Forever in Blue Jeans
The beloved fabric was all over the runways, and seems very right for the coronavirus-defined moment.
Is creativity prescient?
While developing their fall collections, designers could have had no idea of the impending global nightmare, the two-tier crisis, health and economic, that will impact our lives forever. Toiling away in their studios, they did what they always do at that time: ponder and work through how to come up with powerful fashion that women will find compelling and want to wear.
For whatever creative or cosmic reason, many designers chose to include denim in their collections. It was all over the runways. Collectively, the myriad individual decisions to put it there seem very right for the moment. Like every other discretionary-goods business, fashion is now wondering what people will be willing to spend their money on as retail around the world starts opening, whether in full or with curbside discretion. Most likely, when it comes to clothes, the customer will want versatility, longevity, value and, of course, style.
In the classics-longevity realm, nothing beats denim. Certainly Yves Saint Laurent thought so. “I wish I had invented blue jeans, the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant,” he mused. “They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity — all I hope for in my clothes.”
For fall, denim reflected all of Saint Laurent’s checkpoints, showing up variously as sexy, demure, bohemian, urban, racy, witty and more. By the time the collections ended on March 3 in Paris, it seemed like a significant trend — smart, versatile, practical, engaging. Now, it seems like a significant cultural statement.
“We love denim,” said Ottolinger’s
Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient. “It has the unique quality to connect society. It’s a fabric which is worn through all professions, countries and societies.”
Yet every big- picture reading is comprised of countless individual human stories, a reality brought into sharp relief in the COVID-19 crisis.
“Very few things in fashion get better with time, [and] are both comfortable and sexy, and work on [people of ] any age or size,” said Michael Kors. “I think now more than ever people are going to expect a lot from what they buy, so denim will become more relevant than it has ever been in the past.”
The “now” to which Kors refers is a lifetime away from those hours toiled in the design studio. Then, while much of fashion was already challenged, particularly independent brands, the economy was flourishing and consumer confidence soared. Designers were thinking, as always, about speaking to their clients with newness and allure. Now the concept of “relevance” is front- and- center in a very clinical way, in an economic landscape in which shopping for most categories of clothes has pretty much screeched to a halt.
Online sales have shown that if people are buying anything, it’s a very literal take on buy-now-wear-now — sweats, workout clothes, Zoom-ready tops, everyday items for life under quarantine. It makes sense that, as reopening expands, function will remain a priority.
As his starting point for fall, Moohong Kim looked to acknowledge the importance of the ordinary, focusing on classic wardrobe components that are “easily ignored or undervalued.…In this context,” he said, “denim was a perfect means of expressing the collection’s theme, as it is a typical everyday item in our wardrobe, across social class, ages and genders.”