Time for a {fashion} revolution

Vanessa Friedman, It’s Time for a Fashion Revolution, NYTimes, Dec. 12, 2024:

This year will be a year of seismic change in fashion. That much is a given.

Or actually, it is a given that this will be a year of seismic change in fashion personnel. Starting this month, new designers at eight global brands, including Calvin Klein and Chanel, will be making their runway debuts. As they will at Bottega Veneta, Lanvin, Givenchy, Tom Ford, Alberta Ferretti and Dries Van Noten — with the possibility of more open spots being filled at Fendi, Maison Margiela, Helmut Lang and Carven in the coming months.

Sheesh! Whether that power shift will translate into seismic change in what we wear is a different question.

There has been much speculation as to the source of the turmoil. Much blame has focused on a slowdown in luxury spending (especially in China), as well as global political and economic uncertainty, which has led to a game of Blame the Designer (when in doubt, blame the designer), which led to Change the Designer.

There is a tendency, in such an environment, to play it safe. To fall back into the comfort of a camel coat and assume that what sold well in the past will sell well in the future. To focus on the commercial over the creative.

This would be a mistake.

It is time for a fashion revolution.

Later:

Fashion is essentially a story of what the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge called “punctuated equilibrium,” a theory positing that significant change comes in spurts that interrupt lengthy periods of stability or slow evolution. It’s how we got L.B.D.s, the New Look, pants, the possibilities of destruction.

Out of chaos came creativity. That’s where we are now: at a mass inflection point when the world order is in flux, social mores are shifting, the A.I. era is dawning and it’s not clear how everything will be resolved. The first quarter of the 21st century, with the ascent of streetwear and athleisure, is over. There is a hunger for the defining next.

Still later:

Thanks to our wildly connected world, the possibilities for one crazy idea of what it means to look modern, to alter the mass sense of self, are almost limitless.

Here’s hoping they seize the moment not to dutifully respect the so-called codes of the house — enough with the codes of the house — but to embrace the abstract ethos of their brands, not the literal shapes from the archives. Not to merely tweak the mold, but to break it and reinvent it. If outrage is the result that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s often an outrage when you see something that challenges your ideas of proper dress.

But it’s an outrage with a purpose. And if there is another lesson that history offers, it is that such outrage eventually pays off.