Fashion doesn’t exist without constant change—but who controls that change is changing. Vulgarians are at the gate and they’re wielding iPhones.
The fashion industry needs external inspiration. Eighty-three collections got kicked down the catwalk during New York Fashion Week in February, and that doesn’t happen without some borrowed ideas. To give the extreme example: John Galliano’s offensive theft of Native American culture in his 1998/99 autumn/winter haute couture collection for Dior.
From their bubble, designers used to reach out a hand, swipe something and claim it as their own. They were protected in that bubble—and not just because we hadn’t yet mainstreamed conversations about cultural appropriation, though Marc Jacobs appears to have still not received that particular memo. To walk on the inside required education at fashion school and a long grind in the basement bogs of big houses; out of that hazing came orthodoxy, and a monolithic fashion media—led by print publications like Vogue—acted as the doctrine’s propaganda arm. We can write the story of what’s changed in four words, the same four we use about almost anything that’s happened in the last 20 years: “And then: the internet.”
If we start to flesh that out, the upheaval fashion has experienced looks like the recent past of any industry based on creative production. We invited Isabelle Hellyer, contributor to our street culture publication Acclaim and former editor of i-D Australia and New Zealand, to tell the whole story.
Ye out of his league
Though Kanye West isn’t the first or only example of someone kicking at fashion’s foundations, Isabelle sees him as an illustrative figure in the revolution. After his first collection appeared at Paris Fashion Week in 2012, the reactions were more venomous than a middling show should warrant:
Kanye West’s fashion debut was like being subjected to an hour-long MRI scan—but not as much fun… It was the equivalent of Karl Lagerfeld launching a hip-hop career: ie absurd.
—Lisa Armstrong, Daily Telegraph
The Wall Street Journal’s headline simply read: ‘Good thing Kanye West has a day job’. This response was more than gatekeeping dragons hissing at intruders from atop their pile of gold and rubies. Isabelle says: “At that point, slashies were still a relative novelty. Today, it feels like a luxury to be a specialist. You often have to be a jack-of-all-trades to survive in the creative industries. The fact that Kanye was such a gifted musician didn’t engender him any goodwill from the fashion establishment. It was almost the opposite, this idea that he already had his thing and should stick to it.”
Niche is no longer niche
The lack of classical training is what gets the gatekeepers indignant, but the hybridisation Kanye embodies is the thing that poses their true existential threat. Isabelle mentions Yoon, the co-founder of high-end streetwear label Ambush who’s now the head of jewellery at Dior Men under artistic director Kim Jones, who himself moved from menswear at Louis Vuitton and was replaced by Virgil Abloh—another superstar of this new guard. To Isabelle, “young consumers don’t see these designers as the architects behind the brands they love, but as the faces of them. Virgil, Kanye, Yoon—they’re all using their social media and public appearances to tease out new products. They don’t need to send a press release. They can wear a shoe and step outside—that’s all that needs to be done.” By going to get coffee in the morning, they’ve eliminated the need for press, models, photographers and all of fashion’s other hulking infrastructure.
“Historical measures of credibility are going extinct.”
Isabelle notes that LVMH—the parent company of Dior, Louis Vuitton and Fendi—as a whole is “very aware of the power of social stars. There’s a secret deal they’re doing to create a luxury Rihanna line. They own Kendo, which is the beauty incubator Fenty Beauty exists under, so they’ve seen her succeed commercially. Celebrity-fronted brands aren’t new, but it’s unprecedented for a celebrity label to exist in the same category as Louis Vuitton. That’s 2019.”
We’ve passed the point at which outsiders being cast in high-level positions at luxury houses seems audacious. As Isabelle says: “It’s a break from tradition, but hardly a financial risk. Celebrities—and I mean rappers, social stars and so on, less Hollywood types—bring an in-built audience. Historical measures of credibility are going extinct.”
Part of this is out of necessity: “You can’t keep making products for 30-, 40-, 50-year-old luxury consumers. You have to start developing brand loyalty with 20-year-olds, with teenagers. And to do that, quite plainly, you have to make products they want.” And what they want isn’t floating like gossamer breeze from Anna Wintour’s mouth—it’s coming out of their phones and they’re finding it in prevailing cultural movements like hip-hop.
Today’s revolutionaries, tomorrow’s establishment
The path to fashion aristocracy has changed. The temperaments of the people assuming the crowns are different—and so are the ways in which their work gets passed around. Prestige magazines are losing their grip on being the brokers between the creators and the public. Now Instagram is where hearts and minds are being won. We’re in the age of influencers.
They’ve stormed the Bastille, but the drawbridge could be closing up behind them. Isabelle: “You can’t really be a passive or accidental influencer anymore. It has to be your full-time job. Two years ago, maybe—but you really can’t compete with a professional influencer who’s image-chasing with a personal photographer for a living.” For most, Instagram has become a place for passive consumption of other people’s perfect (or perfect-seeming) lives, rather than a place to share your imperfect one. The received wisdom is that this is driving regular folk to alienation and despair or bankruptcy as they try to keep up. But to Isabelle, this doesn’t give us very much credit: “Users are realising it’s not their fault they feel inadequate, anxious or plain sad when they look at Instagram—that’s inherent in the app.”
Is this inaccessibility an omen of the decline and fall of the influencer empire? Let’s take three pretty uncontroversial premises. One: you can figure a modern age of auteur designers (Yves Saint Laurent, etc.) settling in around the middle of the 20th century. Two: the original air date of Keeping Up With the Kardashians—14 October 2007—is a good time to identify as the dawn of influencer culture. Three: rates of cultural change are accelerating. So if the old model of fashion production, discourse and consumption lasted around 50 years, is it so unbelievable to think our current one has reached its max in around ten?
“We’re due for another social platform or another something,” according to Isabelle. We’ll keep on trying to discover what that looks like. We just won’t be searching on fashion-week runways or in Condé Nast magazines.
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