A CALL FOR CHANGE
What’s essential in a world in which runway spectacles are being laid to rest?
IN INTIMATIONS, A NEW BOOK of pandemic essays, Zadie Smith writes that life is “mystifying, overwhelming” and “just keeps coming at you.” Indeed, in the slow-moving world of rapid change that is 2020, nothing superfluous will do: Both the pandemic and racial-justice protests prompted brands to switch up their marketing plans and quickly pivot toward a more pragmatic consumer. The few pandemic-created industry success stories, like Band of Outsiders founder Scott Sternberg’s loungewear line, Entireworld, offer muted comfort for a homebound world.
But Maryam Nassir Zadeh was already issuing a call for change when she decided not to show her fall/winter 2020/2021 collection at New York Fashion Week (NYFW) back in February. Why did she opt out? She was going to a friend’s wedding. The unapologetic move underscored what critics had been pointing to for some time: No longer the fulcrum of the industry, the fashion calendar was becoming irrelevant. Still, despite calls to overhaul the costly, waste-producing, overscheduled runway presentations, which originated in Parisian ateliers over a century ago, the shows kept on. That is, until the grind ground to a halt in March and uncertainty confirmed the runway as a relic jamming up fashion’s contemporary supply chain, which now thrives on a seasonless, direct-to-consumer model for the global marketplace.
Zadeh was not the first designer to decide not to show—two other New York labels, Pyer Moss and Jeremy Scott, also skipped NYFW—but her very human choice neatly anticipated a pandemic-era culture shift in which work is regarded merely as such and is therefore not the entirety of one’s life. Perhaps the biggest left turn that F
2020 could bring is a return to a more wholesome and heart-centred desire to embrace life and its whims.
This thirst for a carefree approach carries into the clothing too. Zadeh’s lookbook features models layered up and lounging in lacy blouses, round-toed knee-high boots, boxy jackets with oversized collars as large as the wings of a paper plane and reworked denim midiskirts.
The designer has a keen eye for vintage, and her clothes are beloved for their wearability, so the feel of the collection is an amalgam of the synthetic optimism and sporty femininity of late ’90s and early ’00s mall trends. (There was a time in the mid-2000s when you couldn’t step out of a change room without a perky sales associate suggesting you “put a belt on it,” and Zadeh’s chunky belts, styled over coats or slung low on the hips, bring that moment of conspicuous dressing to mind.) It’s not nostalgic but, rather, lived in, like if you were to root around in your closet and put together different combinations of your past selves—say, the late-teens you who was obsessed with pleated skirts meets the mid-20s you who wore socks and sandals with confidence.
Zadeh has said that trying on clothes is how she relaxes; it triggers positive memories of loved ones and good times. So for resort 2021, she leaned into this shop-your-closet impulse, pulling looks from her brand’s archive and updating and reworking them for the present. It’s an approach that’s about sustainability, but it’s also inspired by how people—many of whom may never be able to afford Zadeh’s clothes—are dressing right now: unburdened by trends, inspired by DIY and motivated by closets full of inspo. While change is swift and inevitable these days and having to absorb new routines seems never-ending, it helps to remember that the past—in the form of tube tops, cut-offs and faded high-school-gym T-shirts—is still here to serve as an anchor.