Fashion journalism – Vestoj

Branding Authenticity

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 11:39:39 +0000

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s 2001 exhibit, Opening Soon – done without Prada’s permission – was the precursor to the artists’ Prada Marfa installation. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar gallery.

I FLY TO MILAN in the morning and we meet in the afternoon at her company’s headquarters. Our interview takes place in a large tasteful and rather bare office, with her PR director present. We have three voice recorders between us, and her PR takes copious notes as we talk.

***

Authenticity is an original thought, a concept or idea. For a fashion designer it would be someone who invented something that other people go on to copy. But nobody actually cares about authenticity anymore, about who did something first, second or third. Today we have a copy of a copy of a copy. No one talks about authenticity, with the exception of you and a few extravagant intellectuals maybe. As a concept, it’s not relevant anymore. Today it’s considered stupid. The last one to do something, is the one who invented it. Sometimes I think it’s a bit discouraging, but then again I refuse to criticise because you have to live your own moment and deal with it. All our culture derives from other cultures, but authenticity is when you can add something of your own and push things forward. It’s an idea transformed into something concrete. Today everybody is inventing their lives; it’s all embellishment and upgrading. No one tells the truth – I think that’s why we long for authenticity.

I often ask myself why we are completely fixated on fashion and completely ashamed of it at the same time. Maybe it’s because fashion is still seen as a woman’s work, and maybe it’s because we feel shame in talking about ourselves. Clothes after all are about our bodies and appearance and sexuality, and to many people being transparent about those things is too personal. My son sometimes tells me that a lot of his friends would like to work in fashion, but they don’t; it’s as if they think fashion people have rabies. Fashion is associated with something superficial. And I don’t mean the commercial aspect of the industry: often the only thing people like about fashion is that it makes money. I know the feeling well: I’ve been ashamed my whole life about being in fashion. But people in fashion are more cultivated than most – the youngest of my assistants knows more than any bank manager about art, about cinema. We have to be educated to work in this industry. Having said that, fashion is for people with no problems; it’s for moments of pleasure. When you’re in pain, aesthetics doesn’t exist. If you’re sick, you don’t care about clothes. During war, art stops.

I do have enormous respect for fashion though – I want to make that clear. I don’t think it’s in any way less valid as a creative discipline. To work in fashion you have to be open, educated, curious. Maybe the people who still see fashion as inferior are just more bourgeois than I am. Maybe they have preconceived ideas or maybe they are just afraid of what people will think or say if they go into fashion. I know a lot of people in that genre. You know, the ones who think they are too chic, too smart, too intellectual to work in fashion. Sometimes I have fun thinking about the fall of the super intellectual: the one who thinks he’s above the vulgarities of everyday life. The people who really practice what they preach are very few. Perhaps that’s true authenticity.

I like to work against things: if something is luxurious I want to make it cheap, if something is cheap I want to make it look luxurious. That’s my way of thinking so I’m in constant conflict with myself. We’re luxury, but not luxury – and anyway luxury is such an abused word today. I have more doubts than certainty, and I encourage constant change. I hate when companies become too well-defined. I have a hard time with branding, when you have to reduce a company to a few chose terms. It’s so superficial: it irritates me and makes me suffer. We still have to do it, I know, but I try to do it in a way that is a bit more anarchic. Sometimes we do it well, sometimes badly because we don’t do it from a perspective that is only about being rational or commercially valid. The problem now is that we are big so we can’t be completely experimental. I want us to be even more daring or bold, but we have different responsibilities than we used to. To reduce all the ideas that goes into making a collection into a few words upsets me, because simplifying something complex makes it superficial. But then again, to try and make it sound intellectual, I also hate. I do know the limits that I can move within, I know who I am and who we are, and how big the company is and what that means. So far I think I’ve dealt with what I have decently, though I know that by choosing not to be loud and superficial I won’t reach as many people. But I want to introduce some humanity and intelligence into fashion and I’ve made the choice not to be understood by everybody. Being popular, convincing and clever is a difficult balancing act. If you’re niche, you don’t have that problem but then again you speak only to people like yourself.

In my work I have to behave in a way that I both like and don’t like. It’s tricky. A struggle. I want to be able to be open with a journalist for example, but what used to be talking to a niche magazine, today can be taken out of context and go viral in an instant. You just have to be more careful. Now I’m sitting here talking to you, emissary from a very sophisticated journal, but I know that I’m really talking to everybody else too. But to compromise is not a bad thing, you have to compromise with everybody – your kids, your husband, everybody. It’s what democracy is all about, though democracy doesn’t seem to be so trendy at the moment. You can still achieve a lot within a compromise – it’s not like it makes you another person. The compromise is necessary to get things done. We have tried doing highly sophisticated things, but in the end no one bought them. For me making concessions is essential to at least say something; if no one listens all you end up doing is talking to yourself. Don’t misunderstand me though: I’m not saying that only if you’re big can you be influential. Many small things can together have an impact. Of course you can choose to step out of the system. It’s what Azzedine Alaïa did. But he was small, and he liked to work in the tradition of the artisan, to do everything by himself.

I’m intuitive. I tend not to analyse. I don’t think of myself as an artist. To me art is pure, it’s not made with commerce in mind. That’s why it’s important for me to separate art from fashion. Do you know how many important artists have asked me to do bags with them? I won’t do it, because I think the two disciplines should be kept separate. Maybe, because of the way I grew up, I still have too much respect for the art world and the intelligentsia: I never wanted to take advantage of artists to make my work in fashion more valuable. I decided that a long time ago, and though now I might think differently I’ve stuck with it, just out of principle. So many people within the company have tried to make me change my mind, but I won’t – sometimes you have to protect your principles, even if they’re stupid.

When you’re alone with a friend you can allow yourself to say things that are politically incorrect. It’s important to; no thought can advance if you have to remain politically correct all the time. But censorship is huge now. Basically you can’t say anything interesting on the record. I did an interview with a very important journalist some time ago, but then I told him to cancel eighty percent of what I’d said. I know that makes me the censor but I don’t want to ruin my life over an interview. I have responsibilities. It’s hard because whatever I do, someone ends up being upset. A company our size has to think about everything. I made the choice not to be niche, only for the sophisticated few, so I have to accept the limitations of that choice. I prefer to make what is perhaps sometimes not so good but its reach is wide. I want to understand the habits of the Arabs, of the Chinese… I want to understand how different cultures respond to different things; ultimately that’s much more interesting and challenging to me. It does mean though that I can’t be totally independent in what I do.

In my life I’ve passed through many moments, and many that have been freer than the one we’re living through today. Even in fashion you notice this. We are undergoing a major revolution in terms of communication, and I understand the limits of this moment in time. I remember when travelling meant you actually had to stop talking on the phone – now everybody just keeps on talking. Not me. Or at least not as much. I don’t have social media; I don’t even have a computer. So far I’ve refused to engage because I knew it would only mean more work. But I’ve been told that it’s the only thing that people look at nowadays, and that I’d better get involved so since one month I’m studying the internet. I’m looking at social media and everything else that goes on the macchinetta. I want to learn how to respond to it, because online you can really find boundless superficiality and stupidity, but also – I hope – super clever things.

The speed of fashion is stressful, but fantastic. We can do things in months that would take years for an institution or museum. We do the Prada show in one month, and the Miu Miu show in ten days. Granted, I have a monster machine behind me. I know people complain about the pace but I change my opinion all the time, and get bored easily so it works for me. I try to think of every aspect of my work as small parts of a bigger whole, ashes of ideas, and I’ve found that it makes my attitude to work easier. I don’t have to think, ‘Oh my god, there’s a show coming up and I have to be a genius, I have to be good, I have to deliver.’ It takes the pressure off and helps me keep perspective. I can get bored at times and just let people do what they want, and sometimes I can regret that. But ultimately my life is more important – I can’t control everything and sometimes I have to just let things go. I don’t always want to go into our shops because I always notice things I would like to have done differently, and I have to stop with that. Sometimes I get hysterical and give directions all over the place, and I have to stop with that too. I can’t let my work take over my life. Thanks god I have more things to my life than work, so if a horrible dress slips through the cracks, so what? Life is always more important.

Anja Aronowsky-Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder.

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Authenticity, available for purchase here.

On Indian Minimalism

Dr Phyllida Jay — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 01:54:35 +0000

Kantha embroidery on handloom cotton wool, a textile from emerging New Delhi fashion label Bodice.

INTERNATIONALLY VERY LITTLE IS known about the history of design in India, the local dress or drape, or the diverse cultures that Indian designers draw upon. The exciting field of contemporary Indian fashion is often overlooked. For example, not a single Indian designer is stocked in the eclectic, pioneering concept store Dover Street Market.

Why do so many misperceptions of Indian fashion still exist in an international market where everyone is always looking for the next best thing? Perhaps it’s due to histories of representation that obscure the view. The issues that frame entrenched perceptions of Indian fashion date back to the early era of the European drive to expand into the ‘Far East’ in the sixteenth century. India was the exotic land of spiritual mysticism and exquisite textiles such as chintz. The progressive British colonial dismantling of India’s textile industry was followed by its rise as a cheap market for fast fashion brands to source from. Only more recently has the renaissance in India’s craft, aligned to its burgeoning economy, led to the nation’s new role as a source of embroideries for luxury brands including Fendi, Gucci and Lanvin.¹ But deeply embedded perceptions of Indian fashion persist in popular culture. Even supposedly cutting-edge cultural magazines including i-D and Another resort to hackneyed orientalist cliches of blue gods and outrageous chromatic bling whenever they come close to ‘Indian inspiration’ in editorials.² Vogue India fell into this trap when Mario Testino shot Kendall Jenner for its tenth anniversary edition. The result was a reaffirmation that in the eyes of some photographers India exists only as an exotic back drop for hedonistic white people.³ Because what are the all-pervasive representations that Westerners have of India? Raj nostalgia in a never ending slew of costume drama box sets? Yoga, mysticism and a souvenir of rudraksha beads in Rishikesh or a beach holiday in Goa? Beyonce and Chris Martin doing India with heavy dose of nautch exotica and lobbing coloured Holi powder with abandon in ‘Hymn for the Weekend’?

Which begs the question, what are the aesthetics of an emerging post-colonial economy? And when something different from what we expect arises, why don’t we have the interpretative frameworks to understand its nuances?

Take for example Bodice, a popular contemporary label by Ruchika Sachdeva launched in 2011. Bodice combines an architectural purity of line with tonal colour palettes in minimal, loose-fitting but elegant separates and dresses. Architectural shapes in Modern Indian architecture and geometry are a consistent preoccupation in Sachdeva’s work. Yet it’s intriguing how often the India fashion press and foreign buyers exclaim how ‘Scandinavian’ Bodice’s aesthetic is. They often seem amazed an Indian designer could express herself in such a ‘minimalist’ way. Indian labels like Bodice are not understood as one expression of a whole panorama (and history) of Indian design; instead they are stereotyped as imitating Scandinavian design which is in itself a catch-all coda for minimal fashion. Minimalist has become a buzz word in international design, denoting the cross-fertilisation of a conceptual design philosophy across the areas of architecture, furniture design and fashion.

Part of the problem lies in how often fashion journalists resort to cliches and emphasis on trends rather than on robust knowledge of micro-currents in design history. It was particularly evident when ex-Mint Newspaper journalist Shefalee Vasudev lumped Bodice into a group of designers, labelling them with the cringe-worthy term ‘Hindustani Normcore’ and declaring they represent an aesthetic ‘alien to India.’⁴

In understanding micro-currents as international fashion trends rather than Indian design legacies, Vasudev fails to understand these designers within a rich legacy of Gandhian philosophy, non-figurative art and modernist painting, as well as architecture, craft and design in India. Such commentators paradoxically privilege Western histories and perspectives on fashion even whilst they tub thump about the heritage of Indian craft traditions.

In sum, Western concepts are imposed upon Indian fashion, and nuance is lost in the process of translation. In fact, the aesthetic that Bodice embodies is far from ‘alien’ to India, but integral to India’s history of design, art and political resistance to colonialism.

Bodice, along with a host of young Indian design labels who have emerged since 2012 including Lovebirds, Antar-Agni, Eka, Anomaly, Anavila Mishra, Rashmi Varma and P.E.L.L.A, can be seen in continuity with the older generation of designers, notably Wendell Rodricks, Abraham and Thakore and Rajesh Pratap Singh, who all began their careers in the 1980s, as well as an interim generation that includes Gaurav Jai Gupta, Kallol Datta and Arjun Saluja, who have built reputations as designer’s designers in the last decade. All have successfully carved out careers in Indian fashion whilst firmly orientating their aesthetic signature and therefore commercial business in opposition to the all-dominant market for opulent bridal and ethnic formal wear. Whilst each is distinctive, they share common ground in exploring the unadorned surfaces of textiles (often handwoven), they question the commercial dominance of embroidery as ornament, often using appliqué or beading with waste materials, they address the relationship between traditional motifs and contemporary design, as well as forge an ongoing dialogue between traditional, local Indian dress and global currents including street-wear, athleisure and androgyny.

In various ways they propose a version of Indian minimalism, which is both recognisable as such in global fashion, whilst articulating uniquely Indian concerns.

Minimalism: A Morality Tale

Minimalism in its various forms implies taste and a certain intellectual superiority to those who prefer an excess of ornament: it’s why labels like Phoebe Philo’s Celine come with such undertones of intellectual superiority. Modernist architect Adolf Loos’s infamous treatise Ornament and Crime (1910) disseminated the idea of ornament as somehow indicating weaker taste, morality and an absence of sound judgment. His controversial writings elaborated on his own architectural style by denouncing ornament as synonymous with a spectrum of social ills. As a writer he had a major impact on twentieth century architects, including Le Corbusier. In tune with cultural evolutionist ideas prevalent at that time, Loos saw ornament as a sign of cultural backwardness; he vilified for example the Polynesian tribal practice of tattooing. He wrote, ‘Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength,’ and believed in the progressive absence of ornament as part and parcel of ‘cultural evolution.’

India has its own history of moral coding through a rejection of ornament, inextricably tied up in its colonial past as well as the search for a visual language of Indian modernity post-independence in 1947. At its centre is hand-woven cloth and craft like embroidery.

This moral coding begins with nineteenth-century European anxieties regarding the adverse effects of the industrial revolution on community, urban life and the decorative arts. This led intellectuals such as John Ruskin and William Morris to look to India as a model of pre-industrial life. India was a rich source of inspiration for the English Arts and Crafts movement, which idealised it as a utopian economy and culture based on village production and traditional crafts. Form was only acceptable if it followed function, and labour where craft was embedded in local community was required to provide wealth to all.

The connecting thread between the Arts and Crafts movement and contemporary Indian fashion is Mahatma Gandhi’s drive for independence known as Swadeshi (indigenous production). After reading Ruskin’s anti-capitalist polemic Unto this Last, Gandhi developed his philosophy of Swadeshi as the basis for the struggle against British rule. Piles of imported cloth from Manchester (the import of which had all but destroyed India’s own industry) were publicly burnt, and Gandhi revived long forgotten methods of hand spinning and weaving to produce coarse cotton cloth known as khadi. He made the wearing of khadi symbolic of national identity and a visible challenge to colonial rule with its Western dress codes. Gandhi believed India’s future lay in its rural villages. Art historian Partha Mitter writes, ‘Gandhi inspired the Indian elite to discover, then romanticise the peasant.’ Consequently, a central thread of Indian minimalism is charged with a moral set of ideas regarding making and surface aesthetics.

Eka’s loose-fitting, simply-cut tunic dresses in rough textured cotton khadi, and Anavila’s earthy linen saris most visibly embody a ‘Gandhian’ aesthetic in terms of an adherence to the idea of ‘simplicity.’ Gandhi believed only coarse, hand-spun, hand-woven khadi could embody Swadeshi, both in terms of its production providing maximum employment and its aesthetics flattening caste and class distinction though a simple uniformity. This coarse Indian cotton, then, comes with a subliminal moral charge for contemporary consumers, although there is irony in that these designer iterations of Gandhian simplicity can be afforded only by the wealthy. These kind of clothes also sell well in stores such as Knightsbridge’s Egg, or in European concept stores.

Loos’s treatise has been critiqued for how, even whilst condemning ornament, it encouraged the fetishisation of a new type of style, in which an entire building in fact becomes a kind of ornament. Loos’s architecture is every bit as concerned with ornament as those he vilifies for their love of pattern and decoration. But the ornament he uses is abstracted and blended seamlessly into the very structure of the building. This is the architectural version of inconspicuous, conspicuous consumption, a form of display signalling a specific form of taste to a cognoscenti.

Like Loos Modernist buildings, the unadorned khadi becomes a form of ornament in itself, recognisable to those in the know and coinciding with the rise of stealth wealth that plays out in the aesthetics of an emerging economy where new money is shaking up old structures of class and caste and making good taste the final frontier of social hierarchy.

However, there is another key thread to Indian minimalism, influenced by Bauhaus design, which further illuminates the complicated relationship between minimalism and morality in Indian fashion today.

Post-independence, The National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad was founded on the basis of The India Report (1958) by Bauhaus exponents Charles and Ray Eames. They were commissioned by first prime minister Jawarlahal Nehru to visit India and investigate design’s potential to alleviate poverty and shape India’s industrial future. They proposed a pedagogy blending Gandhian philosophy with Modernism, which continues to shape many textile and fashion designers’ approach to ornament today. This was also an era of high Modernism in architecture with Nehru commissioning Corbusier to design the model city of Chandigarh. Modernist architecture promised to provide a visual expression of postindependent India, free from colonial associations, especially pertinent where the Raj had used Indian decorative elements to adorn colonial buildings that were designed to assert power using familiar visual idioms. Loos’s condemnation of ornament and belief that restraint displays spiritual strength takes on a completely different meaning in India’s post-colonial context.

It’s undoubtable that perceptions of the morality of minimal design play out in the specific milieus of the Indian urban elite. Many designers attempt to bring together this history of Gandhian activism, the search for a post-colonial Modernist aesthetic, and the Bauhaus influence on Indian craft in their work.

Abraham and Thakore (A&T), who met at NID as students in the late 1980s, consistently challenge the idea of ornament, embodying the NID pedagogy of abstracting traditional patterns, eliminating details and reducing colours to monochromatic contrasts, attempting to create and define a language of Indian modernity. As Indian designers, they also work in distinction to the dominant market for bridal wear with its heavy embroideries, conspicuous displays of wealth and reputation for ‘bling.’ Negotiating these dynamics Abraham and Thakore have challenged codes of minimal taste, applying gold foil under slashed khadi as they attempt to explore what Abraham calls ‘lustre without bling.’

One of the key things minimal Indian designers seek to do is break down perceptions that Indian fashion only excels in surface ornament whether as bridal wear or as sourcing destination. Designers like Rajesh Pratap Singh focus on cut, reinventing traditional garments such as the dhoti, salwaar kameez or kurta with sleek tailoring.

Yet internationally perception of Indian fashion still shifts between the extremes of hippie kitsch or Gandhian rough hewn, handloom purity, and many designers feel pressured to present themselves within existing interpretative frames where foreign journalists lap up mystical quotes by Rumi or go misty eyed over the idea of hands labouring many hundreds of hours over embroideries.

Where international expectations of Indian fashion are kitsch and bling or at the very least high embellishment, these may contain latent cultural evolutionist ideas vis-a-vis Loos of this ornament taking precedence over the ability to ‘design.’ It is perhaps due to this latent prejudice that fashion journalists in India have internalised ideas about Western minimalism versus Indian excess that they can only imagine a designer like Bodice to have Scandinavian influence.

However, a new generation is shifting these parameters. Bodice and Antar Agni both recently won the womenswear and menswear respectively, of the regional India-Middle East round of the Woolmark prize. Both represent core aspects of Indian minimalism, showing that the strength of this work is finally filtering through to the international fashion industry.

After all, why should an Indian designer have to be ‘Indian’ in her design? It’s a question that has persisted around the rise of the Japanese designers, and Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto’s rejection of the ‘Japanese’ tag is well known. Yet at the same time, when globalisation means everything increasingly looks the same, surely local and rooted ideas of dress have much to offer.

It’s not just that the rise of emerging economies is shifting the dynamics of global luxury consumption. Nor that young Indian designers are exposed to global influences and produce collections that deftly integrate these. It’s also that in fact because of the weighty history of misperception as well as moral ideas regarding restraint versus excess, emerging Indian designers are driven to produce something with a peculiarly unique alchemy for global fashion audiences, beyond cliches and speaking an exciting language of the now.

Phyllida Jay is an anthropologist and author of the book Fashion India.

S Menkes, ‘India Embellishes High Fashion. Discreetly but proudly, Mumbai wears the halo of haute couture,’ Vogue, February 6, 2016. http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/suzy-mumbai-haute-couture-embroidery-india-embellishes-high-fashion ↩
N Theodosi ‘If you’re tired of London you’re tired of Life,’ i-D, May 3, 2017.https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/papbby/if-youre-tired-of-london-youre-tired-of-life-1 ↩
N Theodosi, ‘Mario Testino Takes Over Vogue India’, WWD, May 3, 2017. http://wwd.com/business-news/media/mario-testino-takeover-vogue-india-kendall-jenner-10879422/ ↩
S Vasudev, ‘In Indian fashion, “grey” now sells,’ October 15th 2015. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/DuBZRTQCcEonYL8U9qEwNM/In-Indian-fashion-grey-now-sells.html ↩

Will I Get A Ticket?

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 12:01:19 +0000

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following the original publication of this article, we’ve been contacted by lawyers on behalf of Conde Nast Limited and Edward Enninful OBE and have been requested to amend the interview. This request has now been granted.

WE MEET AT A cosy private club in West London, the sort of hangout popular with fashion professionals who believe in the semblance of bohemia. For thirty-six years she’s been working at British Vogue, twenty-five of those as the magazine’s fashion director, but not long before we meet the fashion press has been full of headlines announcing her departure. We order lattes, and I’m struck by how candid she is.

Scott King, “How I’d Sink American Vogue,” 2006. Courtesy Herald St, London.

A month and a half ago I was fired from Vogue. I phoned my lawyer; she asked me what I wanted to do about it. I told her I wanted to write a letter to my colleagues to tell them that Edward [Enninful] decided to let me go. And to say how proud I am to have worked at Vogue for as long as I did, to thank them for being such brilliant colleagues. My lawyer said sure, but don’t tell HR. They wouldn’t have wanted me to send it.

Later I was having lunch with an old friend who had just been fired from Sotheby’s. She said to me, ‘Lucinda, will you please stop telling people that you’ve been fired.’ I asked her why – it’s nothing I’m ashamed of. She told me, ‘If you keep talking about it, then that becomes the story. The story should be that you’ve had the most incredible career for over thirty years. The story shouldn’t be that you’ve been fired. Don’t muck up the story.’ But I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be the person who puts on a brave face and tells everyone, ‘Oh, I decided to leave the company,’ when everyone knows you were really fired. There’s too much smoke and mirrors in the industry as it is. And anyway, I didn’t leave. I was fired.

Fashion can chew you up and spit you out. I worked with a brilliant designer when I was at Marni – Paulo Melim Andersson. I adored him. He was challenging, but highly intelligent. Fragile, like a lot of creative people. We had our ups and downs, but he stayed with us for seven years. Then Chloé came along. The CEO at the time asked my advice about Paulo and I told him, ‘Paulo is great, but you have to know that he won’t turn the brand around for you in a season or even two. You’ve got to give him time, and surround him by the right people.’ ‘Absolutely, absolutely,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that.’ Three seasons later Paulo was out. They didn’t give him time, and he never got his people. I felt so sad for Paulo. If you want good results, you have to support people. You don’t get the best out of anyone by making them feel insecure or nervous. Ultimately, that way of treating people is only about control. If you make someone feel nervous, you’ve got them. But in my view, you’ve got them in the wrong way. You’ve got them in a state of anxiety. I’m thinking of one fashion editor in particular: it’s his modus operandi. He will wrong-foot you and wrong-foot you, and have everyone going, ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.’

You’re not allowed to fail in fashion – especially in this age of social media, when everything is about leading a successful, amazing life. Nobody today is allowed to fail, instead the prospect causes anxiety and terror. But why can’t we celebrate failure? After all, it helps us grow and develop. I’m not ashamed of what happened to me. If my shoots were really crappy… Oh I know they weren’t all good – some were crappy. The June cover with Alexa Chung in a stupid Michael Kors T-shirt is crap. He’s a big advertiser so I knew why I had to do it. I knew it was cheesy when I was doing it, and I did it anyway. Ok, whatever. But there were others… There were others that were great.

In fashion people take you on your own estimation of yourself – that’s just a given. You can walk into a room feeling pumped up and confident, and if you radiate that the industry will believe in what you project. If, on the other hand, you appear vulnerable you won’t be seen as a winner. I remember a long time ago, when I was on maternity leave, Vogue employed a new fashion editor. When I met with my editor after having had my baby, she told me about her. She said, ‘Oh Lucinda, I’ve employed someone and she looked fantastic. She was wearing a red velvet dress and a pair of Wellington boots to the interview.’ This was twenty years ago. She went on, ‘She’s never done a shoot before. But she’s absolutely beautiful and so confident. I just fell in love with the way she looked.’ And I went, ‘Ok, ok. Let’s give her a go.’ She was a terrible stylist. Just terrible. But in fashion you can go far if you look fantastic and confident – no one wants to be the one to say ‘… but they’re crap.’ Honestly Anja, you can go quite far just with that. Fashion is full of anxious people. No one wants to be the one missing out.

Fashion moves like a shoal of fish; it’s cyclical and reactionary. Nobody can stay relevant for a lifetime – you always have peaks and troughs. The problem is that people are greedy. They think, ‘It worked then, we’ve got to make it work now.’ But fashion is an alchemy: it’s the right person at the right company at the right time. Creativity is a really hard thing to quantify and harness. The rise of the high street has put new expectations on big companies like LVMH. Businessmen are trying to get their creatives to behave in a businesslike way; everyone wants more and more, faster and faster. Big companies demand so much more from their designers – we’ve seen the casualties. It’s really hard. Those designers are going to have drink problems, they’re going to have drug problems. They’re going to have nervous breakdowns. It’s too much to ask a designer to do eight, or in some cases sixteen, collections a year. The designers do it, but they do it badly – and then they’re out. They fail in a very public way. How do you then get the confidence to say I will go back in and do it again?

The most authentic company I ever worked for is Marni. We didn’t advertise, and what we showed on the catwalk we always produced. We never wanted to be ‘in fashion.’ If you bought a skirt twenty years ago, you can still wear it today. We never changed the goalposts. Our shows were about empowering women. We always treated our models beautifully and had incredible diversity in the company: my team was half boys, half girls, all different nationalities. It was very transparent, but when the company was sold everything changed. The Castiglionis were naïve. They sold sixty percent of the company, thinking that the new owner would respect what they had built. I never understood why they sold it to Renzo Rosso of all people. He is the antithesis of everything Marni stood for. The antithesis. When Consuelo left, I remember thinking why not give the design task to someone from the team? It would have been a reflection of how fashion is created today, and it worked for Gucci – Alessandro Michele had been at the brand forever before becoming the creative director. I talked to Renzo and he agreed, but then at the last minute he changed his mind. He brought Francesco Risso onboard, who had nothing to do with the company. Before Marni, he did celebrity dressing at Prada. He’d never done a show, he’d never run a team. But he knows Anna Wintour. And who is Renzo Rosso enthralled by? Anna Wintour. The last womenswear collection at Marni was a disaster; it had terrible reviews. The show was appalling. I heard the cost to produce it was two-and-a-half times what we used to spend, and it sold fifty percent less. A lot of American buyers didn’t even bother to turn up. Marni is no more. It saddens me, but then I remind myself that from the ashes something new can emerge.

When Vetements came on the scene, what they were doing felt very new. At that particular time, it wasn’t what anyone else was doing. And when I saw the last Balenciaga show… Okay, you could say it’s a bit Margiela or a bit this or that, but honestly I was really really really excited. You know what was smart about it? It was the scale – you saw this tiny model emerge and it took forever for her to get close to the audience. It built up expectation. Everything was thought through: the casting, the music, the space. Everything. And I loved how we were all seated: so far from each other, it all felt anonymous. Normally at a fashion show, everyone looks at each other – who wears what, who sits where. ‘Oh, she’s got the new Céline shoes.’ But here you felt as if you were on your own. It was a new feeling.

Fashion shows are all about expectation and anxiety. We’re all on display. It’s theatre. I’m fifty-seven and I know that when the shows come around in September I will feel vulnerable. Will I still get a ticket? Where will I sit? I haven’t had to think about those things for twenty-five years. Most people who leave Vogue end up feeling that they’re lesser than, and the fact is that you’re never bigger than the company you work for. But I have a new idea now, and if it comes off maybe I won’t be feeling so vulnerable after all. We’ll have to wait and see.

There are very few fashion magazines that make you feel empowered. Most leave you totally anxiety-ridden, for not having the right kind of dinner party, setting the table in the right kind of way or meeting the right kind of people. Truth be told, I haven’t read Vogue in years. Maybe I was too close to it after working there for so long, but I never felt I led a Vogue-y kind of life. The clothes are just irrelevant for most people – so ridiculously expensive. What magazines want today is the latest, the exclusive. It’s a shame that magazines have lost the authority they once had. They’ve stopped being useful. In fashion we are always trying to make people buy something they don’t need. We don’t need any more bags, shirts or shoes. So we cajole, bully or encourage people into continue buying. I know glossy magazines are meant to be aspirational, but why not be both useful and aspirational? That’s the kind of fashion magazine I’d like to see.

Lucinda Chambers served as fashion director of British Vogue for 25 years.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder.

Words That Liberate

Aya Noël — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 13:36:52 +0000

Two women protect themselves from the sun with newspapers, 1963.

‘THE LIMITS OF MY language are the limits of my world,’ wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Likewise, there is a realm of sustainable fashion that remains undiscovered because nobody has figured out how to write about it.

Increasingly, designers and brands are proposing alternative ways to design, produce and sell clothes within an environmental and ethical philosophy. Fashion journalism however, is still struggling to translate these exciting changes to a larger audience. Granted, the advertising power of big corporations has limited the editorial coverage of independent design, but even the scarce writing that does exist on the topic is not doing the cause justice.

Sustainable fashion has procured a bad reputation and fashion writing has only contributed to this stigmatisation – it is tangible right from the first sentences of every sustainable fashion piece. These conventionally open with the unsuccessful reassurance that sustainable fashion is not bland, boring or hippy-esque. Sustainable fashion, so they claim, is ‘no longer confined to the wardrobes of hemp-wearing acolytes or those who favour a Birkenstock above all else,’¹ and ‘the lumpy, itchy, hempy pieces of the past are gone.’² Sarah Mower recently titled a Vogue interview with Stella McCartney with the cryptic ‘No Oatmeal-y Shirts!’³

Ironically, saying that a product is not worn by ‘hemp-wearing acolytes’ only adds to the suspicion that it could be, and shirts that are ‘definitely not oatmeal-y’ are rarely more attractive than their luxurious silk alternatives. In their well-intentioned effort to free sustainable fashion from a supposedly negative image, fashion journalists are doing the exact opposite. In fact, the average consumer knows very little about sustainable fashion, if they’ve even heard the term before.⁴ Writers are counterarguing a cliché no one knows about, and are thus confirming the very image they are battling.

When journalists do start describing the sustainable brand or designer, they do so with a vocabulary that has been handed to them from an outside source. Sustainability is an extremely complicated topic, and most writers are therefore convinced that sustainable fashion requires a specific lexicon, which they then borrow from environmentalism. This leads to an array of pseudo-scientific lingo and dry data. Expressions like ‘eco-conscious’, ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘green style’ have invaded journalism, even if most readers have no idea what they mean and frankly do not care enough to find out.

The word ‘sustainability’ has come to serve as a linguistic umbrella for a wide array of problems and their solutions: raw material sourcing, local manufacturing, recycling, labour practises, energy efficiency, chemical pollution, support for small businesses. It simply isn’t possible for journalists to cover every technical aspect of sustainable fashion: the problem is that they try to. Faced with an unfamiliar topic, writers cling on to dry facts and lists of empty numbers, and they throw out any sense of style along the way. Did you know that one pair of jeans takes four thousand litres of water to produce or that the impact of the production of just one T-shirt is roughly equal to the carbon footprint of driving a car for ten miles?⁵ Maybe. Has it made you more excited to discover sustainable fashion? Probably not. It seems as though writers are compensating a lack of transparency in the fashion industry at large by listing every technical detail about those brands that do offer information about the production of their garments.

Whenever journalists attempt at writing something less dry and lifeless, they choose to focus on passionate and emotional stories, hoping to reach their audience by pulling on the heartstrings. It’s the story of a single garment worker who can’t afford to feed her children, or a farmer whose crops are polluted by a nearby dye factory. Clusters of these stories can be found on two occasions: Earth Day on April 22 – when journalists rely on pressing global warming issues and doom scenarios to talk about sustainable brands – and anytime a factory disaster happens.⁶ Of course, these stories need abundant coverage, and they are a great method to raise awareness, but this should not be the only way we relate to sustainable fashion.

While messages of disaster might grab readers’ attention, they come with the same problem as the technical/scientific writing. Both communicate through environmentalism, not creation. Sustainable fashion is perpetually presented differently from what is considered ‘normal’ fashion, so much even, that it has come to represent its opposite. It’s as if there are only two camps – either you write about hemp and trees and farmers, or you write about silk and champagne and popstars.

As a result, sustainable fashion has systematically been secluded to a separate space, if it receives any space at all. Green issues by Elle magazine, Eco Blogs on Vogue.com, separate writers to specialise on the topic – all well-intentioned attempts at tackling the issue, but ultimately unsuccessful, as they strengthen the idea that sustainable fashion isn’t regular, that there is a division between ‘real’ and ‘green’ fashion. This black-and-white view needs to be abandoned. Sustainable fashion deserves regular (and why not, light-hearted) coverage, and mentioning environmental issues can become a part of mainstream fashion writing. Journalists should not feel forced to choose between being a political activist or a silent bystander, but rather should consider sustainability every step of the way.

The reason fashion journalism feels obliged to choose in an either/or dilemma, is because sustainable fashion is frustratingly often depicted as an oxymoron. Vanessa Friedman opened her talk at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit by pointing this out: ‘Sustainable fashion doesn’t make any sense. It’s a contradiction in terms. On the one hand we have the pressure to be new; on the other, the imperative to maintain.’⁷ The idea stands at the core of every sustainable fashion piece, from the blogpost⁸ to the keynote speech⁹, and has become so formulaic nobody even considers wondering if it’s actually true.

According to this argument, sustainable fashion is an oxymoron because fashion is about the new, which is directly opposed to the sustainable. The argument is flawed on multiple levels. To begin with, it doesn’t differentiate between fashion as a form of applied art and fashion as an industry. When fashion insiders claim that fashion inherently stimulates a need for more product, they aim at the fashion industry as we know it today. Secondly, the argument confuses creating something new with producing more. Fashion celebrates innovation; our current fashion system promotes accumulation. The difference is subtle but crucial.

Parallel to this cliché, it has become de rigueur to critique the current fashion system and vaguely demand change.¹⁰ There is a problem. Fashion is not what it used to be. Original and authentic creation is a dying breed. Everyone seems to have a case of fashion fatigue, but very few are able to pinpoint the cause of the issue. Generally, big corporate groups are targeted for their relentless chase of profit which suffocates the creative genius they supposedly rely on. Everyone agrees: fashion is suffering from the fast pace of the system. However, a sustainable vision is rarely mentioned as a solution.

Fashion rhetoric got stuck in a paradoxical platitude where the speed of corporate businesses is hurting creativity yet sustainable fashion is an oxymoron. Won’t anyone dare to admit that the industry could actually benefit from a sustainable production system? Fashion has given sustainability such a bad reputation it can’t even recognise its benefits when the industry itself is suffering.

So, what options are there for the fashion journalist? First and foremost, fashion needs to be de-commodified, meaning we need to stop presenting trends solely as singular must-haves. There needs to be a space to write about fashion through ideas, concepts, zeitgeist, and not just through objects. This is a challenging intellectual exercise, but not an impossible one. Fashion is more than the colour of the season or the length of a skirt. Clearly, shopping pages will remain a fashion magazine staple, but they cannot be the only way we translate trends. If fashion writers continue to pretend fashion is nothing but the hottest, latest, must-have it-item, we give in to consumerism as the only way to experience the art form. Furthermore, the power of high-street bargain brands is that they can copy any design before the original even hits the store. They are fuelled by easy-to-copy, visual trends and right now fashion journalists are handing those to them on a plate.

Secondly, journalists need to work on restoring the consumers’ relationship with their product. A study from 2014 has proven ‘a need for producers to encourage consumers to establish a connection with their purchase by providing the origins of the product and education about disposal of post-consumer textile waste, in other terms completing the lifecycle loop.’¹¹ However, providing this information doesn’t just mean studying farm policies and looking up cleaning guidelines. It means the product must be made valuable.

A journalist does this by telling stories. They reveal the craftsmen behind the product, talk to the designer about his techniques or describe the feeling those pieces will give to their wearers. There are so many different stories within sustainability, yet journalism has only managed to communicate one. It is crucial that more space is dedicated to in-depth and personal storytelling so journalists can engage and inspire readers to think and act differently.

Stories shouldn’t stop at ‘Genderfluidity is back! Shop our top gender-bending items,’ but always look at the way identity is expressed through garments, and what that means. Designers shouldn’t be solely asked about their inspiration, but also about the process behind the design and production of the clothes, and garment workers should become regular contributors to that conversation. Fashion magazines shouldn’t just offer ‘the five hottest summer shoes’ but also ‘the shoes that carried me through five hot summers and one broken heart.’

Right now, the priority is not offering the readers information or creating awareness of the issue, but more profoundly changing consumer behaviour. It’s not sustainable fashion that needs a make-over, it’s our relationship to fashion in general that needs readjustment. Our collective vision of fashion and garments – and the role they play in our lives – needs to transform, and nobody is more equipped for this role than journalists. If culture is language, then writers control the very tools that influence thought. Time to start using them.

Aya Noël is a fashion journalist and editor-at-large for 1 Granary.

Fashion Blogs

Simon Swale — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:20:41 +0000

THE BLOGGER AND THE city; this crucial dynamic is an important and oft neglected aspect of fashion blogs – a consistent presence and relationship that is utterly essential to the context of nearly all of these platforms. To date, the discussion on fashion blogs in academia has been predominantly concerned with the technological and social implications. From a technological perspective; blogs have democratised fashion journalism, offering new means of production, distribution and consumption, in turn providing a platform for social networking around the globe. Anyone with an internet connection has the potential to engage a global audience with their personal commentary of fashion and all its concerns. Blogs offer subjects the possibility for acting and performing, and personalities and identities may become as interchangeable as the very wardrobes that adorn them. Many bloggers, such as The Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman and Style Bubble’s Susie Lau, have themselves become international fashion celebrities for their dedicated and carefully curated blog posts, and the blogger as a citizen and inhabitant of the streetscape is crucial in this context. However, considering the long history of the city as a gendered space, and the fact that blogs themselves are so often gendered domains, it is perhaps surprising there has not been more attention paid to this concern with the representations of women in fashion blogs.

The city is the founding feature of ‘streetstyle’ fashion blog posts. A likely home to the blogger and their audience, providing the backdrop for the gazed upon subject, the city situates and contextualises the blog itself. We often familiarise ourselves with an un-travelled city through these means; how many of us know London or New York only through images posted on Facehunter or Street Peeper? Blogs both inform and tell stories but perhaps more interestingly, blogs speak of the relationships between the city and its subjects, and of ourselves as the viewers of these subjects.

Power is not excluded from these relationships which is played out upon the surface of the screen. The city as a gendered space is a concept considered across a range of disciplines, such as art history, film studies, cultural studies and urban geography. In his book City, geographer Phil Hubbard suggests that representations of people and place embed and reinforce dominant social systems,¹ so maybe we should be asking; how do fashion blogs reaffirm or contest traditional representations of women in the city?

The very notion of women’s place in the city has been much discussed, especially by feminist scholars Janet Wolff² and Griselda Pollock³ in relation to the concept of the flâneur. Both Wolff and Pollock consider the dominance of the male flâneur, and the invisibility (or indeed impossibility) of the female flâneuse in representations of nineteenth-century Paris. The flâneur features prominently in historical literature as the archetypal city dweller, a male adventurer conceived and critiqued by male writers. At this time men and women’s roles were largely defined by an increased separation of public and private space; the city and the home. Descending upon the dangers of the city, Wolff references Baudelaire when describing women’s role in the streetscape as confined to ‘whore, widow or murder victim’,⁴ and although the emergence of the department store provided safe passage, women remained marginalised in discourses of Modernity. In this context, and as a construct that can still be observed in contemporary culture, women are viewed as consumers, in stark contrast to the archetypal male role as producer, and this display of consumption in the form of dress largely reflected a woman’s husband’s wealth.

Today much has changed, yet for all supposed progress, how many representations of women in the media continue to rely on outmoded and condescending stereotypes? Woman as an obsessive neurotic; concerned only with her appearance and a plethora of beauty products, the arch consumer, eternally hungry for more, more, more? In contrast, how many images present women in control, in action, a force of nature, a powerful figure at home in the city? Images of cities seem to remain predominantly those of male production and female consumption, and fashion images are no exception, frequently portraying woman as the object of the male gaze, whether in fashion editorials or fashion advertising.

Can blogs then offer an alternative perspective? Can Tommy Ton’s Jack & Jil be read as a fair portrayal of (at least some) women and their relationship to the city, as it exists in the twenty-first century? Women in positions of control and action, women of strength and character, of ambition and resolve. And not just of women; blogs can be seen to offer strong representations of all those of diminished visibility, across all ethnic, class and cultural differences. Perhaps this new terrain of fashion images can help break what sociologist Chris Jencks⁵ describes as the ‘dominant views and appropriations of space have become taken for granted’, this often results in subjects becoming ‘spatialised, divided and subdivided.’

Bloggers and their subjects may provide the action and documentation of what philosopher Michel de Certeau would call ‘spatial practices’,⁶ helping to undermine and reconstruct the determining conditions of social life. Stand. Pose. Shoot. Marking space, the documentation of a range of heterogeneous subjects across the city may help reconstitute identities and configurations of power and gender. If ‘space is becoming the principle stake of goal-orientated actions and struggles’ as philosopher Henri Lefebvre⁷ suggests, we must take all the tools at our disposal to contest it.

Film and city scholar Guiliana Bruno reminds us; visual representation is not merely optic, but also haptic.⁸ The city is no mere backdrop to a fashion shoot but a tangible place within it. Fashion blogs represent real people in real spaces, in everyday situations, and potentially offer unheralded visibility and documentation for divergent classes, races, ages and sexualities within contemporary society. We should not consider these people the mere objects of the gaze but seek to reinstate the individuality of their subjectivity. We cannot allow ourselves to be subsumed by the personality of the city which we inhabit, or the discourses of power that swirl about us. The power relations that exist in the city are real, but so are the identities of the people who inhabit them: let us hear their voices and know their stories.

It can be suggested that any previously mentioned examples contain thousands of images that portray women as strong confident and empowered individuals. Women demand attention as they command the space about them (just consider the paparazzi like frenzy as bloggers seek to capture their images!). Fashion blog posts essentially provide a context for how many women function in their relationship to the modern world, intrinsically linked to the city for both work and play. Blogs reveal women to be as much at the heart of social, economic and cultural production, as they are with consumption. Undoubtedly consumption retains a large focus for any enquiry of women and fashion, but the production/consumption relationship is today less dichotomous. Reflecting the nature of blogs themselves, images of women in fashion blogs represent the potential for action in both production and consumption at the same time. The relationship between a woman’s appearance and her husband’s wealth of yesteryear has been largely replaced by representations that embody women’s independence and her ability for her own means of production. This means of production is intimately linked to the city. Women are as vital a part of our cities as men, contributing to all facets of modern life, and it is through fashion blogs perhaps that this knowledge is most prolifically documented. It may have happened in previous centuries, but in this one, women will not be hidden from visibility.

Simon Swale is a New Zealand-based writer and lecturer at Otago Polytechnic.

Hubbard, P. (2006) City. Abingdon, OX and New York: Routledge. ↩
Wolff, J. (1985) The Invisible Flâneuse; Women and the Literature of Modernity. Theory, Culture and Society, 1985, 2:37, 37-46. ↩
Pollock, G (1988) Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge. ↩
Wolff. Ibid. ↩
Jenks, C. (1995) ‘Watching your Step; The history and practice of the flâneur‘. In, Jenks, C. (Ed.) Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge. ↩
De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles. ↩
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford and Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell. ↩
Bruno, G. (1993) Streetwalking on a Ruined Map; Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press. ↩