashion is repeating itself is excessively rapid; which is a sure sign that things need to change. Something needs to break the circle and pave a new path to lead us clothed beings into the future. Designers like Jun Takahashi for Undercover are exploring possible openings. Fabric technology is one potential path, with the help of NASA and Schoeller Textiles AG, Takahashi has developed highly desirable ready-to-wear garments, for his Fall/Winter 09 collection, that incorporate membranes and microcapsules capable of absorbing body heat indoors and then releasing that energy once the wearer is in cooler conditions. Genius!

On another front, fashion’s wiz-kid Hussein Chalayan is rigging up elaborate electronic mechanics into garments. Challenging ideas of static, singular, construction and function.

Such feats of forward thinking innovation are hard to maintain with the pressure of having to show every six months or sooner if including pre-seasons. To have the intelligence and imagination to do both is truly remarkable. In fact, it may just be clothing like Takahashi’s who help put an end to the archaic nature of seasonal shows, allowing for increased development in design, he is after all suggesting clothing that works in almost any climate.

So until we start rewarding designers like Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga, as another example, for foam bonding wool, or laser cutting latex; and start thanking innovators like Jun Takahashi for putting little plastic windows in our jacket sleeves so we can see our watches with ease, the same trends will come rolling around, re-styled and ready to consume.

It is the relentless business of fashion that is sending designers around the limited loop at breakneck speeds, with the sole aim of producing desirable retail, be it derived from any era. We are in a giant fashion particle accelerator, and someone needs to start going in the other direction to cause a collision, to create something truly unknown.”