“What’s that?” I asked, looking at a spread of drawings on the wall of his studio-cum-workroom in London’s down-at-the-heels Dalston neighborhood. (Think: East Village.)
“Resort!” said the 28-year-old Northern Irishman whose label is known as J. W. Anderson.
Resort? Already! This guy has been in business only five years and has just 12 people in his studio. Does he really have to join the fashion treadmill, churning out more than four collections a year? A treadmill it is, as Alber Elbaz of Lanvin said with a sigh recently, before his men’s-wear show: he used to go on exploratory trips and hang out in downtown galleries, trawling for inspiration for his shows. But with the number of collections now doubled, there is no time to do much travel beyond the virtual kind.
If we accept that the pace of fashion today was part of the problem behind the decline of John Galliano, the demise of Alexander McQueen and the cause of other well-known rehab cleanups, nonstop shows seem a high price to pay for the endless “newness” demanded of fashion now.
The strain on both budgets and designers is heavy. And only the fat-cat corporations can really afford to put on two mega ready-to-wear shows a year, or four if you add two haute couture shows, or six if you count men’s wear. Resort and prefall push the number up to eight. A couple of promotional shows in Asia, Brazil, Dubai or Moscow can bring the count to 10.
Ten shows a year! If you knock off the holiday season and the summer break, that means a show nearly every month.
But who needs more fashion and is gagging for yet another show? And how can designers cope, given that even the prolific Picasso did not churn out work like factory-baked cookies?
For all the promotional excitement attached to the international collections, it is the resort or prefall lines that are on the shelves for close to six months, while the so-called main line is in and out in about eight brief weeks.
How to make sense of this endless rush for the new when there are no longer any simple markers, like seasons? During the summer, when you are looking for a breezy maxi dress, the fall wool coats are hanging on the rails. Come early November, they will have vanished in favor of resort, which used to be called cruise, as if everyone hopped on a boat to the Caribbean with the first autumn chill.
Who are the crazy ones? The buying public demanding fashion now!, clicking online to buy during Burberry’s live-stream runway show months before the clothes are produced for the stores? The online shoppers hitting on special delivery pieces from Net-a-Porter that no one else will have — at least for the next two weeks?
Or has fashion itself gone mad, gathering speed so ferociously that it seems as if the only true luxury today is the ability to buy new and exclusive clothes every microsecond?
by Suzy Menkes, NY Times | Read more:
Image: William Klein/Trunk Archive
