What We Talk About When We Don't Talk About Prairie Dresses ... So What Who Cares, 5(5)
It took about twenty years, but the Internet has finally come for fashion.
Let's backtrack a little, with some I-love-the-Nineties film recommendations. Go on iTunes and rent Unzipped and Larger than Life: The Kevyn Aucoin Story. Those two documentaries perfectly illustrate a cultural industry at its apex. It is striking to see how small the group of image influencers was -- Polly Allen Mellen looms large in both and in lieu of a documentary on this stylist and editor, we'll have to settle for her presence in In Vogue: The Editor's Eye (streaming on Amazon Prime) -- and how so many of the iconic looks of the 1990s were the work of a small handful of people blithely assured of the divine right of the one-way communique.
The attempt to put prairie dresses on the map -- groundwork laid in the usual places like last year's New Yorker article on Batsheva Hay's neo-orthodox aesthetic -- has run afoul of critics who point out the racist connotations of the look and the disconnect from how people really want to dress. It's a perfectly 2010s situation: A trend is anointed; the consumers say, "Nah, I'm good," and go back to scrolling Instagram to find the looks they prefer instead.
Cathy Horyn wrote a piece today which reminded me of both Unzipped and Larger Than Life, noting:
[Alexander] McQueen and [Thierry] Mugler were fortunate that they lived and worked at a time when fashion was unquestionably king, when bold ideas were not just the norm but expected, and designers had a long time to develop their style, in part because they had the support of department stores and savvy independent merchants and, as well, editors who loved big talent.
That essential framework is crumbling.
Teri Agins' excellent The End of Fashion documents how the foundation was crumbling even at the end of the 1990s. Next, Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers laid down an important tenet of modern retail: Consumers are far less interested in the one-to-many transmissions of a designer who seems indifferent to them than they are in the celebrity who openly acknowledges they wouldn't be where they are without all their fans.
In other words, it's the perceived breakdown of the one-way communications channel. That celebrities have teams of people working to make them seem accessible and Twitter-obsessed just like us doesn't matter. What matters is the perception of accessibility, the demand for which has risen in direct relation to the continually widening post-recession gulf between haves and have-nots.
The architects of fashion's framework tried to keep doing business as usual through a decade that gave us massive peer-to-peer communication empowerment via blogs and then social media, joyful high-low mixing of brands, the rise of direct-to-consumer lines, and the spread of politics-as-brand-differentiator. They're still showing clothes under the assumption that people will wait six months to buy them -- and even if that were true, despite the rise in fast fashion, Americans no longer buy as much clothing as they used to. It's no wonder the old framework is crumbling.
Here's what you can expect in its place, per an excellent WWD article on the death of the "It Bag," or extremely expensive and ubiquitous purse that everyone who was anyone used to buy:
Lisa Aitken, Moda Operandi’s women’s fashion director, said: “At its height, the industry was dominated by a few styles, it was very specific and went everywhere. Now I feel like styles have almost a cult attraction. It’s far more fragmented — consumers are more savvy about personal style and understanding what they like and don’t like rather than being led by a singular style.”
In the beginning, the point to ARPAnet was to craft a network that could route around damage -- a web of nodes, each winking in and out as needed, no hierarchy. The Internet showed people the model worked in a technological milieu; they've since tried it out to everything from news to music to fashion.
Is it really so bad not to have a Maggie Prescott dictating what the American woman is going to wear?
It depends. There's an argument to be made that what one wears is a reflection of one's perceived place in the world. (For more on this, read William Gibson's excellent Blue Ant Trilogy -- Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History.) Then the question becomes how much of that perception originates with the wearer and how much comes from a commercial entity.
The prairie dress trend provides a reflection of the American fashion scene right now. The style is flogged by an industry unwilling to examine the garment's racist and sexist connotations at a time when hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. and we're in an acrimonious national dialogue about how to treat women. Most mainstream fashion coverage of it seems to ignore the specific time and place in which this trend is being foisted on Americans.
At the end of the day, I'm reminded of a very good quote Agins got from Stephanie Solomon, then the senior fashion director of Bloomingdales: "The definition of a designer is when you can gauge the shift of a particular moment."
The unsettling question to answer now: What is the shift? Are people embracing the aesthetic validation of some very specific views about whiteness and women? Or are people deciding some frameworks need to be deconstructed?
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