Supermodels are no more, and our modern lives are the poorer for it
‘Many young people hate fashion,” confessed Maria Grazia Chiuri, the head designer of Dior, this week. She was launching her spring/summer 2023 collection with a catwalk show featuring near-naked dancers writhing in convulsions, while around them stomped a train of scowling, hungry-looking adolescents wearing deconstructed crinolines, chainmail vests and Paddington-style toggles.
Apparently, though, it’s not the tireless absurdity of fashion that young people don’t like. According to Ms Chiuri, they believe fashion is “part of an establishment system which represents power”. It does sound like Gen Z: cross, pious and a bit baffling.
Is fashion still powerful? Commercially, yes. Since the turn of the 21st century, when cheap foreign labour kick-started “fast fashion”, the global production of clothing has more than doubled. Clothing retailers, who used to follow the couture rhythm of two collections a year, now churn out new designs every month or more. This has fostered a throwaway culture that is great for business but terrible for the environment: around 300,000 tonnes of used clothes are burned or buried in landfill each year in the UK. Gen Z, despite its piety, is the worst offender: a third of young women in this country consider an item of clothing to be “old” after they’ve worn it twice.
As an industry, then, fashion is booming. Culturally, however, it has become curiously flaccid. In my teens, fashion sat at the apex of popular culture. The most famous people in the world were fashion models. They wouldn’t get out of bed unless paid vast amounts per day, yet their hooded eyes gazed down on us from everywhere: bus stops, newsstands, billboards, television. Every time they walked from one end of a catwalk to the other, it made front-page news.
Designers, too, were rock-star famous. Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood: each had a signature look – a fan or a quiff or a waxed moustache – to make them cartoonishly recognisable even to the least dedicated follower of fashion. How many contemporary designers could you name? How many models, come to that? The most famous faces – even on the covers of fashion magazines – now belong to actors, reality TV stars and activists. The people who shift clothes are social media “influencers” – hugely famous to those who follow them, unrecognisable to those who don’t.
The fragmented media landscape – with limited mainstream publications and an infinite variety of individually curated timelines – means that fame itself is harder to define. But fashion has fallen into a particularly strange kind of obscurity: it is everywhere, churning through our wardrobes at a rapid rate, but also nowhere.
My generation knew, without even knowing we knew, the traditional structures of couture fashion: its houses and seasons and collections. But when I watched the 2001 comedy Zoolander with my teenagers, I found myself explaining what a catwalk is.
In fact, the film’s very premise – satire of the vanity and empty-headedness of the fashion industry – took some explaining. Satire works by undercutting the powerful, but fashion’s power no longer lies with the pomaded, egomaniacal creatives, or their sleek clothes-horses. It has shifted, wholesale, to the boardroom. And the strange thing is, this feels like a loss.