Should Clothes Stay or Should They Go?
Should Clothes Stay or Should They Go?
Designers will literally do anything but live in the moment.
Hi! This is actually the most fun I’ve had in a while writing a post, and until I sat down I had literally zero ideas to speak of, so let me be an example of the fact that going in completely blind and uninspired can, like two times out of 10, be a GREAT idea.
I’m now officially without an apartment of my own, staying with some kind friends, so NYC, Boston, and PDX please let me know if you hear talk of cheap housing. And stable jobs. I’m praying that the above method of blind scrabbling will also work out for me in these ways! Nervous!
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Neither are “trends”—they’re time-tested devices that have been used in the past half-century of fashion to differing effects—but the opposing impulses of trompe l’oeil and manufactured motion in clothing seem to have come to a uniquely frenetic head this season.
The former seems fed by a desire to compress time: to create a flattened simulacrum of a normally-more-voluminous garment reduces the time it takes to put an outfit together, not to mention to put the thing on:
Also bouncing around in my head is some harebrained idea of spacetime—to traverse the volume of a 3D button and the fabric it fastens as a proverbial (and totally unscientific) atom would theoretically take longer than slipping through a single stitch.
The latter does the opposite, padding keyframe moments out into sculptural garments that objectify and extend the motion, typically forward, of the wearer by stiffening pieces into the shapes they’d usually only make when wind-swept with vigor (Jonathan Anderson uses both techniques in both Loewe and JW Anderson, now more than ever—I hope I’m wrong, but he does give off the vibe of being constantly torn asunder by a duality of psychic whims. It gives us perfect clothes but I hope he’s happy, too):
Both devices feel like they’re trying to escape the immanence of any given instant, either by zipping past it or initiating a freeze-frame, and the easiest explanation for this, I suppose, is that it hurts to live—I mean:
