In the window of Louis Vuitton at the corner of London’s New Bond Street and Clifford Street, a Barbie-height alabaster mannequin has tripped and fallen. Sculpted in Nicolas Ghesquière’s Sixties sci-fi silhouette, she taps a mirror with her heel. Her back is turned, her face gazing up at a trompe-l’œil staircase. She has fallen into retrospection.

At Burberry the scene is one of an aloof petting zoo filled with glossy magnolia ostriches, gibbons and pelicans. At Chanel, like its indomitable high-collared creative director, the Eighties mannequins have gone. What is left is a collage shot on the fake rooftops of Paris built inside the Grand Palais. Two fluorescent bin-men sit on smooth stone benches, staring into tiny phones. Givenchy has plastered matte black vinyl to its shopfront. Two ornate metal garden chairs sit empty in the window of Michael Kors beside a weary lemon tree. I pressed my nose up against the haughty glass at Saint Laurent and looked into a void of cold marble and glossy chrome. Bulgari’s pink velvet boxes do not hold any treasure. Hermès quivers with charm, offering a Katy Perry pastel fantasy of architectural elements and amplified silver hardware – a playhouse that now only postmen and Uber drivers will see.

When lockdown was announced, the luxury stores seized their shoes, bags and belts. The high street left theirs in full view. Oxford Circus is now Xanadu, drained. The long stretches of abandoned storefronts remain dressed. Moored in a state with no purpose, the bi-weekly deliveries of new stock and quick-fire changeovers have been disrupted: the fast fashions linger with no warm bodies on which to be pulled. No parties to be twirled around at. No office desks to graze. No spills to suffer — no lives to lead. One-shoulder crimson dresses, single-button cream blazers and knock-off cornflower mules await their fate, scorched by the sun like carefree noses in June. Lurid screens still broadcast videos of nubile, tanned bodies locked in a summery dream. A man on a scooter bellows ‘Somebody To Love’ by the Boogie Pimps. Seagulls sip puddles. Tall pink flowers wither behind glass.

These shop windows have become a sombre Vanitas. They are allegories of the long erasure of fashion’s ceremony and purpose. Much of what we revere about fashion has nothing to do with what it has become. Filmmaker Reiner Holzemer’s poignant study of Martin Margiela, In His Own Words¹ captures the shifts that took hold after the designer sold a majority stake to the Italian entrepreneur Renzo Rosso in the early ‘00s. The term ‘Brand Management’ suddenly became the norm. A new marketing department drew up its own collection plans based on sales figures. Keywords like ‘sexy’ and ‘chic’ were introduced so they could be applied to different product categories with ease. Fashion stopped being about the clothes. ‘Even if with the new direction there was a lot of new and fresh energy, there was something very unpleasant going on for quite a while in the fashion system,’ Margiela says. ‘For me, it started when we had to go on the internet the same day as the show was shown. I like the energy that comes with surprise and this energy was completely lost. I felt more and more sad in a certain way. I thought, this is the start of a moment where there are different needs in the fashion world and I am not sure I can feed them.’ He walked away from the house the day of his twentieth anniversary show on 29^th September 2008. The merry-go round began to spin too fast and so, Martin Margiela got off.

Even before our lives felt like DVD extras from Safe, Todd Haynes’s 1995 melodrama about dry coughing and conspiracy theories, health fads and environmental disease, I had noticed how designers began to initiate critiques of consumerism with every season. At a talk hosted inside a pop-up shop in Berlin, the photographer and co-founder of the menswear label GmbH, Benjamin Alexander Huseby calmly said that ‘we need to end capitalism,’ whilst bundling us into his latest fleece jackets with curved seams. Everyone ate cheesecake. But now that clothes-shopping has been deemed inessential, I receive daily press releases from brands that commit to producing new garments in sustainable ways, PR offices eager to share their riff on loungewear and brands touting discount codes.

We’re all functioning with a new-fangled high-tech anxiety that worries about the self and the social order in chorus. Does the world need another dress, I wonder? A great fucking trouser? Where does Balenciaga’s check and houndstooth double-face wool-blend wrap coat fit into what’s happening right now? Where do Gucci’s GG Marmont metallic-leather block-heel sandals stand in all this?

Approaching Marble Arch, I thought about Lynn Hershman’s 25 Windows, a Portrait/Project for Bonwit Teller.² In 1976, the artist took over all of the department store’s Fifth Avenue windows, installing a series of tableaux vivants that were part social commentary and part fashion parade. Street theatre: in one, a male mannequin aims a pistol at a love rival, further down a body is coyly turned away from us underneath a still shower. In another, a mannequin is posed with her hand crashing through the glass that passers-by reach out and hold. Hershman’s project encapsulates the grit, danger and glamour of 1970s New York (the windows are Guy Bourdin newsreels come to still-life) but also the social commentary that fashion delivers through fantasy. The endless gifs of Naomi Campbell toting a gun at Versace’s S/S 1998 menswear show whilst wearing a pink crystal mesh dress, or the sharing of Shalom Harlow as victim of two Pygmalion robots in Alexander McQueen’s S/S 1999 show attest to that. Fashion needs to be embodied, it needs to have something to say. Cathy Horyn said in her 2012 interview with Hershman that the artist, ‘believes there is still the opportunity for stores ‘to deal with the moral and political issues of today’ — although she suspects that most people are looking at their cellphones rather than at windows.³ The naked store window publicises Fashion’s vulnerability; the millions of garment workers, textile growers, stylists, photographers, magazine editors, store owners, button sewers, suddenly all left with no work to do. Left to find new ways of existing.

The word ‘unprecedented’ is the hook in the battle cry for political survival during these – unprecedented – times. Amongst the deaths, the sickness, the panic, the stockpiling, the zooming, the virtual gallery tours, the endless requests for Facetime, the handwashing, the dread, is a violent longing for wisdom. Each and every morning we wake to fresh podcasts, emails and PDFS, almost manic in their exhortations of what Fashion needs to learn. ‘It’s Time to Rewire the Fashion Industry’⁴ the Business of Fashion announces. In The Guardian, Tamsin Blanchard asks: ‘Can a greener, fairer fashion industry emerge from crisis?’⁵ suggesting that this unwelcome interruption is bringing ‘a new sense of connectedness, responsibility and empathy’ – if you know where to look for it.

At Dior, the white linen blinds are down. In self-isolated purgatory, we begin to question our need for material things. The theatre is closed, the system stalled. We consider this bloated trade that riffs off a manufactured, manicured need. We think about how much space we take up in the world, how much we miss each other. How much of what we knew will return to the empty window?

Dal Chodha is a writer and scholar and the editor of Archivist Editions. He lives in London.

1. Margiela: In His Own words, directed by Reiner Holzemer, 2019, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11284244/ ↩

2. Lynn Hershman Leeson, 25 Windows, a Portrait/Project for Bonwit Teller, 1976, The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3996? ↩

3. Cathy Horyn, Bonnie the Mannequin’s Wild New York Adventure, The 6^th Floor Blog, The New York Times, 13 December 2012, https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/bonnie-the-mannequins-wild-new-york-adventure/ ↩

4. Imran Amed and Achim Berg, The State of Fashion 2020: Coronavirus Update — It’s Time to Rewire the Fashion Industry, The Business of Fashion, 8 April 2020, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/the-state-of-fashion-2020-coronavirus-update-bof-mckinsey-report-release-download ↩

5. Tamsin Blanchard, ‘Put Earth first’: can a greener, fairer fashion industry emerge from crisis?, The Guardian, 27 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/08/fashion-industry-reels-as-coronavirus-shuts-shops-and-cancels-orders ↩

Apple’s iPhone 4 – released on 15 June 2010 – has made narcissists of us all. This 4.5” x 2.31” rectangular device in grey ceramic and soft glass, promised a hyper-connected world and, with its new front facing camera, gave us a way to put ourselves right at the centre of it. It has pixelated human emotion, delivered instant news and promoted tidy eyebrows and sleepy kittens ever since. Notifications ping, urging us to reconsider what went before.

The past is pervasive. A new selfie competes immediately with any that have been taken years before; photographs are consistently stripped of their context and reassessed as if anew. Soon, historians will have to peer at acres of hard-drives, fizzing with the heat of low-resolution JPEGs, GIFs and TIFFS and find nuance in the narrative. Watch, for example, Hedi Slimane’s autumn/winter 1998/1999 menswear show for Yves Saint Laurent on YouTube – its fuzzy gaze creates an aura of authenticity around clothes that look just as contemporary today. We suspect it is from the archive, but could be easily fooled. ‘The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious,’ the artist Hito Steyerl wrote in her 2009 essay ‘In Defense of the Poor Image.’¹ Things of the past are today made instantly available and new.

Hedi Slimane constantly refers to himself in his work. His reprise of silhouettes, casting and music from his time as Creative Director at Saint Laurent exasperated journalists reporting on his Celine debut in October 2018. ‘Slimane doesn’t seem particularly interested in addressing the mundane issues in a woman’s life. His fashion is not here to solve your problems. Save your problems for your therapist. His designs are about his vision. They are not welcoming. They exist behind the velvet rope. They are the after after party,’ Robin Givhan wrote in The Washington Post.²

The anticipation for Slimane’s spring/summer 2019 collection was fervid, albeit incredulous. Before him, Phoebe Philo had nurtured a cerebral pageantry that had become the go-to for affluent, transatlantic women with careers, brains, children and Isa Genzken sculptures on top of piles of glossy books. Reams of copy were produced when she left the house in 2017 after ten years at the helm. Instagram accounts were made. ‘I Miss Phoebe’, ‘RESPECT THE É’ and ‘BRING BACK PHILO’ were printed across T-shirts. Céline (note the ‘é’) and its female Creative Director were eulogised as clothes for the intelligent, ‘real’ woman who appreciates pockets in her jumpers. Any man in this post-Philo landscape would have had a hard time, let alone one whose last show featured forty-two elongated models wearing swipes of glossy red lipstick and mini sequined frocks, their sky high stilettos clacking against polished stone. Hedi’s appointment was perverse.

Weeks before the show, Slimane photographed fresh new faces with luminous teenage skin for posters that went up in big cities around the world. His lens has focused on a dawn-time, dewy after-a-night-out glamour since the early 00s. His ‘girls’ are never in bright, domestic environments full of colour and textile, as Philo’s women seemed to be. Slimane’s muses are always in stark spaces. They always look alone.

On the night of the show, I was at home watching the live stream. I opened up a group chat on my phone. ‘What do we think is going to happen?’ I asked. ‘I think we know,’ came the resounding reply. Collectively, my colleagues and I had a desire to be shocked after a season of okay clothes. We knew that Slimane was going to pick up where he’d left off at Saint Laurent two years previously, but the ninety-six looks didn’t offend me in the way they did so many others. The group chat murmured dutifully about Philo but I was attracted to Slimane’s refusal to look outside of the world he had created for himself since the mid 1990s, a world that seemed to be about dancing, drugs and decadence. The show certainly felt out of touch, but it didn’t feel undesirable. A far cry from the wokeness that even suburban titles like Vogue have commandeered; all those young, underdeveloped bodies, those white models, those small skirts and stupid 1980s hats. It was a little dated, sure, but does that make it bad?

Where Philo was supposedly reacting to women’s lives, Slimane to many felt reactionary. Vanessa Friedman at The New York Times wrote that the show was a boring retread of things that Slimane had done before. The Hollywood Reporter went so far as to ask if he was the ‘Donald Trump of fashion.’ Some reviewers referred to headline-driven politics, in particular the Kavanaugh hearing, wondering if Slimane’s skirts were yet another patriarchal abuse. The world is pretty fucked up – human rights abuses read like shopping lists, the ocean is full of plastic, no-one can seem to agree on gender dynamics – how the hell can you like something that’s so démodé, people cried with indignation. The global reaction to Slimane’s Celine was predictable disappointment. His nubile vision felt like an attack on all women.

If fashion truly is this thing that swirls and surges forth, if it changes and shapes our times, what happens when a designer stands still? Is perpetual self-homage a welcome, steady approach in uncertain times or does this dogma lead to a dead end? Staring into black mirrors we all play Narcissus, fascinated by our own faces, so can we really condemn Slimane for not evolving? Could it be that Slimane’s staunchness is the uncomfortable reflection of our own self-absorption?

At each company where he has been since he became the ready-to-wear director of men’s collections at Yves Saint Laurent in 1996, Slimane has approached his work in the same way. He references a time when youth was fetishised above all else. He adds a smack of glossy, Warholian relatability. Between 2000-2007 he created Dior Homme at Christian Dior, devising a recognisable, rigorous look for the house which has shaped so much of the standard tailoring we see today. His autumn/winter 2001 ‘Solitaire’ show was fast-paced with slim black suits and white, open-collar shirts; the models came out with licks of hair blown back. Cathy Horyn remarked that: ‘Where Mr. Slimane excels is … in his ability to impart a sense that these are clothes for the here and now.’³ Some fourteen years later, Slimane reflected on that time to Yahoo Style: ‘The early ‘00s were long gone and I felt disconnected to something that for me looked somehow from the past, even if I had been active, excited, and part of this movement at the time. I would now rather explore an analogue world, that could bypass the botoxed-digital revolution, an alternative aesthetic that feels emotional, moving and warm, slightly wrong or chaotic at times. Anything but a deadly digital flat screen world.’⁴ As Armani had in the 1980s, Slimane moved suiting into a new realm. Karl Lagerfeld infamously attributed his dramatic weight-loss during the period to his desire to fit into one of Slimane’s slim fit suits. To him, the clothes were ‘right for the moment because it was of the moment.’⁵

When Slimane joined Saint Laurent for a second time in 2012 (his first stint as director of menswear ready-to-wear ended when he left for Dior) he rolled out a much-lambasted ‘Reform Project’ of the house, most famously dropping the ‘Yves’ from the ready-to-wear label and establishing a design base in LA, 9,000km away from Rue de L’Université on Paris’ Left Bank where the brand had been based since 1961. Four years later, Slimane was out and succeeded by Anthony Vaccarello whose look borrows a lot from the glitzier end of Slimane’s. Look at Celine’s new Hedi-approved stores next to Saint Laurent’s and you’ll be hard-pressed to tell the two apart – each is a mausoleum of grey marble and chrome. You can practically taste the cigarettes and champagne.

It’s rare for a designer to change how people use fashion to express themselves more than once in their career. When he was at Saint Laurent, Slimane’s concentration on the British music scene and his vampiric eye on the young paid off as sales reportedly crossed the €1 billion mark in 2016. The approachability of the boho LA-meets-Marais look, the dialled down concepts and their lack of pretension appealed to a pool much deeper than those on the front row. ‘Two years ago when Mr. Slimane departed fashion, the world was a different place. Women were different. Hell, they were different a few days ago. They have moved on. But he has not,’ Friedman griped after his first Celine show.⁶ Slimane’s glam-rock-pomp goes against the status quo of puritan modesty that has taken over much of fashion. Whilst at Saint Laurent, Slimane was criticised for making very accessible looking clothes, the kind that Zara would have on sale within three weeks. It was a look that he coined ‘post contemporary.’ As some peers were striving for futuristic fantasy, Slimane shifted the focus to quotidian simplicity – and a certain hedonism closer to the perspective of fashion in the 1980s. ‘A dress to get laid, dancing shoes, a prom suit, anything that makes someone feel good about themselves and confident, without going too deep into concepts or being dead-serious about the clothes.’⁷

‘Post-contemporary’ meant that his second, altogether more grown-up, haute-bourgeois collection for Celine seemed, to some, like a complete volte face – the over-the-knee shearling boots, the faded jeans, the suede bombers and the pleated skirts were so deliciously 1970s, so clearly wearable yet rich-looking. Slimane, it was assumed, had come around to the critics’ way of thinking. Yet quickly images from Celine’s campaign archive between 1977-79 began to surface online: Slimane had just served the house codes with his rigorous, glossy relatability.

In revelling in his own past, Slimane is just like us: transfixed by our own mirror image, desperate to claim space in an ethereal world. Like Narcissus, he is comforted by his own reflection. ‘I always believed in repetition, pursuing endlessly the same idea. You cannot own more than one identified style and you need to evolve within the same codes. I transform and borrow constantly from my past collections, what I believe to be making sense or relevant today,’ Slimane said in 2015.⁸ Spellbound by his own likeness, he edits his past to look like his present. Silent to the rippling of critique, Slimane is consistency in a confounding age. 

Dal Chodha is a writer, scholar and the editor of Archivist Editions. He lives in London and wears jumpsuits all the time.

1. Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image,’ Journal #10, November 2009, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ ↩

2. Robin Givhan, ‘Hedi Slimane has blown up Celine. But to what end?,’ The Washington Post, 28 September 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/hedi-slimane-has-blown-up-celine-but-to-what-end/ ↩

3. Cathy Horyn, ‘Review/Fashion; Ford Shines, but Stars Come Out for Slimane,’ The New York Times, 30 January 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/style/review-fashion-ford-shines-but-stars-come-out-for-slimane.html ↩

4. ‘Exclusive: Hedi Slimane On Saint Laurent’s Rebirth, His Relationship With Yves & the Importance of Music,’ Yahoo Style, 12 August 2015, https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/exclusive-hedi-slimane-on-saint-laurents-126446645943.html ↩

5. ‘Dior Homme by Hedi Slimane – Fashion Times Documentary,’ Fashion Times, c.2004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opUAzWhle9I&t=5s ↩

6. Vanessa Friedman, ‘Hedi Slimane’s Celine: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,’ The New York Times, 29 September 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/fashion/celine-hedi-slimane-paris-fashion-week.html ↩

7. Exclusive: Hedi Slimane On Saint Laurent’s Rebirth, His Relationship With Yves & the Importance of Music,’ Yahoo Style, 12 August 2015, https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/exclusive-hedi-slimane-on-saint-laurents-126446645943.html ↩

8. Ibid. ↩