Luxury and Restraintforms, of unity and wholeness, and an invitation to seek meaning, rather
than a mask to conceal the codes hidden under the simple designs.
By the 1990s there was a growing anxiety, exacerbated by the economic
recession, about fashions that flaunted their expense too flagrantly. Con-
sumers’ feelings of exhaustion with obvious labels compounded this after
the huge rise in awareness surrounding designer fashion, which had become
so closely tied into the entertainment business and gossip columns in the
previous decade. People at all levels of society were more familiar with prestige
fashion brands than ever before. Designers at the cutting edge of fashion’s
elite like Helmut Lang were able to assert minimalist style as the obverse of
‘vulgar’, obvious designs that by the 1990s seemed so unfashionable. His
subtle style is shown in an outfit from 1993 where narrow-cut leather trousers
and single-breasted jacket were teamed with a synthetic printed tee-shirt.
While excessive designs continued to make headlines for Versace and Mugler,
it was Lang’s cool, urban silhouettes that married basic shapes with edgy
colour combinations and advanced technological fabrics, which were both
the crucial look for fashion insiders, and the key influence on other designers,
eager to find a new vision of the modern.
Lang helped to reinvigorate the fashion for simplicity. By using cheap,
industrial fabrics, and discreetly complex construction methods, he added
an urban sophistication to his designs, a feeling that the consumer had to
have greater fashion knowledge to appreciate the complexity of such
seemingly basic items. His clothes suggested cultivated taste, and, as Bourdieu
noted, in the case of consuming to demonstrate knowledge, rather than just
wealth, ‘What is at stake is indeed “personality”, i.e. the quality of the person
which is affirmed in the capacity to appropriate an object of quality. The
objects endowed with the greatest distinctive power are those which most
clearly attest the quality of the appropriation, and therefore the quality of
the owner.’^17
Prada was the other label which helped to bring minimalist style to the
forefront of 1990s fashion consciousness. The designers’ need to construct
an identity which spoke of both cultural and fashion capital was acute at a
time of anxiety and insecurity, both the etiolated, androgynous chic of Lang’s
work, and the ironic subtlety of Prada’s inverted status symbols, enabled
consumption that was gratifyingly fashionable, yet eluded the taint of
obviousness. A red coat from Prada’s Autumn/Winter 1998/99 collection
showed her attention to detail in horizontal slits that broke up the smooth
surface of the coat, adding a dissonance to its simple form.
- Bourdieu, P., Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge,
1996, p. 281.