The Fashion Businesssystem or structure, if we want it to be a useful instrument in helping us to
understand or improve our social and physical environment. That creativity
flourishes through being subjected to constraint may sound like a contra-
diction in terms, but I believe that it is not. Perhaps as a consequence of an
overall attitude to the world based on daily experience, many today regard
creativity as being linked to disorder; abstract expressionism is evidence of
this. Yet as recently as the eighteenth century, Pascal asserted that order was
sufficient (and necessary) to define creativity,^1 though I find myself doubting
this when I find myself in the chaos of our design department.
In my opinion we tend nowadays to rarely abstract the idea of creativity.
We tend instead to regard it as an attribute of certain individuals. ‘That is a
creative person’, we are used to saying. What do we mean? Do we judge
outward appearance, the image we are offered, someone’s behaviour or maybe
new ideas, something done in a certain way, a project or performance with a
particular style? Any of these would show us to perceive creativity as
‘something different’. We tend to believe that normality does not favour a
creative attitude, or if you like, that human beings are not ‘normally’ creative.
A great and fascinating debate on creativity and genius enlivened the
psychoanalytical studies of Freud and Jung. The former thought creativity
to be the artist’s tool, by means of which he could express the contents of his
unconscious. In the writings on Leonardo and Michelangelo he analysed the
two great masterpieces St Anne and Moses in which he could see turned into
art, the nature and the inner secrets of the artists’ souls as individuals.^2 For
Jung, on the contrary, the creative person was one, who, through his or her
work, is able to emancipate the self from his or her own individuality to
become an interpreter of the universal themes of mankind which he,
unconsciously, activates.^3 Jung’s model seems to be the one which most
accurately defines creativity in the context of fashion,^4 where the creative
challenge is to divine unconscious collective desires, as I shall discuss.
The Italian writer, Italo Calvino, in connection with some lectures he was
to give at Harvard University within the prestigious Charles Elliot Norton
Poetry Lecture Series, wrote some very interesting papers entitled ‘Six Memos
for the Next Millennium’.^5 They list the essential literary qualities for writers
of the future as being lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity
and consistency. Unfortunately, his sudden death prevented him from giving
- Pascale, B., Pensieri, Turin: Eindaudi, 1962.
- Freud, S., Writing on Art and Literature, Stanford University Press, 1997.
- Jung, C. G. The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1971.
- Arieti, S., Creativity – The Magic Synthesis, New York: Basic Books, 1976.
- Calvino, I., Lezioni Americane, Milano: Garzanti, 1986.