This past year, alongside the hectic 24-hour news cycle, the game of musical chairs brought with it several notable events in the world of fashion. Dramatic changes have befallen the fashion houses, as both meaning and role of designers, creative directors, advertisers and even the clothes themselves are constantly being reevaluated. Newly enacted expectations from those who take on the role of creative director now, more than ever, focus on a demand for leadership and a legacy to be left behind. This is particularly evident in the works of some of the greats of this generation such as Phoebe Philo, Marc Jacobs, Alessandro Michele, Maria Grazia and Hedi Slimane.
The game of musical chairs is played by multiple generations with tensions arising between the changing role of fashion and a sense of reverence and nostalgia reserved for the greats of past generations such as Alber Elbaz, Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld.
The advertising world of the fashion industry is developing in directions that no one could have imagined even a mere decade prior. Many will testify that the “charm” that was characteristic of the fashion advertisements, with all of their sex appeal, provocative nature and bold statements, has since been washed away by the doctrines of the modern world; key among them sustainability and climate awareness, evolving social norms such as the view of feminism (particularly in lieu of the Me Too movement), cultural belongingness and effects of neo-capitalist wealth distribution. All these have seemingly reached a persistent boiling point that in many ways castrates the potential and freedom that the fashion industry was accustomed to in years prior.
Technology has also not spared the fashion world - as it awaits, in nerve-wracking anticipation, the outcome of the race towards a virtual world, in which it too seeks to have a meaningful role. In the meanwhile, more and more fashion houses are now embedding chips of encrypted information as digital certificates of authenticity and incorporating new technologies into their runway shows, seeking to be part of the ongoing technological AI revolution of today. We are witness to the formation of new connections between the two worlds, woven from traditional tools and materials of fashion and the embodied spiritual realism of algorithms and machines.
On the one hand, there seems to be a consensus that we live in dark times - politically, socially, and environmentally. We live in a perpetual state of depictions of war - more publicized wars and less publicized wars, political extremism spreading throughout the western world, graphic violence, environmental disasters that will affect our planet for ages to come, all enveloped in an overwhelming sense of fear of the future to come.
On the other hand, we live in an ongoing state of discovery, with medical, technological and scientific breakthroughs that purport to change the world order every other day with promises of a better reality than that experienced by previous generations.
The clash between the potential that comes with this promise and the destruction that is observed, embodies a mismatch between reality and desire, between our abilities and actions.