How to sum up the new season mood?
As designers turn against hype and extravagance in favour
of more considered collections, the fashion landscape shifts to one of
enlightenment, says Harriet Quick. Illustration by AugustynkaTHE swingof THINGSPicture yourself on a garden swing, spring breeze
on your skin, wearing a flowing, balloon-sleeved
dress, soothed into submission by a Qigong
session, devices switched to airplane mode. Or
strolling along a street in high-rise carpenter
trousers and a shirt – nothing that shouts “new”.
These are just a couple of the vignettes conjured by fashion,
as creatives connect to our yearning for slowness and tranquillity
in a hyper-functioning world, and simultaneously, in the face
of the climate crisis, move their practices towards sustainability.
We are all taking stock of what drives fashion and desire
today. Call it the slo-mo movement, the anti-hype trend.
“The collection is about time, about slowing down and
having a moment to think and to be together as a studio –
calm in our own thoughts,” said Alexander McQueen’s Sarah
Burton, backstage after her s/s ’20 show. “It started with a
group life-drawing class held in-store by artist Julie Verhoeven,
with everyone’s sketches being brought together and
embroidered on the loom for a series of dresses. The exercise
emphasised the sense of working together – time spent
reconnecting with one another and the world.” The meditative
collection – presented on simple stripped floorboards and
under a fabric awning – opened with a puff-sleeved ivory
dress fashioned in hand-beetled linen, which was woven at
William Clark, the oldest linen mill in Ireland, and bleached
in the fields by sun and moonlight. The show closed with
the entire backstage and studio team filing on to the boards
as the London Contemporary Orchestra played out the last
bars of a score composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge.
Fashion is a master at creating hyperventilating moments
and multimillion-pound spectacles, but this season, leading
creatives forcefully pared back presentations, wiping clean
the excess and hype to usher in a more reflective, sedate pace
with clothes that felt rooted in reality. Cue the everyday
flaring jeans, blouses and blazers that strolled by at Celine,
worn by models with “So what?” expressions; or the blue
denim and Breton combinations that ambled along the Rue
Cambon rooftop set at Chanel under a fitting grey sky.
Normal? Grey? Celebrity-free front rows? The new face of
fashion is embracing the day-to-day intimate dialogue we
have with our clothes, not just the Insta-bait surface.
Natacha Ramsay-Levi at Chloé sent out a charcoal
pinstripe suit and voluminous scarf-neck equestrian blouse
as an opening anti-statement. The look, which would have
been considered banal only a few collections ago, now appears
relevant beyond the fanfare of the show season. “I thoughtit was a good moment to be able to make silhouettes more
perennial and less disposable; less about what is the fashion
of the day and more about the signatures of Chloé. It’s my
way of saying, ‘Let’s calm down,’” says Ramsay-Levi. “A lot
of this collection was about repeating looks I have already
done. It was a statement – a sincere statement,” she continues.
“This time round, I didn’t try to add a lot of fashion novelty
where we didn’t need it. My point of view is becoming more
mature. So the very first look was a blouse and a pant because
those are perennial clothes, and the jacket this season is almost
exactly the same as one I have done before.”
Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri delivered her signature
ballerina skirts and Bar jackets in neutral shades, on figures
that meandered through the branches and foliage as if
lost in their own thoughts. No proclamation T-shirts or
overload of meaning. In New York, Marc Jacobs upturned
the concept of show by playing with our perception of time
and formula. He started with the finale, as the entire cast
casually weaved through a set of white vintage chairs –
truffled out by Stefan Beckman from flea markets – and
then peeled backwards to individual time-warp looks that
read like Jacobs’s greatest hits, 1970s daffodil-yellow three-
piece velvet suits and prairie dresses included.
Against a backdrop of climate change, material scarcity and
consumer fatigue, the very notion of disposable seasonal trends- the currency that fashion has dealt in since the proliferation
of ready-to-wear in the 1960s – is increasingly irrelevant.
Where once a designer’s prowess was judged by an ability to
flip between extreme trends collection by collection, proposing
sharp shifts in silhouette, colour and mood (kooky modesty
gave way to extravagant camp, which in turn flipped towards
bourgeois classicism in the latest hyper-speed cycle), the new
watchwords of luxury are restraint, quintessential and core.
In this wake, the grand architects of 21st-century fashion
are calling for a breather, a different perspective. How does
fashion, the poster child of guilt-free consumption, built-in
obsolescence, move forward in 2020?
Miuccia Prada’s resolution was to simplify and present “less
useless stuff ”. That translated as some of the classics Prada is
known for (fine cashmere knits, semi-sheer slip-like midiskirts,
enveloping tailored coats) and even a poignant reprise of the
bowling bag, one of the original It-bags, which came to
symbolise retail hysteria in the new millennium. If you still
have one duster-wrapped in the back of a cupboard, then
lucky you; it should be treasured anew like an ancient relic
of fashion’s glorious hype era. Ditto the Fendi Baguette. >
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