At the showing of Dior’s autumn/winter 2017 collection, seemingly out of nowhere, an iconic print which hadn’t been seen for 20 or 30 odd years showed up on the catwalk. People in the know took one look at that navy blue pattern coupled with gold accents and made a quick dive towards the vintage market.
The pieces there cost a fraction of the price but were almost indistinguishable from what was being shown at the hallowed house’s défilé. For autumn 2018, the good people at Dior decided they didn’t even need to dip so far back into their archives and beautifully, albeit lazily, reissued the saddle bag that every it-girl from here to Timbuktu had in her closet through the first part of the noughties.
At this point, I was still on board, but after Gucci decided to bring back from the dead an old model and just slap a new name on it, the question really had to be asked: does the fashion industry even care about being creative and innovative anymore?
It’s time for us all to reflect on what we are putting on our bodies and buying into instead of buying blindly day in day out
In the past, you were able to define fashion by decade and looks belonged to a particular era but now, in a kind of everything goes, laissez-faire orgy, clothes are being churned out every season willy-nilly lacking in both sparkle as well as substance.
In a recent Dolce & Gabbana show I saw, everyone looked like they had just left the church fête or were prime contenders for RuPaul’s Drag Race and while I am a heavy proponent of more is more, there is such a thing as pushing the envelope so far it actually falls into the abyss. There was nothing different, nothing new: there was just too much of the same and to be honest, they are far from being the only ones.
In the same way that literature and art got to a point where creators felt that all the stories that could be told had been told, maybe we have reached that point in fashion too. Maybe it’s a time for us all to reflect on what we are putting on our bodies and buying into instead of buying blindly day in day out. Maybe it’s time for us to try to be more creative and inspired with how we put things together instead of just following the status quo and dressing like our favourite Instagram models. The lazier we ourselves become, the lazier designers get because they know that they don’t have to make an effort to sell. Maybe instead of mindlessly consuming, we should be questioning everything. If we at least start asking the right questions, maybe eventually we will have some answers.