What Is the Purpose of a Fashion Gimmick?
This morning I awoke with a question throbbing in my head: should fashion be stupid?
The experience that led me to this unexpected thought was the finale of Friday night's Coperni show, where, as you’ve no doubt seen all over Instagram, Bella Hadid walked onto a mirrored platform with her arm demurely across her breasts and wearing a pair of nude underwear. She was spray painted with a white substance, called Fabrican and invented almost two decades ago, by two bros in black. The material gelled within minutes into a rubbery white solid, forming a cocktail dress with straps that fell sweetly off the shoulder.
The internet has been in raptures over it ever since.
Several online observers have said the stunt called to mind the finale of Alexander McQueen's Spring 1999 show. In a similar set up, Shalom Harlow stood in the center of a box, wearing a strapless white dress that belted above the bust and slightly lower in the back and flared out like a skirt. She was then assaulted by two robot arms that pelted the dress with gray and green spray paint as she spun. I was too young to be at that show, but it's always read to me as a statement about McQueen's tortured creativity, the way that creation is violence inflicted upon the materials (and people) tasked with carrying out the vision. It is a beautiful image but it is also a brutal one. Other designers have done the idea of clothes coming into being on the runway with less darkness, like Hussein Chalayan’s robot dress and Martin Margiela, with his melting colored ice cubes. With those, there was wonder and delight. Coperni's effort was vaguely scientific.
But what was the big idea behind this spray-on sheath? I struggled to see or feel anything other than discomfort at Hadid bending her arms and legs to the whims of these two men and their canisters. Hadid certainly looked fabulous, and clearly sold the idea to many; the whole charade left me convinced of only one thing, which is that Bella Hadid is a true supermodel. The show notes said that the collection was dedicated “to all the women in the world.” Really? In that case, to me, the dress is a statement about how often women are gently manipulating themselves to accommodate the dumb ideas of men. The rest of the clothes were unremarkable: printed minidresses in an black grounded floral, hot pants and little jackets with shoulders pitched high, and, I'm not kidding, cargo pants with a tank top (there were four of those if you count one look that had a waistcoat instead of a tank, which is a look that, wouldn't ya know, Bella Hadid invented.) This was a gimmick, and nothing more.
For what it’s worth, I don't think fashion shouldn't be stupid; some of the best fashion is. (I'm thinking of the inflatable toys at Moschino this season, or Thom Browne’s cartoonish couture, both of which are completely delightful without demanding depth.) But one designer who is absolutely not on that journey is Jonathan Anderson, who is making extraordinarily clarified high-concept clothes. Everything is an experiment. What an impulse to be in the midst of your career, and thriving, and then to suddenly blow it all up. (I mean, just two years ago, he was making 1930s-ish eveningwear and basket tops.) Anderson said backstage after his show that he wanted to reduce everything—the show was almost un-styled: one or two garments and a balloon shoe, or super conceptual shield tops zipped under eerily normal knit hoodies. Each look plays with the idea of natural things that look fake. Hence the anthurium, that highly erotic, highly plastic looking flower that he sent out as the show invitation and enlarged in fiberglass as the show centerpiece.
The big deal with Anderson’s experimentation—which began a year ago in Paris with his bizarre Spring 2022 show, filled with weird Renaissance-meets-ninja looks and wackadoo sheath dresses that jutted out—is that he’s gone from emphasizing the hand in his clothes to emphasizing the mind. His clothes used to be all about texture, softness, craftiness. And now they are clothes about making clothes, about enlarging stuff, like balloons or flowers, or taking pretend versions of familiar clothes, and proclaiming they are real human clothes through very little manipulation. ARE these clothes? his designs often seem to ask, cheekily. His 18th century velvet gowns were distilled, essentialist versions of the ornate source material, with panniers reduced to something almost abstract. Meanwhile, his minidresses were cartoonish impersonations of minidresses, so short you could see the edge of models' butt cheeks, but they also felt somehow heavy, with an exaggerated corporeal weight. He sometimes seems to do very little transform objects into clothes. His balloon shoes, which he reprised from last season in a deflated form, are not “balloon-inspired,” tailored to your body, but painstakingly rendered to look exactly like balloons (the material is in fact solid and quite hard). Ditto his anthurium buds, which sit across the chest like sandwich boards. At one point, a woman in silky cargo shorts and shield top and a shearling jacket (that looked hilariously commercial in this context) appeared, then a few looks later seemed to appear again. Did she mess up? Was I hallucinating through my jetlag? In fact, the color palette was slightly different, and that sense of strange repetition, which is native to both nature and technology, is what Anderson wanted to play with. You might say these are gimmicks, too (especially his “digital blurry” hoodies and tees), but if they are, they are evocative and intellectually playful ones.
Nice to have some real fashion ideas to chew on, huh?
Another designer who knows a thing or two about repetition: Yohji Yamamoto. These shows remain a gorgeous experience. Thank God no one in the Yamamoto atelier has convinced this man that he has something to learn from, say, Instagram. The opening section of Yamamoto’s show was like a stand-up comedy routine with its riffs on the black jacket: what if a black jacket had two lapels and a knot? Now what if the knot were tied in the back? What if it were corseted instead of buttoned? What if the lapels multiplied and unfolded like petals? The endless variations that this master cutter creates are an elegant delight. Seeing them only from the front, as most digital runway observation demands, is like almost like reading the Netflix synopsis of a Wim Wenders movie. (Which is to say: unfulfilling, and missing several plot points!)
The finale of the show was nothing short of exquisite. Sprinkled among printed columns and slinky jackets over printed leggings were about ten handmade dresses, with asymmetric straps and bodices unfolding and almost pouring off the models’ bodies, or wrapped around their shoulders like graceful protective stuffing, the stomach revealed under a tusk of what appeared to be leather or open arabesques. “I wasn’t thinking about mass production,” Yamamoto joked backstage. Wow! Just as Rick Owens (who is a spiritual protegee of Yamamoto’s) had a few hip proclamations about how to be beautiful in a different way, stylists should also keep an eye on these monumentally cool and elusive dresses come awards season.
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