This year will be a year of seismic change in fashion. That much is a given.
Or actually, it is a given that this will be a year of seismic change in fashion personnel. Starting this month, new designers at eight global brands, including Calvin Klein and Chanel, will be making their runway debuts. As they will at Bottega Veneta, Lanvin, Givenchy, Tom Ford, Alberta Ferretti and Dries Van Noten — with the possibility of more open spots being filled at Fendi, Maison Margiela, Helmut Lang and Carven in the coming months.
Sheesh! Whether that power shift will translate into seismic change in what we wear is a different question.
There has been much speculation as to the source of the turmoil. Much blame has focused on a slowdown in luxury spending (especially in China), as well as global political and economic uncertainty, which has led to a game of Blame the Designer (when in doubt, blame the designer), which led to Change the Designer.
There is a tendency, in such an environment, to play it safe. To fall back into the comfort of a camel coat and assume that what sold well in the past will sell well in the future. To focus on the commercial over the creative.
This would be a mistake.
It is time for a fashion revolution. The kind of revolution that Coco Chanel created in the 1920s, when she transformed the little black dress, uniform of the serving class, into a status symbol of liberation, apparently causing Paul Poiret to clutch his breast in horror and declare: “What has Chanel invented? Deluxe poverty.” Her clients resembled “little undernourished telegraph clerks,” he sneered.
The kind of revolution that Christian Dior wrought in the postwar era, when he scandalized the world with the New Look, in all its lavishly skirted, wasp-waist glory, inciting riots in the streets against the sheer excess of material. The kind that Yves Saint Laurent ignited during the upheavals of the 1960s, when he adapted the male tuxedo for women, causing Nan Kempner to be cast out of La Côte Basque for the crime of wearing pants.
And the kind that Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons created when she treated darkness and destruction like precious skins as the Cold War collapsed and Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history. Ms. Kawakubo was castigated for promoting “Hiroshima chic,” even as her embrace of the flawed forever shifted ideas about beauty and the body.
Just as, when the millennium turned, Thom Browne was widely mocked for putting grown-up men in short pants (or just plain old shorts) and shrunken jackets. Until those shrink-wrapped gray suits changed not just proportions, but the very meaning of “uniform.”
Such designs horrified and thrilled in equal measure, but they also rose to the challenge of a changed world and a changing sense of how people dressed — not just at the moment they appeared, but forever after.
Fashion is essentially a story of what the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge called “punctuated equilibrium,” a theory positing that significant change comes in spurts that interrupt lengthy periods of stability or slow evolution. It’s how we got L.B.D.s, the New Look, pants, the possibilities of destruction.
Out of chaos came creativity. That’s where we are now: at a mass inflection point when the world order is in flux, social mores are shifting, the A.I. era is dawning and it’s not clear how everything will be resolved. The first quarter of the 21st century, with the ascent of streetwear and athleisure, is over. There is a hunger for the defining next.
Hence the outsize reaction to the Maison Margiela couture show last January, when John Galliano, then the house’s designer, offered up a phantasmagorical underworld full of exploding flesh and extraordinary tailoring that was so unlike the current made-for-the-’gram runway that it provoked fits of foot-stomping ecstasy in its audience.
Those clothes were not actually new; they were newly dramatized versions of work Mr. Galliano had done before — throwbacks, with their extreme corsetry and theatricality, to late-20th-century fashion fabulousness. It was the applause more than the actual silhouettes (which haven’t remotely filtered out into the general population) that was telling: the clearly voracious appetite for something that didn’t look or feel like all the things that had come before.
It was a sign, if any were needed, that the door is wide-open for someone to stop reinventing history and start inventing; to create the thing we didn’t know we wanted, the thing that is impossible to predict, because, by definition, if you can predict it, it isn’t a surprise.
There are designers who are clearly trying: Demna, with his inversion of luxury semiotics at Balenciaga; Jonathan Anderson, with his surreal craftiness at Loewe. These are designers who twist not just items but proportions. Some of their work has jarred the status quo and produced moments of viral indignation (especially Demna, with his haute Ikea bags and eroded sneakers), but as yet, neither has produced a paradigm shift. Wouldn’t that be something to see?
Here’s hoping the new crop tries, that new names and new brains actually make some new clothes, even if at old houses. Thanks to our wildly connected world, the possibilities for one crazy idea of what it means to look modern, to alter the mass sense of self, are almost limitless.
Here’s hoping they seize the moment not to dutifully respect the so-called codes of the house — enough with the codes of the house — but to embrace the abstract ethos of their brands, not the literal shapes from the archives. Not to merely tweak the mold, but to break it and reinvent it. If outrage is the result that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s often an outrage when you see something that challenges your ideas of proper dress.
But it’s an outrage with a purpose. And if there is another lesson that history offers, it is that such outrage eventually pays off.
Until then, it takes courage for executives and backers to withstand the initial backlash and opprobrium; it takes time for the eye, and wardrobe, to adjust. The problem is that time and forbearance are luxuries rarely offered to designers today. If they are to rise to the occasion, if they are to do the unexpected, they must be granted the space and support to do it.
So c’mon, fashion. Surprise us. Enchant us. Shock us. I dare you.
