I’ve been at
this for over 10 years now and have been involved in fashion for a half of a century
and I believe I’ve learned a few things and a lot of it came rushing back to me
after this season’s presentation of Haute Couture and whatever season we seem
to be showing simultaneously so I thought I’d share them and see what you have
to say ….
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Haute couture
used to be the mad scientist’s laboratory of fashion. For so many years it
foreshadowed what was to come in a designer’s ready to wear collection or it
was just a way of translating fantasy into reality. This season, in particular,
given the most straining of circumstances, we have seen everything from fantasy
to horror to who cares. What complicates
matters on the grand scale is that what’s left of the fashion media rarely speaks of
the clothes themselves and instead writes about venue, models, inspirations
and all sorts of hidden esoteric reasons. We are offered some sort of presentation
that you are supposed to intuit by seeing the clothes. None of these extraneous
aspects mean squat if the clothes are not both beautiful and that is a highly
subjective opinion…. As the saying goes… beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
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The reality of
the fashion show cycle is to inspire, aspire and create a mood for a season
that will draw people out to actually purchase the clothes and hopefully in due
time wear them and have places to wear them to. Remember fashion is a business
of selling clothes unless you have a laundry list of contiguous products that render
the clothes unimportant to the bottom line. Couture this season went far afield
and opted for more shock and awe rather than exquisite clothes that make women
salivate and covet. In other words, all this peripheral crap that appears in
reviews doesn’t mean a damn. It is about clothes …plain and simple no matter what
the price, no matter what the designer.
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In these challenging
times, one might think that off the wall styling would take a back seat to the
clothes but instead it takes a starring role much to the detriment of the already
unappealing creations. No one speaks to that aspect as some of these looks have been done
2,3 or maybe 4 times by other designers in fashion’s history because no one has the knowledge of the past because in my opinion, it means that so many of these
collections are derivative or so highly referenced as to make them look like nothing
more than rehashed ideas of years gone by. Might I mention that so many reviewers
can only reference the last 20 minutes and certainly not the last 20 or 30
years.
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Those of us
enmeshed in fashion know that there is a vast difference in haute couture and
RTW and yet these days so much of what we see could carry the same distinction…. At least to
the naked eye as haute couture is a product of “invisible” ateliers and petits
mains with little machine work involved but nowadays it is hard to decipher the
difference and that might include price as well.
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Do I think
couture is dead … absolutely not, but I think that couture needs to be
repositioned back to where it once was as clothes for women of means and supposedly
women of the most refined and finest of taste and lest I forget the largest
wallets…the shock and awe should be emanating from clothes and artistry and not
from tricky styling, models, venues or background information and inspiration.
It should be coming from what you see gliding down a runway via some sort of presentation.
click image to enlarge No names but
here are some collections that have been lauded for no particular reasons other than for everything except the clothes! And very few for the actual creations themselves!
PS. As for these “feature films” that accompany
many of the collections they serve no purpose other than supposedly to see the
collection in motion which so many don’t even try to do and instead spin
some sort of tale that has nothing to do with the collection!
