High fashion gets a hand-it-over moment
Celebrities and fashionistas find new uses for their collections by selling them off
■ ■ menswear-focused moment”, with pieces from designers like Paco Rabanne, Stephen Sprouse, Issey Miyake, Haider Ackermann and Alexander McQueen — the sell-offs themselves may tell us something specific about our particular moment.
They are not, for example, part of the same continuum really as the sales by celebrities like Liza Minnelli and Jane Fonda, which have also become something of a thing but which relate more to Hollywood mythology than fashion (or, say, the recent Russell Crowe divorce auction, which was mostly about the value of his own celebrity, and buying a piece of it).
Instead, the sales by Silver and his ilk seem more purely related to the current consumer culture. They are products of the way in which visual consumption and the need to fill the digital void with More Crazy Outfits! and Even Wilder Looks! have begun to drive actual consumption to unsustainable levels. Not in the ecological sense, though that is part of it, but in the psychological sense. It’s a peculiarly contemporary vicious cycle: If your personal brand and your professional brand are increasingly interchangeable, and part of that brand is dressing in a seriously eye-catching way, and that kind of dressing then causes photographers to seek you out and take pictures, that in turn creates pressure to dress more crazily and change more often and get more stuff, which gets more pictures and so on and so on ad infinitum.
“The expectation that whenever I showed up, I would wear something that turned heads or dropped jaws was really strong,” Silver said. “Every Met Gala had to be a bigger fashion moment, which in turn encouraged me to be extra social and go out like crazy. It was like performance art, but at a certain point I felt like my wardrobe took over my authenticity.”
Cultural relics
This phenomenon is what has led on a smaller level to the explosion of the ■ resale market, and sites like Vestiaire Collective, the RealReal and (on a more accessible level) ThredUp, where fashionistas sell their seasonal splurges to make room in their closets and help finance the next ones. On a bigger level, it has created the sell-off situation.
Once upon a time, great fashion plates — Nan Kempner, Jacqueline de Ribes — collected clothes the way they collected jewellery and porcelain and then left them to a museum like the Met’s Costume Institute or the Palais Galliera in Paris, understanding that they would become cultural relics. Now they can divest earlier, and with purpose.
Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said in an email that auctions used to sell only 18th-, 19th- and early-20th-century pieces.
“But now “vintage” means anything more than three seasons old, and even less sometimes,” Steele wrote. “There is no incentive for collectors waiting until their clothes have “aged” into fashion history, especially when the latest fashions are on display in museums. And it’s certainly true that people (and heirs) increasingly seek to monetise fashion collections.”
Besides, Silver said, “not every museum wants everything.” Indeed, before he decided to sell off his clothes, he donated a number of pieces to the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art for “Reigning Men”, a show on menswear that opened in April 2016.
And it’s not like he won’t have anything left. There are still 300 pairs of shoes, he said, “and suits in 50 shades of grey from pretty much every designer you can name,” since grey suits have become his new uniform. But, Silver said, “it feels great to be free from the pressure to figure out who’s the hottest new designer or what’s the most important new silhouette.”
It’s a monster of our own creation. But there seems to be a growing (and welcome) consensus that it’s time to cut off its head.