chose, discuss, and combine fashions, but have few points of access point or inter-
face to engage in fashion. Consumers can “poach” or recombine, or even join brand
workshops to recycle and customize garments, but it is usually done within a strict
framework, thoroughly calculated design from the brand name public relations
people. Designers, on the other hand, although they have privilege of access to the
modes of fashion production, rarely have the time or freedom of action to rethink
the action spaces they inhabit as a matter of routine. To most people fashion per se
is always prêt-a-porter, ready-to-wear.
On our streets we notice the steadily increasing number of fashion mannequins
that looking down at us from the shop windows. With the escalating pace of fash-
ion, styles are constantly changing and big retail brands like H&M and Zara replace
their collections with ever-shorter intervals, sometimes as often once a month
(Thomas 2007). If we perceive the rapid shift in the rate of collections as the heart-
beat of the fashion system in which we live, we are most certainly conscious of its
racing pulse.
This is not only a one-sided phenomenon, not only a force that stems from brand
names or the fashion industry. There is also an increasing interest in fashion arising
from a number of points of reference, from the rising number of glossy fashion
magazines to the heavyweight morning papers that now even cover the Fashion
Weeks. Television is flooded with fashion-related programs and teenagers dream of
becoming fashion designers at the same time as professors are granted academic
chairs in Fashion Theory. People are generally more informed about fashion and
the collections of major designers are exhibited at prominent art galleries and mu-
seums.
This increasing interest in fashion is taking place at the same time as the fashion
industry exerts a greater influence on design disciplines and that in more complex
ways than they did a few decades ago. Advertising agencies produce their own fash-
ion magazines, the car industry collaborate with fashion designers, and fashion
brands designs mobile phones. The fashion system has moved from that of linear
and monolithic biannual collections of the haute couture catwalks that were cen-
tralized to Paris to an extensive global distribution of multi-layered and complex
systems. Several parallel fashions and the multitudes of subcultures are now all
running criss-cross on top of each other like computer programs, plug-ins and ap-
plications that mix not only high and low, centre and periphery, but equally shal-
lowness and depth, fluidity and density. It can be argued that fashion itself has
moved from defining a universal distinction of “in” and “out” to being a set of more
complex forces. Although it now consists of micro-cultural multitudes of varying
gravity and density fashion still contains some its core elements and is indeed, as
Karl Lagerfeld says, ”ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.” (Lagerfeld 2007)
&
As designers it is necessary for us to look into a central question concerning the
role of fashion in society: we know fashion engages many, but how can the many
engage in fashion? How can we as designers operate with an inclusive fashion yet
still allow it to remain exclusive? Fashion is always some form of difference; “to
look like everyone else, but before everyone else” as phrased by fashion journalist
Suzanne Pagold. (Pagold 2000: 8) Thus, “democratic” fashion, in the meaning of
equally accessible and egalitarian, is an oxymoron, neither possible nor desired,
just as smooth mundane fashion would be that of sameness. What we see is rather