New York Fashion Week is half-over, and there has been much in the daily summaries to suggest that the traditionally traditional New York scene is slowly beginning to turn on its head. Reports range from
unexciting, to
"tightly focused", to
sheer confusion.
It's to be expected from a crowd that for a decade has come to depend on the New York shows to be a centering, a sort of gentle take-off before the turbulence of Paris and Milan, where "edge" is bedfellow with "elegance." Is it any wonder, since Europe has been the launchpad for a majority of the most influential artistic movements in the past century? It is only recently that designers and editors stateside have begun to ask What
is the difference between elegant, new, edgy and branché?
Cathy Horyn thinks she knows the answer: "to be branché is to be elegant, but to be modern is to be natural." I don't know if I agree. I refuse to be dictated to in that way; it is my place to stand firm behind the belief that
to be natural is to be modern, even if that nature is to be clad in my own freshly-imagined artifice everytime I step out the door. To me, there is no difference. Elegance, newness, edginess, and "hip" factor are, in the fashion world as with any entertainment business, completely arbitrary and as specfic to the wearer as to the observer.
La Spiers has it right in her
Marc Jacobs runway report. The only person who wins in clothes like these is Gisele. That is, if winning is merely defined as adhering to codified and commercialized tastes. On the Helmutzonian figure, the silhouettes are enough out of their historical context that they take on the attitude of the wearer—namely a media-reinforced assurance of acceptance. On a slightly less statuesque build, however, this matronly look [which has long been on the streets] challenges societal views on age and figure. There was a time, remember, when a bustle begged a gentleman's eye to imagine just what lay underneath the wire piled on a woman's posterior, a body part that only a hundred years earlier would never have been played up apart from the hips and breasts in equal fashion.
Today, aesthetic values telescope at an increasing rate, and the inward spiraling of retrofetishism constantly forces us to reexamine social movements as they relate to the body, the body to art, the art to entertainment, the entertainment to social movements. Contexts of clothing, in both their construction and use, become as layered as generational values. It is my hope, however, that this is only one branch of fashion as philosophy. My blessing goes to designers like As Four, who, with
their Fall 2004 show on Monday and in previous seasons, ask everything and nothing of the fashion public because their work cannot be accurately evaluated according to tradition. As Four has no tradition, no loyalties, no rules. They seek to erase the line between dream and reality. When one telephones the As Four workloft, the answering party will say "Future Planet of Style." ADi, ANGE, K.A.i. and GABi want
this to be the future. They create a dialogue with fantasy by recognizing and seizing a pre-existing form [in this case, fashion] and then disavowing and superceding its previous and current framework. For As Four, clothing is about
shaping the body in a new way. They do not recycle old silhouettes and their historical connotations. They do not merely arrange objects and colors and shapes. Instead, they create new laws and new meanings
on those arrangements.
That is creation.
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