I CAN’T GO ON, I’LL GO ON

Text by Eugene Rabkin

During Paris fashion week earlier this year, I found myself chatting with a big PR executive at a brand dinner. Trump’s coronation was still a fresh memory and our conversation inevitably turned that way, as it inevitably did at the time when the fashion industry was still collectively processing the trauma of the upcoming four years of doom. The thing about trauma is that the events that incur it are nonsensical. This is why trauma is so impactful; the mind has trouble satisfying its demand that things make sense, and because it can’t, it constantly returns to it. 

“The only thing we can do is fight back with beauty and creativity,” the PR executive pronounced. Had he said that a year earlier, I would have rolled my eyes at the affectation. Fight back with what, scissors and fabric? Slogans on t-shirts? What does an industry that mostly produces expensive clothes that people don’t need have to say about politics? I was tired of our industry producing virtue signaling and self-satisfaction without engendering real change. If we cannot change anything, at least we can be honest about what we do, which at its best is creating beautiful moments that nurture our drive for aesthetic appreciation. I have long maintained that politics and fashion need a divorce. I still do.

And yet, fashion’s constant self-deprecation, most commonly expressed in the phrase, “We are not saving lives here,” which frequently gets tossed around in fashion circles, also feels wrong. No, we are not saving lives, but neither does Universal Studios or Spotify or Larry Gagosian, yet we hold in esteem what we call “serious” film or music or art. In its self-congratulatory stance, our cultural figureheads all too often forget how limited their impact is. Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” may be a stunning piece of art, but as the art critic Robert Hughes pointed out, it has not stopped a single bullet during the Spanish Civil War. 

Like art, fashion holds a promise of cultural impact. The problem occurs when it confuses cultural impact for political one. The mix of fashion’s self-importance and self-deprecation is at least somewhat responsible for this confusion. Designers see themselves as creators but not quite artists, and the constant adulation they receive eventually starts to take on a veneer of fakery. The industry puffs itself up, yet when it encounters the outside world, it is told that it is frivolous and totally unnecessary, and it believes what it hears. Its narcissism runs deep and rampant, and so it grasps for seriousness – witness the constant designer-artist collaborations and brand-sponsored literary salons. And, of course, politics. Models are no longer simply models, they are model-activists. Brands tout their DEI and sustainability credentials. Fashion magazines put presidential hopefuls on their covers. Designers wear t-shirts supporting political causes for their final bow. And when these efforts run into a wall, as they inevitably do, this makes fashion look exactly how we fear it looks, silly.

Part of our confusion is that everything has become politicized and many tend to see the world in purely binary terms. But the world is complex. A person can enjoy fashion’s frivolous theatricality and hold progressive political views. A brand can give women and minorities a proper place within its structure while concentrating on making a healthy business. A magazine can produce editorials on purely aesthetic merit without feeling the need for sloganeering. None of this makes those who work in fashion apolitical or immoral.

This does not mean that a fashion creative cannot channel political matters into fashion. In the past few years designers like Rick Owens and Rei Kawakubo have done so. But the merit in those collections lay first and foremost in their aesthetic power channelled through their formidable design talent. I doubt that either thought that their collections will stop Trump or the war in Ukraine. The point is that they don’t have to. Their collections were powerful because they were done within their remit as fashion designers and not as political activists, or, worse, commodifiers of political activism.

In his 1953 novel The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett grappled with failure, as he always did. Perhaps the most famous line he ever wrote was, “…you must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” He was saying that an artist is doomed to failure, but they have no choice but to produce art. This was not some facile stumbling-on-the-way-to-riches neoliberal hogwash, but an acknowledgement of the sisyphean plight of the artist. You create something, you look back on it, and you will see that you could have done better, the way I will read this article in the future and see its inevitable flaws. Imperfection is creativity’s fate, but it is also its engine. The key is to realize that fashion is worthwhile on its own terms. At its best, fashion does its own service to humanity, the service of producing its own specific kind of beauty. When we internalize this, the need to dress fashion up will fall away, as will the insecurity about it not being “serious.”