The Fashion BusinessYamamoto has become ever more influential, as he combines the aspirations
of the haute couture with the daring of the iconoclast.
By the 1990s, the Japanese avant-garde had given birth to a European
avant-garde, spearheaded by Martin Margiela, who, like Kawakubo, espoused
an aesthetic of deconstruction and radical experimentation. Margiela’s use
of recycled clothing was especially influential. He unravelled French Army
socks and knitted them into sweaters, and cut up old leather coats to make
into evening dresses. The young Belgian designer Anne Demeulemeester revels
in the inky black that Kawakubo herself has now renounced in favour of
newly transgressive colors – like pink.
Sex and gender continue to be central issues in the cultural construction
of contemporary fashion. But whereas Yves Saint Laurent politely combined
seduction and subversion, designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier have upped the
ante. “A woman, like a man, can be feminine,” insisted Gaultier, whose work
travesties traditional gender expectations. His collection ‘And God Created
Man’ featured the skirt for men, while ‘Wardrobe for Two’ focused on
androgyny. As Gaultier said in 1984: “Gender-bending, huh! It’s a game.
Young people understand that to dress like a tart doesn’t reflect one’s moral
stance – perhaps those jolies madames in their little Chanel suits are the real
tarts? I’m offering equality of sex appeal.”
Gaultier was also notorious as the apostle of bad taste. “Me, I like every-
thing,” he said. “Everything can be beautiful or ugly... I like different kinds
of beauty.” He showed his strange clothes on unconventional models – fat
women, old people, heavily tattooed and pierced people. When French Vogue
went to Brooklyn to photograph Jean-Paul Gaultier’s collection of Hasidic
fashions, many Jews complained. His use of fetishism has been especially
influential, epitomized in his corsets created for Madonna. Less obvious are
the ways in which he has subverted traditional ideas of class distinction.
Social class is no longer clearly defined in terms of fashion, in part because
of the excess associated with the nouveaux-riches styles of the 1980s. The
1980s have been stereotyped as a “decade of greed” and “excess”. Journalists
have focused on themes such as the money culture, junk bonds, and status
symbols. As it happened, the stock market crash of 1987 coincided with
Christian Lacroix’s New York opening, and there were those who drew a
connection between the two events. In her essay, “Dancing on the Lip of the
Volcano: Christian Lacroix’s Crash Chic”, society journalist Julie Baumgold
argued that “Lacroix makes clothes of such extravagant, gorgeous excess as
to divide the classes once and for all.”
The frivolous and theatrical look of Lacroix’s dresses – extended over hoops
or bustles, and adorned with garlands, fringe and ribbons, in a riot of red,
pink and gold, stripes, polka dots and roses, and costing some $15,000 to