Can There Be True Progress In Fashion?
Designers come up with new ideas all the time. While there might be no lack of diversity and variety, what about true actual progress? Is there something worth our while, or is fashion design just an empty meandering producing ever more pointless aesthetics?
Of course, this question becomes almost entirely comical if one assumes to be able to give an absolute answer, as questions of fashion are questions of aesthetics, and questions of aesthetics can never be inquired without considering cultural as well as aspects of personal taste.
At the same time, I would argue that questions of aesthetics don’t equally fall into the domain of radical relativism or arbitrariness. Considering that there is an idea behind every design and design implementation, we can compare different designs, even when they originate from various stylistic periods or cultures.
If we pick the right example for comparison, we might stumble upon something interesting to observe and consider. As a result, we might learn something about fashion and its development over time.
Being interested in fashion, design, and aesthetics can be rewarding, but not because some beatnik in a black turtleneck says so. There is much to learn about what we can do with different materials and how we can construct artefacts that serve our purposes and furnish our everyday lives and reality.
The example I want to use here to argue for progress in fashion concerns the classic good old trench coat. Any classical iteration would do, but for the sake of argument, we should stick to the big guns:
Let’s look at the classical Trenchcoat from Burberry and compare it to the J122-GT from ACRONYM.
Love The Classics!
Around since the middle of the 19th century, the well-trodden design of the trench coat became a true staple of classical and time-proven fashion over the course of the 20th century. No company stands as much for the trenchcoat as Burberry does, even though it has developed into an expensive luxury trend-following fashion brand over the decades.
Thomas Burberry founded the company in 1856 in Basingstoke, England, in the middle of the 19th century. Around 20 years later, in 1879, he designed the famous gabardine fabric, which was waterproof, breathable, and durable. This fabric became the foundation for the iconic trench coat.
As the name suggests, in today’s best-known design implementation, the trench coat came about during the trench fighting in World War I. It was initially employed as a practical garment for British military officers. The trench coat was originally double-breasted and had military epaulets, a belted waist, and a storm flap.
It was intended to provide protection from the elements while being lightweight and comfortable for soldiers in the trenches. The trenchcoat became popular among civilians after World War I — and particularly after World War II — marking the beginning of its iconic track record as a 20th-century fashion staple.
So far, so book.
But what is unique about it? What makes the trenchcoat the trenchcoat?
I think a good way to understand the design and concept of that particular clothing prototype lies in a couple of essential hallmarks:
Practicality: The trenchcoat should better be practical as it is a garment for military usage. It is made of a technical material that provides its wearer with a lot of performance, especially in wet conditions.
Transformation: Supposed to be worn in the heat of the battle, as well as in the heat of the officer’s casino, the trenchcoat is designed to be a very transformative garment, as different buttons, flaps, and belts can be adjusted to various configurations changing the look drastically.
It can be worn open-buttoned, resulting in a sharpened silhouette when the belt knot is tied to the back. A couple of adjustments later, the trenchcoat is close-buttoned, looking very strict and formal, with a radically altered appearance.
Aesthetics: The trenchcoat is generally considered to be aesthetically pleasing. As with many types of clothing that have a military origin (e.g., field jacket, pea coat, bomber jacket), there is something very sporty about the designs resulting from the demanded functionality due to the requirements of military usage. At the same time, it has a very particular chic, as it was designed to dress authority.
For those reasons, the trenchcoat can be combined with very formal clothing (e.g., a three-piece suit), dressing it down a little bit while at the same being combinable with a casual outfit (e.g., brown leather shoes, chino, and a random shirt) dressing it up.
Let’s keep those three things in mind: practicality, transformation, and aesthetics. I suggest this set of properties marks the essence of the trench coat design, and I argue that this prototype has become so popular due to those properties.
Of course, we picked the Burberry trenchcoat as a significant representative of the classical interpretations of the trench coat. Most designs follow the logic described here and present the wearer with the described feature.
Let’s compare this to ACRONYM’s avant-garde interpretation of the trench coat.
Fear The Avant-garde!
ACRONYM is interesting: Founded in 1994 by Errolson Hugh and Michaela Sachenbacher in Munich, the brand is best known for its avant-garde designs, its drive for innovation, and its passion for functional designs. The best way to characterize the design might be to state that the clothes are supposed to uncompromisingly unite cutting-edge performance fabrics with avant-garde aesthetics that make them stylishly wearable and combinational in urban environments while still being able to withstand the forces of the elements.
The designs employ a range of advanced fabrics and materials, including Gore-Tex, Schoeller, and Dyneema. These materials are chosen based on their waterproof, windproof, breathable, and durable properties, keeping the wearer comfortable under various weather conditions.
Let’s look at what inspired me to write this essay, the J122-GT.
In contrast to the classical trenchcoat, the J122 comes with a hood, which can be adjusted in various ways to provide protection from either rain or wind. It can be worn wholly pulled over the head or just over the ears, covering the whole face, similar to a balaclava. When you pull it over your head, you can keep it closed, making only the eyes visible, similar to the ventail of a medieval helmet, or open, showing your face while protecting from winds coming from the sides. Ultimately, the hood can also be left down for a very relaxed look when the weather is rather unchallenging.
Keeping in tradition with the trench coat’s original design, the J122 can also be worn either open or closed, significantly altering the appearance. As is typical for jackets from ACRONYM or other tech wear designs, the jacket comes with a strap system, allowing the wearer to easily throw it over the shoulder if it gets too warm to wear. Of course, this is an incredibly convenient and interesting approach to improving the original design from over 100 years ago.
What really caught my eye was the simply spectacular feature of having the option to shorten the trench coat by folding the bottom part up inside, reducing its length to that of a regular jacket, which opens up even more stylistic possibilities.
Further design details include the ability to protect the sleeves against water or wind penetration and multiple pockets that provide ample storage space for the wearer.
3L Gore-Tex is being used as a material known for its exceptional waterproof, windproof, and breathable properties.
Is This True Progress?
To conclude our comparison, we will have to tenderly graze the domain of philosophy. First, we should try to understand what progress in fashion is supposed to mean.
Fashion, of course, belongs to some significant part to the domain of aesthetics, so it shouldn’t surprise us too much that different people will be impacted differently by different designs. Someone might enjoy a particular design, while someone else is not convinced at all. Also, of course, there is an undeniable fact that the specific details, silhouettes, forms, and ideas employed in fashion and design are, to a considerable degree, time-dependent, as different epochs and cultures present stable trends and aesthetical ideas over their whole persistence.
At the same time, the question of design preferences is not solely limited to subjective aesthetic preferences. Every design has an idea behind it, some goal or aim the design strives towards. It tries to address a complex of problems. When speaking of advancements in the quality of different designs, this is a fruitful angle of attack when considering such questions.
As I stated earlier, the idea or concept underlying the implementation of the design idea of the trenchcoat in its classical form, as presented by Burberry, can be broken down into a particular set of principles: practicality, transformation, and aesthetics.
From the perspective of practicality, the classical trenchcoat presented us with a specific type of yestercentury’s innovative high-tech fabric, which made it especially wearable in harsh weather conditions, particularly when rain is involved. To this day, the classical trenchcoat is one of the sparse examples of luxurious and well-crafted pieces you might find in a sophisticated wardrobe that can be unproblematically worn in rainy conditions. The trenchcoat will not be damaged by torrential rainfalls.
In comparison, the J122, considered from the same perspective of practicality, can be regarded as superior to the original design. As the days pass and the globe spins, people come up with new ingenious ideas, especially in the domain of technology. Employing 3L Gore-Tex as a waterproof, windproof, and breathable material strikes me as strictly better than the originally used material.
There are even videos on social media of people wearing 3L Gore-Tex clothes entering their shower fully dressed, turning it on, then, after a couple of seconds, turning it off again, simply shaking off the remaining water and reemerging from the shower, still dry and protected by their high-tech garments. A soldier in the trenches of World War 1 would have had good reason to have chosen the state-of-the-art modern material for maximum functionality and tactical advantages.
Let’s consider the second essential aspect of trenchcoat design: its ability to transform. As described earlier, the classical implementation can truly shine in this category, particularly with the change between open- and close-buttoned wearing. This allows the wearer with one and the same piece of clothing to alter his or her appearance significantly within a couple of seconds and only a few adjustments.
I would argue, equally as with the first point, that the J122 is superior in its transformative abilities. Every adjustment is just as quick as with the classical trench coat design. Still, there are more possibilities with the J122 than with a classical trenchcoat. The plethora of different possibilities for adjusting the hood of the J122 alone gives a lot of justification for adding a hood in the first place. While both design implementations share the ability to wear it in a more open and closed fashion, the ability to shorten the J122 to the length of a typical jacket is just a clever and useful additional feature with no counterpart in the original design implementation.
The very simple but smart feature of adding straps for carrying the coat by throwing it just over the shoulder adds a brand-new functional feature that improves on the original design.
Of course, we can always argue aesthetically! For once, it depends on what you wear and what preferences you generally hold. For classical attire consisting of a three-piece suit with a lovely classical pattern, the classical trench coat fits the bill better from a perspective of the aesthetic coherence of the whole outfit.
But! When we keep our considerations as objective as possible, we should include one crucial observation that gives us at least some degree of comparability between the two radically different aesthetics presented by the two pieces:
The original trenchcoat is military attire. The design of tech wear, and particularly the design language of ACRONYM, is vastly inspired by state-of-the-art military attire and its performance. Things change over time, so it shouldn’t be too shocking that the men charging at each other at Verdun more than a century ago wore different attire than the highly specialized soldiers of today’s day and age.
While the designs are different, they both share a connection to military aesthetics and requirements of their respective days and ages.
Considering this, I would not argue that one of them wins this category. Still, I would refer to this fact and judge it neutrally, as both are mere children of their respective times.
So, is there progress in fashion?
Well, again, a clear-cut answer would violate careful philosophical consideration. But considering everything we have said, there is at least a sense in which design and fashion can actually progress.
When we consider the essential aspects of a particular design and find different implementations that better or more fully respect those aspects, then yes, we can meaningfully assess progress.
In this sense, I would argue that the J122 represents such progress, an improvement in design implementation, as both the avant-garde and the classical piece share the connection to military aesthetics and attire of their respective days and ages. At the same time, the J122 is just superior in consideration of the essential design aspects of the trench coat in terms of practicality/performance as well as its transformative capabilities.
I am happy to hear what you think about this. Do you agree or disagree? I would appreciate it if you have similar considerations or observations you could and would like to share with me concerning other cases of potential progress in fashion. Let me know!
Sources/Further Reading
[1] J122-GT: https://acrnm.com/J122-GT_FW2324
[2] Showering in Gore-Tex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNtM6foplrU
