Is Fashion Worthwhile?

IS FASHION WORTHWHILE? FASHION AS ART: As someone with an interest in fashion sometimes when people just laugh at the absurdity of it all, I tend to take it a little personally. Itʼs like laughing at someoneʼs favourite song or film, if it means a lot to them surely that should be respected? And in my view a couture Givenchy dress made of lace, tulle and luminous feathers deserves the upmost respect.

So why do people find it so easy to discount fashion as a worthwhile endeavour? In the words of Anna Wintour, “I think what I often see is that people are frightened about fashion. Because it scared them or makes them feel insecure they just put it down. On the whole people that may say mean things about our world…feel in some ways, excluded or, you know, not part of ʻthe cool groupʼ so as a result they just mock it.” Perhaps it is a feeling of exclusion. But that doesnʼt completely explain how someone like uhr, Ms Wintour and me feel the same when weʼre more than a few worlds apart. So maybe itʼs more a case of misunderstanding.

Fashion has been blamed for many things over the years; the rise in anorexia, unruly youth and frivolity, for example. But for every person who looks in a fashion magazine and sees a skinny girl and wants to emulate that, I bet thereʼs at least ten who notice the clothes, the set or the photography. Thatʼs what makes fashion worth all the nonsense and the sometimes questionable motives in the end: the art.

We need look no further than our museums and art galleries to see how valued fashion is as a creative art form. Alexander McQueenʼs retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York brought crowds of over half a million visitors. On a personal note Hussein Chalayanʼs show at Lʼart Decrotifs Museum in Paris fulfilled a long ambition of seeing his ever innovative and creative pieces up close. And right now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London you can see clothes by Vivienne Westwood and Cinzia Ruggeri next to art by Andy Warhol and Martine Bedin in the Postmodernism exhibition.

They are thought of as equals and portrayed on the same artistic merit.

It is, however, on the street where you find what I think is the biggest misunderstanding of why fashion is worthy. People are under the misapprehension that what they buy on the high street is fashion in the same way as what you see in New York, Paris, London and Milan is fashion.

Granted you can create a great personal style from the varied and wellinformed shops we have on the high street here in the UK and around the world. Though it is important to remember that just because Topshop has produced a plausible knock off of the latest Miu Miu print doesnʼt mean that it has the same kudos.

What I really mean is that whist fashion should be for the masses, the masses should also be well informed about where the chains designers get their ʻinspirationʼ. Because, the truth is that every time someone wears a piece of clothing without knowing it, then they are, in effect, diluting the meaning of the original piece. With a piece of art, there is a way of selling cheaper mass produced versions of pieces without devaluing the original. Banksy for example sells prints, cards, badges etc printed with his artwork and yet people also pay millions for the original. Thatʼs because each and every use of his work is credited to him. In fashion there is no comparison. The ʻprintsʼ or stolen designs have the original designers name nowhere in sight.

So how have the fashion world responded to this? What fashion does best: retreated into fantasy. The last few seasons have seen the fun ramped up to the max after they seemed a little lost in an industry so readily plagiarized.

Weʼve had fruit prints, cars and panthers from big names like Givenchy and Prada, truly showing that fun and fantasy is something you canʼt buy off a hanger in Primark.

On the other side of things Pheobe Philo at Celine has redefined the quality that was always there to justify the price but had been forgotten in a throw away culture. The fact is you cannot get a pair of trousers or a blazer cut to that quality, in those fabrics for less than they charge. It marked the differences between them both and now we find ourselves in a place where both high street fashion and high fashion have marked their territory and done better out of it.

We now see big chains collaborating with designers where before they may have been shunned. There is better quality in house design with the example of ASOS where their own lines have a niche all of their own, not fast fashion and not carbon copies either. The high street knows now that it is there for trends, it tells people what to wear so that they buy it and the fashion industry has got back to some truly stunning innovation. Fashion is worthwhile because it keeps us dreaming, itʼs an escape, itʼs beautiful and most importantly it can make you smile.

FASHION AS CRAFT: Whatʼs going to happen to Haute Couture when all the little old ladies in Parisian Ateliers die? If we donʼt encourage the young aspiring designers to be seamstresses too, how can we continue the beauty of their craft? On the catwalk of Diorʼs Autumn/Winter 2011 show history was made when instead of the designer emerging at the end to take his credit, the design team did instead. Now, partly ignoring the massive misgivings that took place for this to happen lets discuss what this actually showed about fashion.

At the beginning of the same show, the brands President Sidney Toledano came onto the catwalk and talked about “The heart of the House of Dior, which beats unseen, is made up of its teams and studios, of its seamstresses and craftsmen”. When they came out onto the catwalk themselves they were dressed in white coats, a hint perhaps to the mystique and artistry behind couture garments that creates a sort of magic at the heart of fashion. It also, of course, means a brand can create an identity to sell things like make up and handbags.

The painstaking work that goes into producing up to ten shows a year may fall heavily on the shoulders of the designer. The tales that emerged after McQueenʼs death or Gallianoʼs fall from grace about not sleeping, medicating to cope and being stuck in a spiral of pressure to create the next biggest thing. However it only goes to shoe, perhaps more so, how these delicate fragile types need someone propping them up. Or sometimes even a whole team of people, just to get the stuff on the runway at all.

The sheer work that goes into a fashion show, that really you only appreciate close up to the clothes, in astounding. I remember a particular story of a designer having their team create a collection in colour, before photographing them in black and white and then making them again in the exact shades of grey as the photos. Now to someone who may think fashion a pointless endeavour anyway Iʼm sure that sounds extremely pointless. But to the discerning fashion enthusiast among us they would point to the depths of the monochrome and also perhaps the positive light it throws onto the brand as something not just churning out mass produced, highly priced garments.

That is, of course, the other question to ask when talking about the craftsmanship and work behind the scenes in fashion. When we read about stories of great artistry thereʼs an element of being drip-fed what we want to hear. I probably seek out the extraordinary geeky facts about how something has been made because I love the idea of something actually being made, by someone rather than a machine.

In essence the “little hands” are there to work away in the background so that the beauty of the clothes themselves can shine brighter. When the majority of us mere mortals see a Givenchy couture dress on a computer screen or in a magazine you know itʼs beautiful. But you canʼt see that the lace and jewels

are treated with formaldehyde so that over the wearers lifetime, layers of lace will disintegrate away, revealing the intricate beading placed beneath. Now, to me that idea and that attention to detail is absolutely breathtaking.

In art, people like Damien Hirst come under fire for using teams of people to make his pieces. There is something of a taboo if you admit that as well as coming from your head and your soul, it was not your hand that made it. In fashion though, there is such a fluidity and exchange of ideas that means it has long had issues of authorship that go largely unaddressed. The fact that Jil Sander can no longer produce garments under her own name, for one example, sounds completely absurd.

Perhaps itʼs the tradition of borrowing ideas that led to this. If you can always pinpoint a designerʼs true influence to things in the past, then does it become something that wasnʼt truly their idea? Well, no. The level of craftsmanship we have nowadays, the advancement of technology means thereʼs always a new twist to be added. Just look at Christopher Kaneʼs fall 2010 collection. Inspired by traditional crochet and childhood memories alongside gel filled plastic that was something no one had seen done in that way before.

Another example, is when in 2010 backstage after a show that Sarah Burton had executed for the first time without itʼs namesake, Alexander McQueen, she thanked the team around her first and foremost. The collection saw one particularly beautiful dress that had first been made of pottery, then broken and individually drilled and then sewn back onto a dress by the atelier. It was more than just a metaphor of the terrible tragedy that had just occurred, it was also a sign of how the brand was to carry forward under new leadership. But, of course, with the backbone still in place.

There are, Iʼm sure, thousands of stories just like these. Thereʼs one for every designer, every show, every piece, and yet most of them weʼll never hear about. Most of them will remain in the ateliers and design houses of big name designers. We must though when we pour over, like and reblog our favourite designers pieces, thing about the craftsmanship of each piece that we donʼt necessarily hear about.

At the moment, every other fashion student wants to be a designer and we have thousands of art universities and collages that cater to that. But where are we teaching the next lace makers or pattern cutters, or seamstresses?

Not only do these skills make better designers, but teaching them to the new generation of fashion enthusiasts is key to continuing the wonderful tradition and artistry that goes into high fashion.