Connecting CreativityThe fashion industry purposefully identifies garments and accessories as
indicators of social status. Historians have suggested that this has been so
since the fourteenth century.^11 Nowadays, this identification has become a
carefully planned and greatly accelerated activity. In the eternal ping-pong
game between antithetical meanings, the motivating force for creativity within
fashion is nearly always, or often, cultural. When Chanel urged her wealthy
clients to dress like their maids,^12 she was playing on dialectics between rich
and poor, high and low status, snobbery and inverted snobbery, but the reason
for her attraction to these particular themes, and the reason for the fashion’s
success, was her ability to intuit the predominant social tensions of the
moment (in this case ideas the uncertainties of wealth and power initiated
by the economic unrest of the 1930s).
The potential of cultural models to drive creativity cannot be over-
emphasized. Successful designers refer to as wide a variety as possible, drawing
from history and going beyond it, they focus on conceived models of an
ideal future life. No matter how successful though, designers cannot create
the desire to possess or acquire a particular product, but they can create
products which satisfy or arouse incipient or otherwise undetected desire.
This, in my opinion, is usually achieved by the ‘lifestyle’ associations a product
has for the consumer; designers and companies like ours devote themselves
increasingly to formulating our identities from visions of an ideal existence.
The stimuli for creative ideas in fashion have always originated from the
widest variety of sources. Even in the last few years, we have seen influences
exerted by exhibitions, films, writers, geographical areas, traditional cultures
and metropolitan phenomena. It seems that fashion can appropriate practic-
ally anything and turn it into a ‘look’, the success of the look depending of
course on its resonance with the cultural/social concerns of the day. Many
enjoy the challenge of ‘unpicking’ fashion to reveal the influences which
shaped it, but to me, what really matters is not to identify fashion’s sources,
but to examine how they generate innovative product ideas, the design process
and the marketing of the product.
I have compared fashion to a language, and to a game, and there are
sufficient similarities to justify both analogies. But where fashion differs is
in its scant regard for rules. In a field which prioritizes innovation and change,
practices are swept aside before they become established. Rules have a very
short life indeed, and this is what I appreciate most about my work. Successful
strategies inevitably become harder and harder to forecast, since the elements
- Breward, C., The Culture of Fashion, Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1995, pp. 22–9. - Charlie-Roux, E. Trans Amphoux, N., Chanel, London: The Harrill Press, 1995.