The End of Fashion

Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization

Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas, Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350045064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Attitudes to fashion have changed radically in the twenty-first century. Dress is increasingly approached as a means of self-expression, rather than as a signifier of status or profession, and designers are increasingly treated as 'artists', as fashion moves towards art and enters the gallery, museum, and retail space. This book is the first to fully explore the causes and implications of this shift, examining the impact of technological innovation, globalization, and the growth of the internet. The End of Fashion focuses on the ways in which our understanding of fashion and the fashion system have transformed as mass mediation and digitization continue to broaden the way that contemporary fashion is perceived and consumed. Exploring everything from the rise of online shopping to the emergence of bloggers as power elites who have revolutionized the terrain of traditional fashion reportage, this volume anatomizes a world in which runway shows now compete with live-streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram, and Pinterest. Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in exploring the dramatic shifts that have shaken the fashion world this century – and what they might say about larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society.

1

FASHION FUTURES

Valerie Steele

“The End of Fashion” is a phrase, it seems to me, with at least three possible implications. First, it could be an imperative: “End fashion!” Second, it could be a statement of fact: “Fashion has ended.” Third, it could be a warning: “Fashion is about to end.” The discourse surrounding the “end” of fashion also calls to mind debates about the end of, say, art, religion, or printed books. Announcements of their demise have proved to be premature, and the same may be true of fashion. Nevertheless, it is striking that fashion has attracted such hostility or, at least, ambivalence. Anti-fashion sentiment has a long history, composed of a number of different critiques. The idea that fashion is “vanity” and a source of immorality goes back to the dawn of Christianity. By the nineteenth century, when industrialization made it possible for many more people to follow fashion, a variety of groups emerged that positioned themselves “against fashion,” including both dress reformers and advocates of “clothing as art.” Dress reformers, some of whom were feminists, argued that fashion was a tyrant and women its victims. Fashion was also criticized from a utilitarian point of view as a waste of time and money. For aesthetes, on the other hand, contemporary fashion was ugly. As Oscar Wilde quipped, fashion was “a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”¹ For leftists, fashion was and remains “capitalism’s favorite child.” Tansy E. Hoskins’s Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (2014) is an example of activist discourse on fashion as an exploitative, racist, sexist industry, which supports hierarchical distinctions in society, promotes the beauty myth, and destroys the planet. Many of her criticisms of the capitalist fashion system are widely shared, and her book, as a whole, is a call to end fashion, although she does propose a vague, utopian vision of revolutionary, “post-capitalist” fashion, reassuring readers that they will not be forced to wear uniforms like people during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.²

Barbara Vinken’s Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (English translation, 2005) exemplifies the statement that fashion has ended. A German scholar, Vinken argues that “the century of fashion is over: the very idea of Paris fashion is at an end—even an anti-fashion could not save it.”³ According to Vinken, the modern fashion system developed in the 1860s with the rise of the haute couture in Paris, and ended about a century later, when fashion no longer filtered downward from the elite, but rather moved up from street and subcultural styles. Although prestigious designers quickly appropriated such demotic styles, this was not enough to maintain the fashion system as it had long existed. Vinken goes on to argue, however, that after a century of fashion, there came something she called “fashion after Fashion” or “postfashion.” In a series of chapters, she analyzes its various typologies, from Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, with the transformation of the griffe, to Martin Margiela, whose work was characterized by the registrations of time. Whereas fashion had previously rejected the démodé in favor of a ceaseless search for the new, postfashion incorporates the old into a new process of time. Vinken’s approach to fashion was similar in some ways to that of certain art critics, who discussed the status of art after “the end of art,” a discourse which was related to critical theory about “postmodernism.”

Teri Agins’s book The End of Fashion, published in 1999, is perhaps the most famous example in recent years of a warning that fashion is in danger of ending. An experienced fashion journalist, specializing in the business of fashion, Agins observes some ominous long-term trends, which could be summarized as “nobody’s dressing up and everybody loves a bargain.” The demise of Christian Lacroix’s couture house and the growing importance of mass-marketing and brand image seemed to provide evidence that the fashion system, especially the subset of high fashion, was entering a difficult economic period. For many consumers, Agins warned, designer fashion had begun to seem like a “rip-off.”⁴ I spoke with Agins in 2017, almost twenty years after she published The End of Fashion. “I deliberately chose a provocative title,” Agins recalled. “The publishers didn’t like it. They thought it was too negative. Back then people kept saying ‘Oh, fashion will come back.’ Now people tell me, ‘Your book was ahead of its time.’ A big game changer was the disappearance of dress codes. A whole generation saw the captains of Silicon Valley wearing T-shirts and sneakers—and these are their role models.”

A $700 iPhone is most people’s clothing budget for two years, continued Agins. “The phone is indispensable. New clothes are not. Of course, people still want trendy stuff, they just want to get it cheaply. Already in the 1990s, Target’s slogan was ‘It’s fashionable to pay less.’ This is capitalism. Some people will still make money. I didn’t anticipate on-line shopping in 1996. There is an emerging middle-class in Asia, and there is also white space in plus-size clothes. But the mystique of fashion is gone.”⁵

In 2015, the eminent trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort published her Anti-Fashion Manifesto, proclaiming that “fashion is obsolete” and has become “a ridiculous and pathetic parody” of itself. According to Edelkoort, “Marketing … killed the whole thing … It’s governed by greed and not by vision.” In interviews, she reiterated: “This is the end of fashion as we know it.”⁶ The last clause is the key, because she also suggested, counter-intuitively, that couture, the most exclusive and expensive component of fashion, will be coming back, along with an emphasis on clothing rather than “fashion.”

In contrast to Agins’s business-oriented analysis of problems in the contemporary fashion system, Vinkens’s theoretical analysis of historical changes in fashion, and Hoskins’s activist analysis of injustices in the fashion industry, Eidelkoort’s Anti-Fashion Manifesto is a hybrid of warning, statement, and call to action. Fashion is simultaneously described as dying, dead, and about to be resurrected in a new form. It is a bit like the medieval philosophy of the King’s two bodies, whereby the court announces: “The King is dead! Long live the King!” Eidelkoort’s manifesto has been greeted with considerable enthusiasm within academia, more in the liberal arts than in fashion design, however. Members of the fashion industry have been respectful, but there is also considerable disagreement with her analysis and proposed improvements to the fashion system.

Any discussion of the “end” of fashion also inevitably evokes the idea of the “beginning” of fashion—and, indeed, the definition of “fashion” itself. While the majority of dress historians tend to believe that fashion began in fourteenth-century Europe, as part of the gradual rise of capitalism, there are also scholars who identify the beginning of fashion with nineteenth-century modernity, as well as those who focus on the eighteenth-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the consumer economy. In addition, there has recently been a movement toward looking globally at the rise of fashion, with special attention paid to eleventh-century Japan and to the T’ang, M’ing, and Q’ing dynasties in China.

These differences of opinion are obviously directly related to differing definitions of “fashion,” as opposed to “dress” or “costume.” Although fashion is often defined as a regular pattern of style change, there is little agreement about the required rate and degree of change, and whether fashion necessarily involves changes in silhouette, as opposed to, say, color or decoration. Another unresolved question is to what extent it matters if changing styles of dress are restricted to members of a tiny elite. Fashion in Heian Japan, if we can call it fashion, was restricted to members of the court, as, indeed, it mostly was in fourteenth-century Burgundy.

As an historian, I am inclined to think that fashion did not “begin” abruptly in one time and place, but rather gradually developed in different places, following different trajectories. Similarly, rather than trying to identify the “end” of fashion, or the rise of “postfashion,” it seems more useful to think in terms of changes within an evolving fashion system.

In this chapter, I will look at how fashion “as we know it” has changed and where it may be going. I will make no attempt to go back to the “origin” of fashion, focusing instead on the past few centuries. My own research indicates that ever since the late seventeenth century, Paris was the center of fashion in the Western world, setting new styles that were adopted in many other countries. Significant changes in the fashion industry began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the rise of the grande couture (now called the haute couture). At the same time, developments in mass production, together with a retail revolution and inventions such as the paper pattern and the sewing machine, led to fashion becoming a genuinely popular phenomenon. For approximately 100 years—from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century—Parisian haute couture was at the pinnacle of the Western fashion system, and couturiers were widely regarded as “dictators” or “geniuses” (although this was always a misleading stereotype). When Dior launched his 1947 New Look, it was copied throughout much of the world, including Japan. Increasingly, most people thought of fashion as a phenomenon relating to women’s clothing. Men’s clothing appeared to follow a different trajectory, changing much more slowly. However, the fashion system changed dramatically in the subsequent decades. No longer can a single designer like Dior create a collection that women everywhere adopt. Already by the 1960s, the empire of fashion had begun to break up into multiple style tribes. Some women wore Chanel couture suits (which cost about $500) and others wore licensed copies (which cost about $25), others wore youth styles by English designers like Mary Quant or futuristic fashions by designers like Pierre Cardin and Andre Courrèges. Young men also increasingly adopted new styles of their own, which were collectively characterized as “the Peacock Revolution.”

Increasingly, Paris was challenged by new fashion cities, such as London, Milan, and New York. Haute couture diminished in influence, as designer ready-to-wear, youth styles, and sports clothes emerged as vital components of the fashion system. London, in particular, spawned new youth styles, from Mod to punk, which embraced menswear as much if not more than womenswear. The young British people who identified as Mods were often working class. They were not anti-fashion. Indeed, they were extremely interested in fashion—as long as it was their fashion. “The original Mods had their clothes made, hunting down tailors and shoe-makers prepared to bend to their fantasies or, if they did admit something mass-produced they either modified it, took it out of context or insisted on certain stringent qualifications—their jeans, for instance, had to be American.”⁷ Gradually, designers emerged to cater to the new market. As the self-taught designer Mary Quant put it, “To me, adult appearance was very unattractive …. I had always wanted the young to have a fashion of their own.”⁸ Many London boutiques, such as Quant’s Bazaar, Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba, and John Stephen’s eponymous menswear shops, accommodated young people’s tastes for “modern” styles associated with popular culture and music. Miniskirts and tights for young women and brightly colored trousers and shirts for men were among the most important new styles, which soon spread from London around the world. Eventually, the new styles took root in the Paris system, becoming transformed into more stylized futuristic looks.⁹

As the Mods gave way to the hippies in the late 1960s, attitudes toward fashion changed radically, as the hippies proclaimed themselves to be adamantly anti-fashion. Positioning themselves as anti-conformity, anti-consumption, and anti-hierarchy, they rejected the changing styles promoted by the fashion industry. The long ago (Victorian petticoats found in thrift stores) and the far away (Chinese workers’ jackets) provided inspiration for individualized ensembles. Anti-war sentiment was ironically expressed through the wearing of cheap and tough garments from army and navy surplus stores. But hippy style was epitomized above all by blue jeans.

A book published in New York in 1970, The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution is Trying to Make America Livable, explained the new “consciousness” among young people, whose first “commandment is: to be true to oneself.” As the author, Charles Reich, explained: “A good place to begin is clothes, for the dress of the new generation expresses a number of the major themes of Consciousness III in a very vivid and immediate way. The first impression the clothes give is of uniformity and conformity—as if everyone felt obliged to adopt the same style.” But this was “an erroneous impression.” “[T]here is agreement on certain principles, but great individuality within these principles.” Young people, Reich explained, favored “inexpensive clothes,” because they believed that “neither individuality nor distinction can be bought in a clothing store.” They wore “earthy, sensual” clothes, such as blue jeans, which give the wearer “freedom to do anything he wants,” in a “deliberate rejection of the neon colors and plastic, artificial look of the affluent society” and the socially mandated need to “dress up.” Young people’s clothes might look uniform, but they are not, because “they are extremely expressive of the human body, and each body is different and unique.” Whereas “men’s suits really are uniform, … jeans make one conscious of the body.”¹⁰

Formerly a working-class man’s garment, blue jeans were now adopted by young men and women of the middle class. While ceasing to be vernacular workwear, jeans also seemed to be outside of the fashion system, and therefore “authentic,” especially when hand-embroidered, or otherwise individualized (Plate 1). “The new clothes express profoundly democratic values. There are no distinctions of wealth or status; people confront one another shorn of these distinctions.”¹¹ In fact, of course, jeans were rapidly incorporated into an evolving fashion system. Manufacturers machine-embroidered and otherwise embellished jeans, and new brands appeared. Jeans became fashion.

The punk subculture notoriously rejected hippy love and peace in favor of sex and anarchy, but they inherited at least some of the hippies’ sentiments against fashion. They refused to accept social rules governing appropriate dress and behavior, and they were uninterested in following trends set by the fashion industry. However, they were very interested in creating their own transgressive styles. Because their styles were often deliberately shocking, punk was initially rejected with horror by a fashion industry that had easily assimilated mod and hippy styles. Punk would therefore appear to be the poster child of anti-fashion. Yet almost immediately, creative entrepreneurs began to cater to the new punk subculture, and remarkably rapidly punk style infiltrated the fashion system.

Vivienne Westwood became the first and most important punk fashion designer. She and Malcolm McClaren began designing and selling clothes in the early 1970s, frequently renaming their store as their styles changed. McClaren also promoted punk bands like the Sex Pistols. Punk also became a part of the fashion system when designers such as Zandra Rhodes and later Gianni Versace created garments that visually referenced punk tropes, such as safety pins and rips. Indeed, virtually all street and/or subcultural styles, no matter how outré, have proved relatively easy to assimilate into the fashion system. Every few years, high-fashion designers and fashion stylists resurrect elements of past styles. Although members of the various subcultures often complain about the loss of “authenticity” that results from the incorporation of subcultural styles, this has no effect on the process of fashionization.

Avant-garde Japanese designers, such as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, had a huge affect on international fashion, beginning in the mid-1980s. Many people today believe that the “Japanese fashion revolution” was the last really significant challenge to the fashion system. Yet although they helped “brand” Japan as a fashion-forward country, once they had begun to be successful, avant-garde Japanese designers almost always moved their runway shows from Tokyo to Paris. Indeed, instead of competing with Paris, Japanese designers confirmed Paris as the world capital of fashion. More significantly, many of the design innovations pioneered by the Japanese avant-garde, such as the use of frayed edges, were also incorporated into both high fashion and mass fashion. Essentially the same thing happened with avant-garde designers from Belgium, such as Martin ...