Fashion: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

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Fashion: Yesterday,

Today & Tomorrow

Valerie Steele

As we enter a new millennium, fashion journalist Teri Agins proclaims The
End of Fashion. Of course, fashion has not ceased to exist. We are not all
identically dressed in a unisex uniform of tee-shirts and chinos. Nor are we
likely to be. Many people still care passionately about the way they look.
Yet fashion, as we have known it, is definitely disappearing. Certainly, over
the past fifty years, fashion has been completely transformed.
The empire of fashion has fragmented into hundreds of competing looks –
what Ted Polhemus calls “style tribes”. Polhemus has spent years studying
the effect of youth culture on street styles, and he uses the term “style tribes”
to describe the looks associated with groups such as goths, punks, and rappers.
I would argue, though, that adults also fall into different style tribes,
epitomized by different fashion labels. The Modernists, for example,
(represented by, say, Jil Sander) are an entirely different breed than the Sex
Machines (Tom Ford for Gucci). The Rebels (Alexander McQueen) can easily
be distinguished from the Romantics (John Galliano). This is not a question
of socio-economic status or age. Members of the Status Symbol tribe (Marc
Jacobs for Louis Vuitton) have neither more nor less money than members
of the Artistic Avant-Garde (Rei Kawakubo for Commes des Garçons), but
they do have very different values and lifestyles.
As a result of this stylistic proliferation, we can safely predict that there
will be no New Look next year, at least not in the sense that Christian Dior
launched his “New Look” in 1947. At that time it was still possible for a
fashion designer radically to transform the way women dressed. Dior’s first
couture collection featured dresses with small shoulders, a voluptuously
curved torso with a nipped-in waist and padded bust and hips, and long, full
skirts. It was a dramatic change from the broad shoulders, boxy torsos, and
short skirts of the war years. Some women tried to salvage their old clothes