April 12, 2014 |
Fashion loves a revolution. It’s the allusions to upheaval and dynamic change that attract; the idea that, in one fell swoop, the world can be transformed. It’s Dior’s amnesiac, full-skirted New Look, Yves Saint Laurent’s ready-made Rive Gauches, Charles Frederick Worth’s chutzpah in daring to stick his name on a slip of fabric inside a gown destined for her Imperial Majesty Eugénie, the Empress of the French. Latterly, as with trite terms like “luxury” and “iconic”, the word “revolution” has been woefully overused.
I tend to remember the verdict of Jeanloup Sieff on the “revolution” of Yves Saint Laurent’s 1960 Beat collection at Dior: a revolution in a teacup. But when you’re in the teacup, it feels very important.
Today, however, we are in the midst of another fashion revolution. Scratch that: it’s a revolution across communication as a whole, one as profound as the invention of the printing press. That sounds grandiose and overblown – very fashion, in fact. It’s not. If anything, it’s an understatement. Of course, I’m talking about the internet, a medium that has revolutionised everything from politics to pornography, right through to the clothing on our backs. “You know what I think?” says Suzy Menkes, the esteemed fashion editor of The International Herald Tribune and the only woman qualified to have the title of “Fashion’s Authority” readily affixed to her name (alongside her OBE and Légion d’honneur). “I believe that we live in one of these really exciting ages when everything is changing. I wasn’t there – although some people might not believe this – at the turn of that other century, when people were getting out of their carriages and taking off their grand hats, when the car was invented and everything became streamlined. It’s a similar sort of feeling now, that whole idea that everything in the world is changing. Certainly, the internet and all of its ramifications just makes you feel like that.” “A revolution happened,” states Donatella Versace bluntly. Please note, she uses the past tense. “I don’t know if fashion was ready. Other things were ready, but I don’t know if fashion was ready, because it moved so fast. We would move so fast with ideas.”
The fashion industry, however, has been tardy to the online party. The first dotcom bubble had swollen and burst by the time fashion even got a proper foothold online. Style.com launched in 2000 – its URL has now become part of popular fashion vernacular. It’s revolutionised the way we look at fashion. And by “we” I don’t just mean avid fashion consumers such as myself. Suddenly we are able to see entire collections at the click of a button, as opposed to the highlights presented in newspapers or magazines, removing the ability of the fashion press to “edit” the public’s perception of a show, or indeed, season.
Style.com has transformed the way fashion designers themselves look at their collections. Look at a Prada show, and you’re struck by the sequencing of the outfits: the Prada spring 2011 menswear show, for instance, with its closing quartet of multicoloured matelot-striped sweaters, seemed made for Style.com. Or at least visually orchestrated to make the most of the medium. “Nowadays, whatever I design, I look at it through my ‘digital eye’,” says David Koma, the new artistic director of the house of Mugler. “Because most people see collections on the internet… So to me, it’s very important how my clothes look this size through the screen. It is very frustrating because sometimes I create the look and we receive the samples and it looks fantastic and we love and we are excited about it, but as soon as we take pictures with flash, it doesn’t look right. Then I’m not using it or I’m not going to put it in the show, because it won’t have the same effect and people aren’t going to feel how I feel looking at it.”
The orchestration of fashion for the internet. That has been one of the biggest changes wrought by the online revolution. It’s not necessarily about clothes becoming more outrageous or shows becoming more theatrical: that happened in the 1990s, when John Galliano and Alexander McQueen staged extravaganzas hellbent on transforming fashion into a spectator sport. Haute couture was their favourite playground, where fashion could be eschewed in favour of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-Lesage-embroidered-pantaloons fantasia and nothing – but nothing – had to sell. Conversely for a commercial dead end, the budgets seemed limitless: in July 1998 John Galliano took over the entire Gare d’Austerlitz, transforming it into a Moroccan souk and sending a steam train bursting through a curtain of cyclamen silk (nearly 15 years before Marc Jacobs at Vuitton, I hasten to add).
Galliano and McQueen’s bravado approach was reflected in the work of an entire generation of designers, specifically in London: Owen Gaster staged shows in pool halls and fairgrounds, while Antonio Berardi transformed the Camden Roundhouse into a voodoo temple, and the Brixton Academy into a Las Vegas stage. Who got to see that magic? A few hundred, and then a few thousand via grainy images in newspapers. The internet upped the audience, and therefore the ante, exponentially. It wasn’t just the dozens of images suddenly available on Style.com, but designers themselves having the opportunity to broadcast their shows live, to create a universe. In 2009, the livestream of Alexander McQueen’s spring 2010 show crashed as half a million viewers simultaneously clicked to view. I know: I was part of the team of Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio.com scrambling to satisfy the insatiable view on demand.
Those audience numbers – larger than the circulation of most magazines and newspapers – are a goldmine. Especially when harnessed by a brand, rather than a publication. A designer’s www universe is entirely their own to control – and can be eradicated of critical opinion. The fashion world got behind the internet when it realised it could be used as a powerful tool to sell – sell a message, or indeed sell a product. The luxury e-commerce market in China – the biggest in the world – is currently worth £16.6 billion, a figure that has increased by over 70% in the past two years, and is only set to skyrocket further; 20-30% of all sales in China happen online. It isn’t Asia-specific: Net-A-Porter.com was valued at a cool £350 million when a majority stake was purchased by the Richemont group in 2010; Condé Nast invested £13.2 million in Farfetch.com in March 2013; and four out of five luxury houses now have their own e-commerce site. Fashion’s great, grand leap onto the internet came with dollar signs in the eyes of the men in suits. Donatella Versace insists it’s affecting her fashion at the highest level. She began to stage her Atelier Versace shows once more because of the online hunger for the glamour offered by haute couture. “We have much younger, much more international access to couture through the internet,” she states, defining her designs as “A young couture. A younger couture for them.” Them being the online audience – and the online customers.
So the internet offers a fuss-free, editorially neutral forum for hardcore frock retailing? Well, partly. The flip side is the often-scathing reviews of internet critics – not the journalists, but the fashion enthusiasts who throng to sites such as TheFashionSpot.com to dissect designers’ collections mercilessly. “I’m a total blog whore,” admits the New York designer Joseph Altuzarra – whose spring/summer 2011 collection was inspired in part by the random aesthetic associations thrown up by Google’s image search. “I was on TheFashionSpot, which is pretty vicious and when you read the stuff that people write… It’s usually the people who hate it who write on it. It’s anonymous, there’s really no censure.” The internet is a two-way medium: rather than fashion being dictated from on high, the internet allows the public a voice, and their own outlet. Style blogs were the natural offshoot, their approaches being either the street-style selfie “look at me”, or “look at this” fashion geekery. Susanna Lau, of Stylebubble.co.uk, combines both, whereas the first has been seized upon even by industry insiders, such as Anna Dello Russo, who declares that the internet has given her a new lease of fashion life. It certainly propelled her to the giddy heights of her own sell-out H&M collection, her own (sort of) hit single, and an eponymous fragrance. “I put on my blog a wish to have a perfume. And then people came to me saying, ‘That’s incredible, I want it, when did it come out?’” shrugs Dello Russo. Allora! A blogosphere superstar is born.
Dello Russo has reasoned that the hunger of her online fans for variety in her outfits has made her change clothing more times each day than Marie Antoinette. That’s debatable: Dello Russo has been a clotheshorse for years. But, with an audience to satisfy, she has possibly pushed herself further than before. I suspect she enjoyed plonking those fibreglass cherries on her head that little bit more when clocking the number of street-style bloggers thronging to capture the spectacle. A similar phenomenon seems to have seized the industry at large. Hence the new-found importance of the pre-collection, a stealth retail force for decades, but now bona fide seasons in their own right. They’re feeding a demand for product, sure, but also a demand for pure fashion imagery. Which, in turn, demands more product. “That’s the genius and the curse of the internet,” states Jonathan Anderson – who, like Altuzarra and Koma, is a member of a new internet-savvy generation of designers hitting their stride before they hit 30. “I think we live to consume – on, like, high speed. Everything you need, you need it now, you need more fixes, and whatever is on the internet is all there is. If you’ve seen it, you’ve already devoured it. And now, when you go into a shop to buy it… you’re already bored with the new stuff.”
Perhaps that’s why some brands are already beginning a backlash. “There are a lot of designers out there who are still clinging on to the horse and carriage,” states Menkes. “You’d be surprised how many almost shy away from things that they could do digitally but don’t. You only have to wait for time because the generation that’s growing up now is obviously never going to say that, never going to take that attitude… So I think, in a way, the best is yet to come.” Fashion’s latest revolution may be its greatest. And, it seems, it has only just begun.
By Alexander Fury
