Big and small talk surrounding fashion month
Fashion month is upon us: hundreds of shows in four cities vying not just for your wardrobes, but for your eyeballs and even sense of outrage.
Who will be bidding for Oscar red-carpet glory? Can anyone top the Schiaparelli lion head? Will there be any scandals and controversies? Here’s what you need to know:
It’s make or break time for the Balenciaga brand.
That might seem like hyperbole, but it is not. This is the single most fraught show of the season. Maybe of any season. As you may recall, Balenciaga — regularly called the hottest brand of the past five years in any fashion ranking thanks to the ability of Demna, its designer, to hold a finger up to the cultural winds and capture them in clothes and context — had a spectacular fall from grace last fall.
It started in October when Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, opened the Balenciaga “mud” show, only to follow up with his own Yeezy show to which he wore a White Lives Matter T-shirt, which presaged a host of antisemitic and anti-Black comments. Slow to distance themselves from the rapper, Balenciaga then went live with a holiday ad campaign featuring teddy bear handbags in BDSM gear held by children, followed by another campaign that contained papers related to a U.S. Supreme Court child pornography case tucked in a pile.
A public outcry ensued, with Balenciaga accused of promoting pedophilia, boycotted and otherwise canceled. Apologies, when they finally came (after an attempt to blame a set design team), were halfhearted. Assumptions were
that heads would have to roll, but both Demna and Cedric Charbit, the CEO, remained in place. Holiday sales, especially in the United States market, have, by all accounts, been dismal. And the Lyst shopping platform reported that in the last quarter of 2022, Balenciaga fell out of its ranking of the top 10 most searched brands for the first time since the index was created in 2018.
Save for the apologies, Balenciaga has remained almost entirely silent, though on Feb.
8 it announced a threeyear partnership with the National Children’s Alliance, focusing on training and raising awareness of child abuse and protection. The show, scheduled for March 5 in Paris, will be its next major visible statement.
Burberry is trying to bring back Cool Britannia.
Burberry, the biggest luxury brand in Britain and a sort of doppelganger for the country, lost its way in recent years under designer Riccardo Tisci and CEO Marco Gobbetti, offering up an outsider-goth version of Britishness that included deer ear prosthetics, backless trench coats and a video inspired by a “love affair between a mermaid and a shark” that included white-clad acolytes swaying in a forest.
But after almost a complete shift at the top, two Brits — Daniel Lee, the new designer, and Jonathan Akeroyd, the
CEO — are now in charge, tasked with recentering the heritage at the heart of the house.
Change has already begun, with a new logo
that is a throwback to the original Burberry Prorsum horse and rider minted in 1901, plus a teaser ad campaign starring Vanessa Redgrave, Liberty Ross, Skepta and Lennon Gallagher. Yes, the son of Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, the original Cool Britannia couple of 1997. As clues to where this is going, it’s pretty clear.
Generational change is happening in New York.
There has been a lot of moaning about New York Fashion Week losing its superstars after Calvin Klein closed its runway line and Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren decided to make their own schedules. But in their absence a rare thing is happening: generational change.
The new guard may not be household names, but they are rethinking what American sportswear means and who gets to define it, in a way that has the potential to reshape fashion for the next decade or more, and to make New York another rare thing: a genuinely diverse design hub.
Thom Browne is taking over from Tom Ford as head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
The two most thrilling showmen in the city, Browne and Willy Chavarria, lead with theater and emotion, not commerce and calculation.
Also look for Heron Preston, bringing his form of “instant language,” upcycling and archetypes, back from Paris; Raul Lopez of Luar, who imbues his edgy, gender-agnostic lux with his own back story; Everard
Best of Who Decides War, the designer turning jeans into couture; and Taofeek Abijako of Head of State, whose post-colonial storytelling pairs every product he makes with a community-improvement project, both at home (upstate New York) and in Nigeria (where his parents are from) and who dressed Danai Gurira and Evan Mock for last year’s Met Gala.
Harry Styles’ favorite designer is debuting in Paris.
Harris Reed, 26, the half-American, half-British, much feted but largely unproven name who made the ballgown Harry Styles wore in Vogue in 2020, and the polka-dot Seussical suit Shania Twain wore to the Grammys this year, is the new designer at Nina Ricci, a brand that has been struggling to define itself beyond its perfume pretty much since it tried to move beyond perfume.
Reed’s dramatic genderbending one-offs garner a lot of attention and celebrity kudos when he shows under his own name in London, but they do not exactly scream “commercially viable!” so there’s a lot riding on his debut.
It’s a similar story with Ludovic de Saint Sernin,
27, the new designer at
Ann Demeulemeester, whose genderless shredded peekaboo aesthetic has found fans in Kim Kardashian, Dua Lipa and Rihanna.
The Belgian brand, once the epitome of slouchy, existential hipness, has lost some of its mojo in recent years, existing on the good will of its former self. De Saint Sernin’s job is to change that trajectory.
The question, in both cases, will be how the designers translate their drama into wearability — or whether, in the Instagram-TikTok age, statement-making is actually the ultimate goal.