Digital fashion week comes to a fitting end
While some shows chose concept over clothes, others hit the mark
In 1964 Andy Warhol trained a camera on the Empire State Building for about 61⁄ 2 hours, in a meditation on the nature of monuments, thought and perception.
On Friday, Alessandro Michele of Gucci trained a camera — actually a few — on a Gucci campaign shoot for12 hours in a livestream about the nature of creation, identity and dress.
Also, in both cases, boredom and the way it can free the mind.
Michele has, in the five years he has been the creative director of Gucci, mostly cloaked his increasingly hyperbolic and oversaturated shows in the dense erudition of relatively obscure philosophers like Giorgio Agamben, but it turns out that Warhol makes for much better source material.
As a comment on the experience of lockdown and what it meant — to fashion but also to those stuck at home in that unsettling nether land of suspended animation where the life of the mind continued while the life of the body was restrained — it turned out to be surprisingly effective.
And it made for a fitting ending to what has been an olio of a digital fashion week: a random stew of lines including men’s, women’s, couture, ready-towear, resort and “Flash” (the name for an interstitial collection created to generate excitement), all of it packaged as brand promos, designer musings and high-concept creative collaboration that favoured concept over clothes to an unfortunate extent.
The challenge in the current digital reality has always been combining a chance to actually see the stuff with the more abstract suggestion of the idea behind them and the way it connects to our own lived experience. It’s proved harder than most expected.
Watching AJ Tracey, the British rapper introduce his new song at the Versace headquarters while models writhing in what were mostly beaded faux snakeskin crop tops and hipslung trousers was fun. But it didn’t go very far in answering the question of what we are supposed to wear next; who we are supposed to be.
Perhaps that’s why a number of designers took the coronavirus-be-damned route and went back to live shows (Etro, Jacquemu s) with a limited, masked audience. It proved hard to focus on the fashion, however, when you kept being worried about an outbreak.
So what worked best, not just as a visual experience, not just as a historical record of a very complex moment, not just as actual shirts and dresses and coats you may want to wear, but as all of the above?
Loewe’s do-it-yourself show in a box, complete with swatches, pop-up backdrop and dress cards, as a counterpart to the filmed musings of designer Jonathan Anderson and the 360-degree view of selected mannequins, where the rigorous splicing of extreme 18thcentury volumes and austere outerwear could be seen in the round.
Maison Margiela’s 50-minute docudrama about the making of the Artisanal collection in the weeks after lockdown in France was compelling in its insight. It traversed the leaps and swirls of designer John Galliano’s mind as it ranged along a pathway that connected the fragile drapery of Greek statuary to the Blitz club kids of 1980s London to James Baldwin quotations.
Then, there was Miuccia Prada’s last Prada show as lone creative director. As of September, Raf Simons will be joining her. Perhaps as a result, she returned to first principles, stripping away the fuss to get at the essence of a black nylon dress, full-skirted, empire-waisted, strapless or sleeveless.
All of them effectively offered an easy to wear, and easy to imagine, transition. Not so much between seasons or systems, but between how to dress for home and how to dress for the potential return to public life that is dangling so tantalizingly (and nerve-rackingly) in the future.
To frame it, Miuccia Prada enlisted five creatives, each of them offering two-minute snippets of their own point of view. The result was called “The Show That Never Happened” — just as Michele’s was called “Epilogue.”
In both cases, they were an acknowledgment of what all of this experimentation in form and function signifies: the last gasp of the old system and tentative steps toward the new.
Thus Michele offered up what was essentially an ode to the grandmother’s trunk approach he has made his signature.
He loaded on the prints and pieces, the reference and nostalgia in 76 looks.
He did it in the Palazzo Sacchetti in Rome with 35 models who weren’t models but members of the atelier. He did it with the people who made the clothes they were wearing; people of different ages and shapes and skin colours; all identified by name and job and given their due.
And he did it with final look book photos layered atop video of the shoot. It was, Michele gabbled during the video, “The end of the beginning of an experiment.” He was right. Now, onward.