Recently, in the firm belief that to access consumer wallets it is necessary to be accessible, fashion has been doing its utmost to demystify itself: allowing documentary filmmakers into its inner sanctums (The September Issue); tossing parties (Fashion’s Night Out); and simplifying its opaque pricing structures via second lines. In Milan, there’s even a municipal councillor for fashion, design and events, charged with integrating the fashion sector and the rest of the city, who organised a C’N’C Costume National show/art-and-music spectacular in the Piazza del Duomo on the first day of fashion week, inviting everyone. Fashion for the people!
Giovanni Terzi, the man responsible, explains: “It’s an opportunity that will enable the Milanese to become better acquainted with this fascinating world, which is anything but ephemeral and is indispensable in terms of the figures accounting for productivity on our balance sheet.” (Fashion accounts for 50 per cent of Milan’s gross domestic product.)
And yet, as was increasingly clear in the shows that led up to the Big Democratic Show, sometimes accessibility is not always the best thing when it comes to fashion. Sometimes, a little opacity is not a bad thing.
For example, waiting for the Dolce & Gabbana show to start, my neighbour eyed the sand-covered runway, the giant tree trunks flanking the head of the catwalk, and said: “Oh, they’re doing cowgirls.”
He hadn’t seen a single outfit. But when he read the programme notes, which specified “urban cowgirls”, he looked smug, and when the first girl strode out in distressed denim jeans and distressed denim shirt, and was followed by more girls in distressed denim bustiers and distressed denim multi-tiered miniskirts, he looked like he had won a bet.
Even the less overtly cowgirl stuff – lace shirts and men’s suit jackets and up-to-there crinolines and floor-sweeping Scarlett O’Hara skirts – only added up to the style equivalent of a one-liner. Though the clothes themselves were fine, the whole theme was simply too familiar.
Similarly, at Moschino Cheap & Chic a pun (“Pop & Pop-eline”) became an entire collection, as 1940s-esque beach pin-ups in daisy-polka dot miniskirts and rompers appeared alongside oversize ruffled shirts, Pepto-Bismol pink sundresses with big black bows and jewel-trimmed jackets. Betty-Boop goes to the boardwalk.
Both D&G and Cheap & Chic are second lines, so it’s possible to argue that this lack of subtlety is the point, but at the same time, it’s hard not to think that not thinking is being increasingly conflated with accessibility. Which is a lexicographical, as well as sartorial, mistake.
After all, as the oracle of fashion, Miuccia Prada, intoned after her show: “Life is a mystery: so many countries; the city, the beach. How do we make sense of it all?”
Her answer was: you don’t (or she doesn’t). You are miserly with your explanations and generous with your imagination and you give people the leeway to have their own ideas instead of banging them over the head with the references in what they wear.
Because really, how could the mental journey from life’s mysteries to the mysteries of a hotel corridor, to the mystery of veiled women you might see in that corridor, to the mystery of fabric that looks like one thing (duchesse satin) but is another (silk/nylon mix), all be read in trapeze-yoked jackets and Bermuda shorts that look as if they had been hacked off with a pair of shears; halter dresses and bloomers printed with remixed digital prints of chandeliers and resort scenes; and nets of plastic crystals thrown over white scuba bodysuits? Yikes.
And yet the clothes are so engaging, even if you don’t understand them – even if you can’t be bothered to try – they keep you thinking. And that means, as Ms Prada said, that even though they are part of a main line and will be very expensive, “I think this collection will sell very well.”
