Absurdity in fashion: are we in a denial or just playing childish? Wednesday news
Today is the 4th of May, 2022. Let’s talk about the latest fashion news, a trend that goes far beyond surrealism, and yesterday’s visuals.
I want to apologise for 2 days of silence. I needed one day to travel from Moscow to Lucca, and one to get into the mental shape adapting from one form of lost freedom to another one, more private but nevertheless the same hurting as its general variation. And I find out that only one thing helps me to find peace with myself when my mind and my whole existence refuse to make any sense of reality. It’s denial.
I deliberately turn off my critical thinking and just catch whatever is good and nice in my life, the tiniest pieces. Then play around like a child. Naive until someone won’t remind me about the world. I stop reading news, following agenda, and let go of my own business, because I simply can’t deal with it until I fix my tolerance and am able to fight back. Why do I write about it and what is there about fashion?
Have you thought about the enormous amount of weird designs that we see lately. They don’t look anyhow sophisticated, and they passed the mark “art” being wearable and adapted for mass production, if needed to. It goes to the styling more than to the actual design sometimes.
Re Edition Magazine Spring Summer 2022 photographed by Ola Rindal @olarindal Styled by Marie Chaix
The accessories are invented in the air - shoes dropped into collants and collants worn like shawls, or different objects squeezed in the transparent upper layer of the dresses to form distortions that can be reversed easily unlike Rei Kawakubo’s sculptural designs. Everything is about the play. Not about practical transformation from one garment into another, but about naive game into shaping things, starting from our own bodies.
Time for inner child
Children use such learning when they discover the object world as toddlers. They don’t have critical thinking yet, their analytical mind is reduced to comparing and ordering stuff and enjoying the results, including the acts of destruction and reconstruction for the new cycle of ruining something they have just built and would like to remember the feeling.
The world right now is getting more and more difficult to accept. Fashion was always a projection of the mental and social state of the people. And when I try to find how it mirrors reality now, I can’t resist the feeling that it sinks deeper into denial - as an industry and as a creative media that feeds its audience. Who would think that the most mindful period will be 2020 thanks to the absence of offline shows and presentations?
Re Edition Magazine Spring Summer 2022 photographed by Ola Rindal @olarindal Styled by Marie Chaix
The fashion looked pretty awful back then, because of the endless repetition, and overproduction of overpriced average designs that mass market and sportive brands produced for ages. So we thought to stop and to think better before buying again. We cleaned our wardrobes and gave away lots of old new things we had no plans to use anymore. And then we stuck at home, online. Maybe that was the moment when we lost the need to be actually close to each other and to react to things adequately.
No matter how Zoom simplifies our life and helps to save minutes and hours for work and for whatever else from endless talking, distance matters. We couldn’t overcome it by walking to offices and cafes, to friends and family, by travelling and sharing thoughts face to face. As much as we shared the experience of knowing and learning about each other online, we could only use our mind, imagination. And it seems that we succeeded in that.
What were our thoughts then?
We reflected on ourselves, our life, relationships, dreams, fantasies, but also nightmares and frustrations, we spent less time looking outside our cells and more searching inside. But though it looked like time stopped for us sitting in different corners of the world, it didn’t. The processes were going, and it looks like a lot of the bad stuff we simply missed. Not because we deliberately ignored it, there was no information flow from one corner of the world to another and no voices of reason to stop someone from falling into paranoia or to change the direction of their actions. There was no actual public control over such actions. And all the conditions to feel isolated and unseen.
That was the time when metaverse stepped out to show that it can alternate the offline fashion shows and buying experience. After 2 years it’s here and offline is as widely presented as it was before. Like nothing happened. All the shows, all the seasons, all the travelling no matter the costs for the environment but followed with discussions about climate warming and the danger from mass market production to the ecology. That does look absurd, doesn’t it? And we haven’t looked at the designs yet.
Absurdity as a fashion trend
I’ve already written about surrealism in contemporary fashion, and here’s another article with a different angle on the same trend: The return of surreal fashion (Financial Times). Though I still believe in everything I’ve said, now I think we are much more into the fun of absurdity than into the art of it. I watch how celebrities try hard to change their looks from smart to more strange or more “strong”, meaning scandalous. The events are getting more and more off the social and political agenda we read and watch on social media or on news platforms. It’s getting so far gone that it doesn’t matter what those public people say anymore, they look too loud. And surprisingly we don’t care anymore about their minds and ideas.
More and more often I find myself in a situation where I need to choose between discussing dresses or screaming about injustice or war or climate or hunger or something meaningful that happens right now. It’s just like in a newspaper - a war on the front page and a crossword puzzle - on the last. But even media outlets now feed us with disasters and balls published on the same page. So you stare in cognitive dissonance and just skip both, looking for cuties, recipes or movie’s reviews - anything that seems normal.
Or we look for art. Preferably abstract. Or surreal. Or perfecting reality into fantasy. Or just for colour drops and splashes would serve a great meditation background. If it’s fashion why not to do the same: just to play with patterns and shapes. We have enough clothes for everyday life, for home, for sport, for going to café to chat about nonsense, and something else - for serious talks here and there.
There should be more fun
I remember a few months ago I wrote we need to see more joy in fashion. Our attitude should be less serious, we should get the sense of irony and pleasure we lost somewhere on our way to the 2010s. Clothes became too commercial and for that reason too boring. We took our own looks too seriously while it’s just style but the media made us believe it defines our personality. It works in different directions actually: we define the style, we use it for self expression and self exploration.
And then suddenly fashion turns upside down: absurd playful looks become prevailing over the glamour. The best barometer of the mood change today is Thom Browne. He doses precisely the essence of weirdness. This time from sophisticated stylish unisex suit avantgarde he moved to the full scale almost haute couture childish fun. It reminded me of Gaultier, Comme des Garçon and Viktor and Rolf, though models went with facial expressions from 'What A Merry Go Round' by Alexander McQueen (Autumn/Winter 2001 collection).
Public is happy to watch the show next to the elite group of Teddy Bears. And then comes the viral reposting of the major things and show episodes.
It was positive despite sad faces, commercial because unlike McQueen it wasn’t disturbingly truthful or pervasively beautiful, it was clear, toothless, artistic and not too smart like Kawakubo’s visions of the distorture of women’s bodies. It was the same manageable creativity as by Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry, who invents his version of surreal fashion art based on post modernism as a method of repetition and reinvention of symbols from the past.
Loewe, headed by Jonathan Anderson, is the moderate version of the same trend. Intelligently advising to season minimalism with strangely attached objects, the brand renews the form and only for those who need it to stand out. Of course he forms an elegant ground zero for all who want to play in art. Some go too far with trashy accents or materials, others - with artistic concept, forgetting that it should be wearable because it’s about clothes. Anderson balances in the middle.
It can be everything right now - any uniqueness will work fine. The more attention the dress attracts, the accessories, the better. It’s not important to be recognised in it, it’s enough to be discussed and multiplied on social media. But people want more than just fun from discussion of the looks. They want sense, answers, peace and the promise that the show will continue to distract them from the world.
Though how brave are we to really accept the truth and to change accordingly denying the new purchases but not the need to act and think about wars, women’s rights, children education, rising prices, shrinking earnings, all sort of dark stuff that we can’t turn off like it’s a bad movie?
Visuals from my feed for May 3rd, 2022
9.00 am zakharova_kaetano Good morning 🌞, the world after MET Gala 2022! How are you today? #haveagoodday I’m trying to fit in my new old life, it doesn’t fit me at the moment. Everything feels off and worse. But let’s hope it’ll change somehow for better. Here’s @philippe_halsman_official photography for #morninginspiration#morningmood #goodmorningpost #artofphotography #historyofphotography
5.00pm zakharova_kaetano #finding @ninotchka_jewels wooden and steel bangle seen on @twentyonejewels_byelena #artofjewellery #beautyofjewellery #jewelleryasinspiration #contemporaryjewellery
10.00pm zakharova_kaetano #nightmood #fashionportrait#fashioneditorial i need #colour today. Here’s one of my favorite #fashionstory I’ve posted it before, but something I want to watch and rewatch… I hope you don’t mind to look at those @i_d covers from spring 2012 again. Photographed by @chenman, Styling @lucialiustylist makeup @terrybarberonbeauty #fashioneditorial #portraitphotography #colour #artofphotography #fashionasinspiration #beautyofwoman #loveit
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