LESS STORYTELLING, MORE DRESSMAKING

This one is going to be a little harsh – I beg your pardon. I’m all for fostering the next generations of designers but, after attending countless contests, visiting innumerable showrooms and talking to a wide cross-section of up-and-coming authors, I get the impression that over the years something has gone slightly wrong when it comes to the way creatives operate, the approach they take and the expectations they nurture. I will leave the bigwigs out of this rant, as they count on heavy marketing to solve concept and design problems – that’s the way it goes nowadays. Shall we blame the flood of pretence on the schools or on the way the system functions as a whole? Shall we stigmatise Mrs Miuccia Prada and Mrs Rei Kawakubo for unwittingly turning aspiring designers into selfaggrandising conceptual artists, and Mr John Galliano and Mr Alexander McQueen for unpredictably turning aspiring designers into full-blown storytellers of the most outlandish kind? Maybe all of the above, maybe none of the above. Whatever the case may be, I’m fed up with hearing the term “concept”, or with feeling like I’m about to solve a riddle every time I meet a new designer. And that’s even before seeing the clothes. The latter, apropos, require maximum effort in order to be visually read, not to mention used and worn. Enough is enough: complication is deceitful, misleading and useless. Don’t get me wrong: schools should maintain their role of no-holds-barred creative playgrounds. Students should be allowed anything and everything in order to strengthen their creative nerve. Yet what should never be forgotten is that there is one unavoidable and actually hyperstimulating limit to fashion making: dresses need to be useful objects. Fashion is an applied art: a merging of form and function. That’s the starting point and the end goal. Within this frame, anything can happen. In order to be effective, however, the conceptual and the narrative should be made integral to the design and construction process. Too often today they are little more than a form of pseudo-cultural embellishment applied a posteriori instead. If you ask me, less storytelling and more dressmaking would do a lot of good to fashion at the moment. McQueen and Galliano are wonderful examples: their wildest ideas were set into the clothes, way more than their stellar presentations. The same goes for Hussein Chalayan. Let’s focus on the tangible, then, and the rest will follow. Won’t it?