THE GREAT DISRUPTION
As the fashion world begins to look, feel, and think more and more like the real world, a revolution is afoot. Sarah Mower walks us through the changing of the guard.
Well-behaved people rarely make history.” Scroll down Alexander Wang’s personal Instagram account, @alexwangny, and you’ll find those bold words in a post that just about sums up the generational attitude knocking down the gilded gates of the citadel of fashion – or, perhaps, climbing over its backyard wall and staging an occupation. “I’m more and more encouraged to go by my instinct,” says Wang. And less and less inclined, he adds, to fall in with “the way things were always done prehistorically”. Zing!
In 2016, something has finally hit critical mass in the industry. Whole groups of people formerly excluded from the halls of the approved have moved into its centre, bringing with them their own ideas about beauty, LGBT liberation, independence and feminism. All this at a time when designer fashion has been trying to run at the pace of fast fashion, and shows have broken out of the old schedules and are now everywhere and practically year-round.
Hedi Slimane first rocked the boat when he rebelled against seemingly every industry procedure and piety, followed his own instincts for product – essentially an enhancement of real, everyday street style and made a massive success of Saint Laurent while ignoring a press that criticised him for supposedly not complying with haute-designer expectations. Slimane lopped the “Yves” off his label’s name and relocated his atelier from Paris to Los Angeles. More recently, he effected one final shake-up of the house – by leaving it.
Other welcome injections of reality are bringing down frozen-intime ideas of glamour – from the notion that women buy clothes only to stand around in them at cocktail parties to the alienating styling-by-rote that has had a zombie-like hold on fashion since the turn of the millennium. Historically, Miuccia Prada holds the
“IT FEELS LIKE A POLITICAL GROUPING, AND A VOICE, THAT YOU BELIEVE IN”
crown for feminist resistance to such ideas, though Alessandro Michele at Gucci – with his radical breakaway from the glossy, sexy image that went before – is sensitive to the same sort of feeling. “I’m not conscious of being a revolutionary,” Michele says. “This is my life, looking through my glasses at my little world, but this world seems to be full of people who understand it. I think a lot of people feel that they want something softer. Things are changing. It’s about individuality, and in a way it’s romantic.”
In the tech world, Slimane and the many other characters who are making an impact in this chaotic time would be hailed as disrupters – Silicon Valley praise for outsiders who shoot up with ideas, products and methods that become so blindingly popular and inevitable that old structures are forced to reconfigure around them to survive. Power is shifting – and in ways that reach far beyond fashion’s time-immemorial business of designing fresh clothes that don’t look too much like last season’s clothes. Enabled by digital communication, people who have grown up in the postmillennial world are changing it all: who’s allowed to wear the clothes, how they’re bought and sold, and on whose say-so they’re judged to be good.
A panorama of the scene might start with a disparate crowd of designers – Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy, Shayne Oliver of Hood By Air, Rick Owens and Jonathan Anderson of J.W. Anderson among them – who have chipped away at gender and race prejudices, replacing them with the sort of realities that have become the beautiful new-normal to a whole generation. Tisci, in particular, has long been pushing for that kind of openness. “Why shouldn’t fashion reflect everybody – regardless of colour, sexuality, religion?” he asks. Owens, the LA Moses of fashion who is ever more revered for leading indie tribes into the promised land of Paris, has been prying open that space for years with unpredictable, often performance-based presentations, including a show for spring that featured women gymnasts carrying one another – always a broad bandwidth of individuals rather than the narrow caste of fashion’s traditional acceptable models.
At 28, Shayne Oliver is something of an avatar of the new ways outsider-revolutionaries are operating and who they might be – often entrepreneurial kids who’ve known nothing other than living in a faltering economy and are now increasingly likely to skip the formal education and teach themselves as they go along. “It has a lot to do with people who don’t agree with being told how they should be,” Oliver declares. “There is a lot of freedom within that.”
The energy coming from Oliver – and others – is friendly, collaborative, pragmatic. Terrified industry elders might be reassured that these disrupters also love fashion with all the sincerity of uncynical youth – but they are very certain of their ground. The Hood By Air spring show, with its cutaway and tape-tied clothes, was a kind of coming-of-age romp of pride set up as a crowd of multigender high school kids at recess – with a detention card as the after-party invite. “It was us talking about our childhood in a way everyone took seriously,” Oliver says. “Finally we can solidify that. It feels like a political grouping – and a voice – that you believe in.” It has to be faced: establishment corporate fashion is not the most popular of industries today. Openly lashed for its relentless speed and its quick-change way of dealing with talent – with the resignation of Raf Simons from Christian Dior, Alexander Wang’s parting of ways with Balenciaga, and the firing of Alber Elbaz from Lanvin only the most public shocks of last year – its practices, questioned from afar, can seem nonsensical or out of touch.
As negative an environment as this might seem, a healthy countermovement is brewing. Tisci’s inviting a thousand New Yorkers to stand with the insiders of the press, buyers and VIPs at his Givenchy show last September is just one symbolic gesture. Now that everyone talks directly to anyone across countries and cultures, barriers are falling fast.
Needless to say, Instagram’s capacity to be a diary, a gallery, a mailbox and a shopping catalogue disrupts the old commercial chain of command, giving even raw, independent designers the chance to start up an operation without magazine coverage, advertising campaigns or wholesale buyers. Selling directly can’t help them with the headaches of manufacturing, holding stock, shipping and accounting, but these are tremors of a seismic rethink about how to gather a loyal band of followers and what will move them to spend when money is so tight. Perhaps it’s also about sharing
ideas: Anderson recently set up his concept shop in London as “a collaborative experiment – with book publishers, poets and ceramicists – to find out what our customers want and stage events that anyone can come to”.
Of course, a certain faction in this movement might want to stand apart from this kind of hyperspeed change – John Galliano, for example, who has reappeared at Maison Margiela doing one considered thing without showing his face. Others, though, thrive on working at the speed of social media. Anderson, who in 2013 took over the creative directorship of Loewe in Paris on top of designing his own collection in London, claims to be more than happy to turn out clothes and ideas at a blinding speed. Gargantuan 80s-style leg-of-mutton sleeves for his own show and luxurious, rich-uncle suede tracksuits for Loewe were only two of his eye-swivelling spring standouts for women; a recent menswear show live-streamed on the gay dating app Grindr was another.
When Vetements arrived in Paris out of nowhere, it came with utilitarian, antiposh aesthetics. “It was a naive way of thinking that things don’t have to be this way. We had no logic, just gut instinct,” says Demna Gvasalia, originally from former Soviet Georgia, who lived in Germany, studied in Antwerp and worked at Margiela and Louis Vuitton before opening up shop with his brother, Guram, and a band of international friends.
“We started by making a list,” Gvasalia says. “What do we need? A pencil skirt, a hoodie, a trench coat, a sweatshirt, jeans, a dress. Then we refined each category by taking screenshots of people on the street – thousands of them from all cultures. Inside Vetements there are people who are Georgian, Russian, French, Slovenian, Slovakian, Italian, German and Japanese. We have really strong, open debates.” Gvasalia, who has cast his runways from Instagram, enlisted a sociologist to go out in Paris, Berlin and London to document how and why girls choose what they’re wearing, and he and his friends bring back their own reports from the club scene in abandoned squats outside Paris. “You see everyone wearing the same 501 jeans, hoodies, vintage army surplus and Doc Martens – but each of them is their own character; everyone looks different,” he says. “There is a style to it, but they really don’t need fashion.”
Does anyone need fashion? No. Well, yes – but in the very real way all these disruptive influences have set running through the Zeitgeist. And when Demna Gvasalia was appointed to Balenciaga? It was a clear and strong signal that, at last, the powers that be had started listening.