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FASHION FUTURES
Valerie Steele
âThe End of Fashionâ is a phrase, it seems to me, with at least three possible implications. First, it could be an imperative: âEnd fashion!â Second, it could be a statement of fact: âFashion has ended.â Third, it could be a warning: âFashion is about to end.â The discourse surrounding the âendâ 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 âvanityâ 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 âagainst fashion,â including both dress reformers and advocates of âclothing as art.â 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 âa form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.â1 For leftists, fashion was and remains âcapitalismâs favorite child.â Tansy E. Hoskinsâs 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, âpost-capitalistâ fashion, reassuring readers that they will not be forced to wear uniforms like people during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.2
Barbara Vinkenâs 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 âthe century of fashion is over: the very idea of Paris fashion is at an endâeven an anti-fashion could not save it.â3 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 âfashion after Fashionâ or âpostfashion.â 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 dĂ©modĂ© in favor of a ceaseless search for the new, postfashion incorporates the old into a new process of time. Vinkenâs approach to fashion was similar in some ways to that of certain art critics, who discussed the status of art after âthe end of art,â a discourse which was related to critical theory about âpostmodernism.â
Teri Aginsâs 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 ânobodyâs dressing up and everybody loves a bargain.â The demise of Christian Lacroixâs 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 ârip-off.â4 I spoke with Agins in 2017, almost twenty years after she published The End of Fashion. âI deliberately chose a provocative title,â Agins recalled. âThe publishers didnât like it. They thought it was too negative. Back then people kept saying âOh, fashion will come back.â Now people tell me, âYour book was ahead of its time.â A big game changer was the disappearance of dress codes. A whole generation saw the captains of Silicon Valley wearing T-shirts and sneakersâand these are their role models.â
A $700 iPhone is most peopleâs clothing budget for two years, continued Agins. âThe 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, Targetâs slogan was âItâs fashionable to pay less.â This is capitalism. Some people will still make money. I didnât 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.â5
In 2015, the eminent trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort published her Anti-Fashion Manifesto, proclaiming that âfashion is obsoleteâ and has become âa ridiculous and pathetic parodyâ of itself. According to Edelkoort, âMarketing ⊠killed the whole thing ⊠Itâs governed by greed and not by vision.â In interviews, she reiterated: âThis is the end of fashion as we know it.â6 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 âfashion.â
In contrast to Aginsâs business-oriented analysis of problems in the contemporary fashion system, Vinkensâs theoretical analysis of historical changes in fashion, and Hoskinsâs activist analysis of injustices in the fashion industry, Eidelkoortâs 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 Kingâs two bodies, whereby the court announces: âThe King is dead! Long live the King!â Eidelkoortâs 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 âendâ of fashion also inevitably evokes the idea of the âbeginningâ of fashionâand, indeed, the definition of âfashionâ 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 Tâang, Mâing, and Qâing dynasties in China.
These differences of opinion are obviously directly related to differing definitions of âfashion,â as opposed to âdressâ or âcostume.â 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 âbeginâ abruptly in one time and place, but rather gradually developed in different places, following different trajectories. Similarly, rather than trying to identify the âendâ of fashion, or the rise of âpostfashion,â it seems more useful to think in terms of changes within an evolving fashion system.
In this chapter, I will look at how fashion âas we know itâ has changed and where it may be going. I will make no attempt to go back to the âoriginâ 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 yearsâfrom the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth centuryâParisian haute couture was at the pinnacle of the Western fashion system, and couturiers were widely regarded as âdictatorsâ or âgeniusesâ (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 womenâs clothing. Menâs 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 CourrĂšges. Young men also increasingly adopted new styles of their own, which were collectively characterized as âthe Peacock Revolution.â
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 fashionâas long as it was their fashion. âThe 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 qualificationsâtheir jeans, for instance, had to be American.â7 Gradually, designers emerged to cater to the new market. As the self-taught designer Mary Quant put it, âTo me, adult appearance was very unattractive âŠ. I had always wanted the young to have a fashion of their own.â8 Many London boutiques, such as Quantâs Bazaar, Barbara Hulanickiâs Biba, and John Stephenâs eponymous menswear shops, accommodated young peopleâs tastes for âmodernâ 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 workersâ 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 âconsciousnessâ among young people, whose first âcommandment is: to be true to oneself.â As the author, Charles Reich, explained: âA 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 conformityâas if everyone felt obliged to adopt the same style.â But this was âan erroneous impression.â â[T]here is agreement on certain principles, but great individuality within these principles.â Young people, Reich explained, favored âinexpensive clothes,â because they believed that âneither individuality nor distinction can be bought in a clothing store.â They wore âearthy, sensualâ clothes, such as blue jeans, which give the wearer âfreedom to do anything he wants,â in a âdeliberate rejection of the neon colors and plastic, artificial look of the affluent societyâ and the socially mandated need to âdress up.â Young peopleâs clothes might look uniform, but they are not, because âthey are extremely expressive of the human body, and each body is different and unique.â Whereas âmenâs suits really are uniform, ⊠jeans make one conscious of the body.â10
Formerly a working-class manâs 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 âauthentic,â especially when hand-embroidered, or otherwise individualized (Plate 1). âThe new clothes express profoundly democratic values. There are no distinctions of wealth or status; people confront one another shorn of these distinctions.â11 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 hippiesâ 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 outrĂ©, 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 âauthenticityâ 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 âJapanese fashion revolutionâ was the last really significant challenge to the fashion system. Yet although they helped âbrandâ 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 ...