Necking

Proenza Schouler Resort 2012, Proenza Schouler Spring/Summer 2011

Accessories are often the last items people put on but as book covers, some merely contain the contents and others say a thousand words about them. Proenza Schouler’s accessories, like patterns from a kaleidoscope, are examples of the paradox it takes twice the careful planning to come off random. For Resort 2012, Alex & Lee, Bay Area artisans, contrasted no frills hardware like cords and bronze clasps with precious stones like Brazilian stalactite. The earthy elements grounds it in folk art where jewels alone would be conspicuous consumption.

Even though the designers had access to everything off a Thomas Pynchon laundry list, their picks conjure a backstory they retraced the steps of a tribesman to use what their foraging would yield. Cords to copper holds everything together, championing the ethos make do with what you have. But since what Alex & Lee have are a lot of technical skills, their macramé knotting to tight wrapping  makes improvised materials look well thought out. The interplay of practical and pretty objects says I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty but I can still look good doing it.

Talent is timeless

Delvaux - Brillant MM

There are two types of art that stand out. There’s art that forges a new style to closely capture new prevailing moods. Then there’s art that transcends time because it reflects some aspect of nature - seeing it every day and everywhere, it forms our tastes. Fashion does trendy, timeless and everything in between. The problem is, while many artists from other genres set their own pace, designers are expected to churn out two full collections and a couple of smaller ones to bridge the gap every year. 

This Octomom fertility gives customers something new to buy every season. However since hundreds of pieces overwhelms the senses, our memories turn into reverse prisms and all the vibrant colors that flows through ends up converging together, into whiteness, nothingness. Instead, designers should reissue standout pieces and roll out new work when the inspiration hits. Varying their release dates, new clothes don’t all compete for attention at once. Maybe labels count on the sensory overload from summer/winter cycles though to give everyone cross eyes so they can’t read some of the jaw-dropping prices. 

Though there are still some heritage brands who focus on a range of classics, even they, like Delvaux, have started doing fashion shows and seasonal collections. Though some brands are monetizing their fashion shows by accepting orders for pieces as they appear, most model parades are still about playing up the image of the brand so aspirational buyers get high profit margin perfumes and key chains for a piece of the action. They fund the creative ventures. But fashion shows, even ones that garner a lot of converge, get lost. Many labels haven’t realized that when a platform is crowded, you don’t try harder to stand out, you move to another platform to stand relatively alone.

To branch out, labels could try interactive campaigns like the Art of Trench to retrospectives like Savage Beauty. Fashion has to realize that with function first items, we judge their usefulness so newer is better because microprocessors get faster, resolutions get crisper, etc. For form first items, we judge their effect on us. Since it’s less about the object and more about how our senses react to it, we don’t evolve that fast, even if the methods and materials to achieve visions sometimes do. So the great pieces that are great today remain great tomorrow.

Great leap forward

Guo Pei - Fall/Winter 2010/2011

China is known for clothes you wear one day, then salvage the scraps to keep your pet warm the next. So a Beijing couturier who regularly goes overbudget to chase her flights of fancy? Refreshing. Guo Pei makes the giant leap forward from proletarian drab garb to dresses  with elaborate beading and embroidery. Pei’s porcelain dress take its folds from origami and its proportions out of a house of mirrors.  From over-to-top to over everyone’s tops, the high heels of mid-sixteenth century Europe inspired Pei’s shoes. They make you thirty inches taller so others, having to look so far up, can’t make out your grimace. From footbinding to stilts, trying to make the few women in China easier to pursue?

Soaring heights also describe the new generation of Chinese artists who strive to one up their genre’s previous bests and China gives them the resources to pull it. Off. Migrant workers erected architectural wonders. Strict discipline synchronized thousands of performers. Cheaper craftsmen free money to put more details in clothes. While Chinese art is running ahead, people to appreciate it hasn’t caught up.

The wealth of China’s nouveau riche is still new enough they prefer designer names to show they could afford something everyone knows is expensive. However to support homegrown talent isn’t to care how much their wares cost but to recognize how much they’re truly worth. Eventually the Chinese will also grow out of their inferiority complex to realize their countrymen is capable of top notch craftsmanship too. Then Pei stands to receive more than lukewarm applause at the end of her fashion shows.

Prints, please

Cerruti - Spring/Summer 2011

High-tech digital printing has allowed fashion designers to go from creating art out of fabric to pasting art on it. While some prints interact with the angles and curves of the body, many others are standalone pieces that simply need to hang off something to keep it upright. However, the body is not a blank canvas. It’s a canvas that already comes with work whoever using it has to factor in. Yes wearing snazzy graphics help show off your personality and taste. However, if one cares to support the art of fashion, then it’s less about looking good however which way and more about achieving a knockout look while celebrating the uniqueness of the field.

In fashion, the relationship between fabric and body reigns supreme. As dresses from Cerruti expertly demonstrate, prints excel when they play up and down our features. Prints could also narrow a vision that has already been built up by pleats, shoulder pads or other tricks of the trade. Without prints, Lee McQueen’s otherworldly creatures from his Plato’s Atlantis collection would have had shape but no skin, revealing where they’re from but not what they are. The use of prints, as the star of the show or as the stage concepts and craftsmanship perform on, reflects the two expectations art at large has to find the sweet spot between: “Does it look good?” and “Is that enough”?

Deconstructing distressed

MTWTFSS Weekday - Fall/Winter 2010/11

Spurning signs of conspicuous consumption, distressed looks are increasingly preferred to spanking new getups. The less out of place an item would be at an archaeological dig, the more character it has. The allure of both ruins and modern architecture explain the trend of ripped jeans, shredded t-shirts and so on. The new shows how far we’ve come and the old reveals where we’ve been. Many labels have cashed in on the aesthetic, pulling apart and tearing up their wares to sell at prices that inflict the same on your wallet.

While fashion is about dress up and make-believe, destruction is sometimes beautiful because it appears in a context that lends it meaning. For clothes, tears and rips recall the time you caught your shirt jumping over a fence, dropped cigarette ash on it, etc. They look cool because they recall your accident, your history or someone else’s that has been passed on to you. When you wear a shirt with a rip in the armpit in the same spot as thousands of other people, you outsource a job that’s second nature for us: screwing shit up. MTWTFSS’s shirt is an example of distressed I do like, as it doesn’t pretend to have a story - its unraveling threads brag about holding a perfect pattern and doing double duty catching prey for spiders, nothing more to it.

Somarta

Junko Kimura - Spring/Summer 2009, Esteem PR Management - Skin + Bone Chair at Triennale Design Museum

Ever since Tamae Hirokawa launched the fashion label SOMARTA in 2006, she has used the latest in textile technology to create what macro lens capture, amazing details. Her skintight bodysuits allow the bold to go beyond expressing themselves through clothes that hang off their bodies, to wear something that takes the shape of it, making their bodies part of the message. While they’re provocative, Hirokawa’s lace doesn’t let what’s under it steal the show - its art that renders the skin its canvas. Differing from fashion designers who expanded their horizons sometime later to grow their brand, Hirokawa started working under SOMA DESIGN to apply her aesthetic to several crafts, from fashion to furniture design. It goes to show, in art, it’s less about knowing or doing something specific, more about sharing a story, and every discipline in the field, from theater to painting, is another language to tell it in.

Alain Quilici

Luisaviaroma, Public Image PR - Spring/Summer 2010

Drawing from Japanese anime and the tension between man and machine, Alain Quilici created his first shoe collection in 2007. For Spring 2010, Quilici attached architectural wedges to simple shoes, a relief from footwear sloppier than loaded plates in a buffet.  The cutouts in the first shoe recall tree trunks but cut and treated for human use. By resting the organic colored upper on a distinctly processed wedge, Quilici comments on how the natural and manmade rub shoulders. However, the wedges on the other shoes from Spring 2010, particularly on the oxford heels, are more gum stuck to the back than something that belongs. To be ahead of the curve, designers have to start off with something new, be it in the shape, materials and so on, rather than pile on top of what has already been done. Otherwise Quilici translates his unique vision into sculptural shoes you can show off on your feet, not just on a shelf.