It is Time to start looking forward

Text by Eugene Rabkin

There is something rotten in the state of fashion. It feels like everywhere you look, things are dismal. In a world dominated by bland corporate brands and mass taste, it feels like fashion cannot offer much beyond overpriced logoed merch. As a result, young people are turning away from fashion in droves, shopping vintage, looking back at the ‘90s and the early aughts. So do their older peers, led by a sense of nostalgia that makes them want to relive all the things they have missed out on the first time around. They are not wrong, since mainstream fashion no longer caters to those who are genuinely interested in fashion design. I am one of these people. In the past several years the bulk of my fashion budget went to vintage garments from the cult Japanese brand Number (N)ine, particularly the work made between 2006 and 2008. It is everything I loved and could not afford at the time, and it never ceases to amaze me how modern these garments look and feel, and how superior in terms of materials and construction than what passes for luxury fashion today.

Contemporary fashion is in a postmodern malaise, one in which our dissatisfaction with the present and our simultaneous inability to imagine the future makes us inevitably turn to the past, for the simple reason that there is nowhere else to go. But because we lack a genuine connection with the past—another result of the postmodern condition—we can only go back in a piecemeal fashion, to plunder the past for aesthetic clues and turn it into ‘retro’.

Referencing the past is not a new phenomenon—designers have done it since the 1970s. Yves Saint-Laurent’s infamous 1971 collection, Libération, was based on the silhouettes of the 1940s. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood started their career by referencing the Teddy Boys subculture of the early 1950s. But these designers also looked forward and made innovative, exciting fashion. In the 1990s designers like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano made fashion the coolest thing on earth; cooler than art, cooler than music. Both studied the past carefully, and both have drawn on it to make the future. We no longer study the past in any genuine, meaningful way. It is not a coincidence that the most exciting collection of 2024 was designed by the 63-year-old John Galliano. He went back to the past, to Brassai, to cabaret, filtered everything through his lens, and what came out at the other end was nothing short of astounding.

It feels like there is little to get excited about today. It is true that the rich fashion past makes the future look bleak. The basic problem facing young fashion designers is that in the world in which so much has been done, innovation has become increasingly hard. Vivienne Westwood, Rei Kawakubo, Helmut Lang, Ann Demeulemeester, and Raf Simons, to name just a few, were on some level lucky because what they were envisioning did not yet exist. And yet, innovate we must. There is no other way for fashion to remain exciting. Innovation may have become hard, but it’s not impossible. Chitose Abe of Sacai, Craig Green, and Kei Ninomiya are all innovators.

In order to go forward we must cleanse our palate of the current fashion system. Fashion has become too much in thrall of a handful of brands wielding enormous power. The fashion media writes about celebrity outfits and creative director appointments, instead of writing about fashion design. The power of big brands is so vast that we have started to confuse them with fashion itself. But fashion is a rich ecosystem, much of which resides outside of these behemoths. It is there that true fashion fans must look. Conversely, smaller brands and independent designers must give us something to be excited about. And there is only one way to do it—innovation. No matter how hard it has become, designers must discard the postmodern culture of pastiche and go back to the central tenet of modernism, as summarized by the poet Ezra Pound’s maxim, “MAKE IT NEW.” But to make something new we must carefully study the past and be engaged with the present, not in a piecemeal way, but in one that is deep and meaningful. Much of the blame here falls on the fashion education system that now takes in too many students, many of whom are not interested in design but only in the glamorous fashion façade, and then lowering academic standards to accommodate them. But it also lies with our pastiche culture, which has rendered depth and authenticity all but impossible. It is this culture that the young designers must fight against.

The good news is that the future will come regardless. And it will be made by the young, because there is no other way forward. What they need is the right set of tools. These include the right education, not just fashion but also cultural. But above all, designers must stop looking at fashion as a path to a glamorous life and start looking at it as a creative discipline. Only then can fashion be made exciting again.