However, below the surface of the cobbled streets, innovation and youth is bubbling and is sure to surface with a Bang!!!! (Lucio Vanotti and Arthur Arbesser are ones to watch!)
Like everything in fashion and the standard business cycle you have your standard booms and your troughs, your peaks and lows, your classic pattern of ups and downs as hypnotising as the waves of the sea and as steady as the changing of seasons. Repetitive? Yes! But filled with opportunity to adapt to the dynamic present to create a better future. Vogue Italia and Camera della Moda have invested in Italian talent for tomorrow and are brining fresh air into the Milanese fashion capital. Milan, once considered a dormant beauty has undergone a beautiful awakening, partially responsible is Alesandro Michele and the excitement he has brought to Gucci. AW2014 was a legendary season for Milan, but today almost 2 years later is unsurprisingly stagnant with a lack of new ideas. However, below the surface of the cobbled streets, innovation and youth is bubbling and is sure to surface with a Bang!!!! (Lucio Vanotti and Arthur Arbesser are ones to watch!) An investment in talent is the only way to reach long term benefits in a creative context.
Repetition is a buzzword for Milan SS17 with a Bold, Underlined, All-Caps emphasis on house codes and heritage storytelling.
Repetition is a buzzword for Milan SS17 with a Bold, Underlined, All-Caps emphasis on house codes and heritage storytelling. Comfortable at best. Stale at worst. In terms of brand building, enforcing house codes and heritage is vital when positioning effectively in the mind of the consumer and is for the very best a core competency promising a degree of stability in a volatile climate. Leaning too heavily on the shoulder of the past however is a risk itself and can inhibit creativity by transforming the “same old” to the “same old” with new bows and tassels. A styling exercise may prove fun and quirky, as we saw with Dolce and Gabbana, but underlines the major tectonic shift from fashion show for business purposes to the fashion show for entertainments sake. There’s no business like show business right?
Speaking of “for entertainments sake” - this gives me the opportunity to address the infamous round table discussion by Vogue editors on the blogger. The spiciest phrase includes: “Note to bloggers who change head-to-toe, paid-to-wear outfits every hour: Please stop. Find another business. You are heralding the death of style” said by Sally Singer. Bazinga.
Andy Warhol’s prophecy of “in the future everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame” has come true with the issue being that it devalues the actual purpose of the shows into a mad circus of ME! ME! ME!
Having only been part of the fashion circus myself for the past 2 years, I can only compare what I see today with the accounts of others who have been in the industry for more than a quarter of a century. Lots has changed. And one of those major changes is the purpose for attending the fashion show. Ever since the 1970’s, a Ready to Wear fashion show predominantly allowed spectators to critique, order and exchange information between industry members thus legitimising a brand’s offering. Essentially it has been a B2B event but this has more and more shifted to a spectacle, filled with a glamorous Front Row (‘Frow’) in order to gain more press through sites such as the Daily Mail. Still this has to do with business.
The discrepancy though which has happened through social media is the tempting offer that everyone has a chance to be a star through street style photography. The more eccentric the better. Andy Warhol’s prophecy of “in the future everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame” has come true with the issue being that it devalues the actual purpose of the shows into a mad circus of ME! ME! ME! opposed to moving forward as a collective industry into an unraveling future.
I don’t believe the Vogue Editors were referring to professional bloggers who earn their bread and butter from such events — as many industry players do! I think they were referring to the (at least what I have noticed) thousands of people running around looking to gain social capita and legitimise their positions and following on Instagram by “being there”. Sarah Mower stated it is “pathetic for these girls…desperate[ly] troll[ing] up and down outside shows”.
I too would agree. I would preach the more successful route into the industry is spending some good ole fashion time in the library learning about fashion references, terminology, designers, photographers, and mastering a skill such as writing, designing, photography, drawing, filming… whatever your passion may be. Only renowned for being paid for over the top eccentric dressing for the sake of being photographed is incredibly cheapening to the self and to the industry. Just one gal’s opinion.
Starbucks was nice, same old.When I walked back across to the tent an hour later there were three girls shivering in their underwear with their heads in animal masks. Surely this was going too far, even fashion must have its limits somewhere oh but then I realised it was only PETA demonstrating against the use of fur. They were positioned so that people taking photos of them would find it impossible not to exclude from the frame the gleaming MBFW tent in the near distance behind them.
Everyone outside seemed to be smoking when I crossed the street and lingered around the tent. It struck me that they were trying to ward off hunger. Ha, just like the starving child in countries were cigarettes cost less than food. Albeit smoking to get that chemical hunger-displacing rush for different purposes. Or maybe it was only the smokers that came to stand outside giving the false impression that a greater percentage of fashion people smoke than actually do.Ok, I say fashion people. I'll need to explain my terminology a little bit here. What became clear to me as the week wore on is that there are categories that define the clothes people wear. As everyone wears clothes, everyone must fit in a category. Categories are as such: Fashionable. These are the ladies and gentlemen at the apex of fashion, they dress themselves in the latest in designed produce and all seem intent on goading each other on towards the next fashionable thing, the process of which keeps fashion alive and evolving. The second, category, where I would place myself (80 per cent of the time), belongs to the stylish. Stylish people are those who settle for, well, just looking stylish. It is not a necessity for them to be always reaching further for new and artistic ways to clothe themselves. Stylish people can be quite happy with a nice Ralph Lauren shirt and a pair of comfortable jeans thank you very much. Then we have the not so stylish who maybe need a little advice and direction, or though equally, may not have the capacity or desire to spend money on 'stylish' clothes.I spotted Nina making her way towards me all excited about what she had seen inside and I was eager to hear about it and we got into a Mercedes-Benz sponsored shuttle bus which took us to another part of the city where a related event ‘Premier’ was taking place this week which was basically an exhibition of all of next winter's (so 2015/16) seasonal clothing that was being shown to store owners who could decide if they wanted to stock any of the clothes in their stores for people to buy next winter kind of in a way similar to picking stocks as the store owners need to predict what will likely sell well and thus decide how much of which items on display to order. So, yes, as you are likely wondering, I have seen the fashion future... And it looked fiiiiine.
No, but seriously, there were so many brands unknown to me at the convention that trying to remember the names of any of them makes my head spin. However, one brand that stood out for me were a sneaker company 'Some Are Thieves'. As I was taking photographs of the shoes I overheard the designer telling Nina about the inspiration behind the design on the shoes, that it was modelled on the patterns made when the universe began and that he wanted that the be the design as such a pattern predates any other known image in like all of time. I could totally chill with this guy! I didn't know designers could be so down to earth! The next pieces we looked at were hats that were made with specially malleable material. The designer, a quiet, intense guy, actually snuck up on Nina and plopped a rather wide brimmed hat onto her head, and began manipulating the shape of its rim with his hands, twirling it, folding it back in on itself. He didn't really say much, but he kept modelling these hats of different shapes and sizes on Nina with a keen artistic eye.
It was at this point that I began to decipher a little bit the questions I have about the meaning of fashion. This piece was clearly artistic, clearly invoking a foregone age when hats were a daily necessity, though the designer had put that fashionable, in many ways unique and original stamp on his creation that I suppose is what pushes fashion on into unseen territories. What can one do with the idea of - the concept of - a hat to make it fresh and new and exciting; what does the artist see and seek to change, to add to and evolve the piece?It seems to me that on reflection I was reaching the heart of the matter - I was looking in at the concept of fashion - I was imagining what other possibilities there are for which we can clothe our bodies - I could feel the energy behind artistic creation and realised for the first time that our bodies can be canvasses which we dress according to our tastes, to our individual style or mood - as if by arranging other people's artwork and designs on ourselves we were creating a novel artwork, that artwork being curated and displayed as we go about our daily business. And then it struck me - this is what the fashion people do. This is how they live. They do just this. They wear designer clothes and they walk around like artworks because they are, in a way artworks; they are on display.It was from this enlightened state – from this new angle – that I was the following day able to view the fashion people outside the MBFW tent smoking or not smoking as individual works of personal expression.by Luke Gaillet
