Has it ever seemed clearer that fashion is not about clothes? Has it ever appeared more inevitable that the cult of the designer is slated for the cultural slag heap, there to join all those other monuments to the outmoded notion of the grand career (retrospective albums, DVD collections, the Great Novel)?
Fashion, like an awful lot of other stuff in the culture, is cracking apart before one's eyes. You're doomed if you try to see the field as some powerful system run by chic sadists ("Bore someone else with your questions," said Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, snapping at her simpering minion in the weary tone of a burned-out dominatrix).
Fashion doesn't come just from the runway anymore, if it ever really did. And it doesn't come from Project Runway either. Rather, it seems to happen spontaneously and then spread like some mostly benign contagion, a germ carried in the air and contracted in this store, that magazine, this corner of the city and in ways that fashion bibles rarely bother to note.
Trends emerge, apparently from nowhere: They are fashion. This process can be intoxicating to watch. Suddenly young people in rock bands like the Decemberists and My Morning Jacket begin dressing as if playing a rock club was no different from running copies behind a counter at Kinko's. In place of stage costumes, they favor cheap sweater vests and no-brand thrift shop jeans. They make such a success of looking frumpy that their frumpiness develops into a style despite itself.
How can one tell? Well, already last season in Paris, Sarah Lerfel, a farsighted owner of the celebrated boutique Colette, was talking about a trend that sounded a lot like the Return of Grunge.
Fashion in that sense is a Mobius strip, a flexible circuit, both variable and closed. Designers shine one season on the face side of the loop, the arc turns and suddenly you can't see them anymore. A year ago the name of Roland Mouret was on everyone's lips. The hobbled skirts and elevator stilettos he promoted in the fall of 2005 were greeted by some as precisely the antidote to a sartorial landscape grown neutral and drab.
It was meant to happen in a big way for Mouret. The fix was in at Vogue. And then well nothing. A couple of movie people were spotted wobbling down that purgatorial road to nowhere, the red carpet, in his creations. Yet the predicted breakout did not take place; the gyre turned and Mouret faded away. Until late this November, when, with hardly any fanfare, there he was again, proudly adorning the racks at the Gap. The Gap?
"I was interested in the opportunity to make my designs available to a broader audience," the designer said, after a small capsule collection of his was shipped to select local Gap stores.
Was Mouret selling out? He was not. He was just doing what every designer from Stella McCartney to Karl Lagerfeld to Vera Wang has recently done, buying his ticket to board the mass-market gravy train. As it happens, this is a fine thing that has happened to fashion, since the democratization of design is a value that has been trumpeted by every theoretician of the applied arts since the Bauhaus.
It is thrilling somehow to see visual ideas first created to be pitched to the rarefied tastes of a group of mandarins leak out to the broader population. It is a pleasure to realize that our tastes, after all, are not formed at the whim of some underfed dictators of editorial chic. And there is a lot of fun to be had in tracking the serendipitous way that cultures, both high and low, unexpectedly collide.
RSS