Dear subscribers,
This will probably be the last email you get from me this year. I’m taking this week and next week off to spend with my family, most importantly my two children. Back Row will land again in your inbox on or around January 3. Thank you SO MUCH for supporting this newsletter by subscribing and telling so many of your friends about it (if you haven’t yet, it’s never too late). I wish you all safe, happy, and, most importantly, healthy holidays. And now, on to what you’re here for.
Amy
What stands out in your mind about fashion from the past year? Maybe Zendaya’s “wet look” Balmain gown at that Dune premiere? Perhaps Lady Gaga on the red carpet waving around a big purple Gucci dress like a flag girl in marching band? House of Gucci came out pretty recently so if you saw it you probably still remember that, too, despite what may be your best efforts to forget that you did. Or maybe you just sigh in contentment when you recall that, after two and a half years, Anna Wintour got to finally put on her plant-based Met Gala. This is where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore one of the most memorable red-carpet dresses of the year, designed by Aurora James, emblazoned with the words “tax the rich.”
This year started with President Joe Biden’s inauguration, to which First Lady Jill Biden wore Markarian, which was the hottest name in fashion for like a week. I was surprised I forgot about that (and nearly also Michelle Obama at the inauguration wearing a gorgeous look by Sergio Hudson in a beautiful shade of plum — and not because of bipartisan symbolism or whatever we fashion writers like to project onto the people we obsess over, but because she and her stylist Meredith Koop just liked the color). Maybe these nice moments aren’t at the forefront of our reflections because in our Omicron-induced rage/haze/depression, time feels the way Steve Martin’s character described it in The Jerk:
I know we've only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it.
A year that started in unbelievable despair has ended with glimmers of optimism behind us as we peer into a scary near-future that harkens a year ago. This whiplash — life is back! no wait, it’s not. — has left fashion understandably unmoored. Our buying habits have been so erratic that it’s hard to even pinpoint clothing trends from the past year aside from, what, face masks? Vogue.com recently asked some of the world’s top buyers what sold in 2021, concluding:
In between those extremes of dressing way up and dressing way down: jeans (they’re everywhere), jewelry (the major story of the year, tbh) and, not unsurprisingly, an ever greater emphasis on where a brand sits in the world, and what it says to us when we choose to wear it.
Normally trends are much more specific, like “eighties” or “sneakers for evening.” But this is our 2021 trend report? “Jeans” and “jewelry”?
Despite everything being so uncertain, the industry had unusually memorable and gorgeous bursts of creativity that defy trends or categorization. Kerby Jean-Raymond became the first Black designer approved by the Chambre Syndicale in France to present a couture show on the official Paris calendar. His show defied traditional notions of couture. He told reporters he credited “ayahuasca” with helping him come up with the concept, which turned Black American inventions, like a portable air conditioner and peanut butter jar, into wearable art/objets/clothing. “These are inventions by Black people and I wanted to reintroduce them to Black people, reverse the erasure that may exist—and to troll a little bit, too,” he told Vogue, adding to WWD that “some of the pieces are super hilarious to me, like the peanut butter one.”
And my breath still catches when I see Marc Jacobs’s brilliantly oversized and beautifully layered Fall 2021 collection — photographed stunningly by Steven Meisel for Edward Enninful’s British Vogue.
Demna Gvasalia resurrected Balenciaga couture to likewise stunning effect. Vogue reported that as the collection walked — in silence without music, because if Gvasalia is expert at anything it’s creating a spectacle and heightening pretension — “the sound of the suppressed gasps of fashion journalists and clients was heard again… for the first time in the 53 years since Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his hallowed couture house.” Even for nicey-nice Vogue, that’s high praise.
Yet other collections bubbled to the surface thanks to sheer aesthetic gluttony. Fendi can be blamed for two of these. It collaborated with Kim Kardashian’s Skims shapewear, thus unleashing onto the market a slew of tight colorful things like this $1,490 midi tank dress with FENDI SKIMS embossed on it.
Fendi and Versace also joined forces for the Fendace show, which basically slapped some big Fendi logos on signature Versace looks. Many fashion people will tell you in private the show was on the whole just ridiculous. The tackiness was also confusing for a more significant reason: these collections came not long after all that justified ballyhooing about how the pandemic revealed the fashion system was deeply broken. The Council of Fashion Designers of America and the British Fashion Council jointly issued a statement in May of 2020 encouraging “brands, designers and retailers, who are used to fashion’s fast, unforgiving pace, to slow down,” in part by producing fewer collections (because do brands really need to do cruise and pre-fall?). Yet in September of 2021, in addition to Fendi putting on its own spring 2022 show and Versace putting on its own spring 2022 show, they joined together to put on an Italian Frankenshow. Like, does anyone need this?
Schiaparelli continued to pick up steam with buzzy couture collections, which I realize many people profess to love but often strikes me as clickbait. As an example, I give you another Hadid at the Cannes Film Festival in July:
Fashion is an incredibly difficult business, and each year brands fall. During the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, they fell like dominoes, prompting the New York Times Magazine to publish a nearly 7,400-word story about it on August 6 of that year. The focal point was designer Scott Sternberg’s new brand of pastel, athleisure-y clothes called Entireworld. I bought a few Entireworld pieces and loved them because they were perfectly cut, but also the kind of stuff you want to wear every day — but Sternberg was forced to announce its closure in October. From that 2020 Times story:
Thanks to the rise of fast fashion and the luxury market’s simultaneous attempt to keep up with its impossible pace, it all started to feel disposable. So detrimental was the cycle of overproduction and discounting to luxury goods that in 2018, Burberry, the British label, revealed that it had been burning — not metaphorically but literally: burning — $37 million of worth of merchandise per year to maintain “brand value.”
What else happened the year after that in which these words were published? Well, in October Coach was caught by TikToker Anna Sacks trashing slashed, seemingly perfectly good unsold merchandise, prompting the company to admit that it did this to a shocking 1 percent of product — or about $42.5 million worth of stuff. Meanwhile, Coach was hawking a bag recycling program, inviting people to trade in old bags instead of getting rid of them.
Of course pretending to be sustainable or “green-washing” isn’t the only area where the industry can be easily called on its bullshit. Following the summer of 2020, fashion positioned itself as something of a bulwark for diversity and inclusion. While models — some of the most public faces of the industry — have become more diverse in the runway show, look book, ad campaign, and editorial images that get blasted around the internet, far less progress has been made in the ivory towers of fashion houses, where executive ranks are mostly white. When Rihanna’s Fenty LVMH brand was put on indefinite pause this year, the number of Black women leading major luxury European legacy labels went from one to zero. When Virgil Abloh tragically and suddenly died, the industry lost its most powerful Black executive and designer.
In March, the New York Times attempted an audit of the industry by sending a select group of the most influential fashion conglomerates, designers, and retailers a series of questions about diversity. It reported:
Four of the 64 fashion brands — Tory Burch, Coach, Kate Spade and Christian Siriano — tried to fully answer each question.
That’s an abysmal six percent. The rest of the response was similarly pitiful. Of the 15 retailers contacted, for instance, nine declined to respond, two never replied, and four gave a partial response. Some European companies cited laws that they said barred them from answering questions about employee diversity. The story added:
Eight companies declined to participate at all. One never replied. Ten brands declined to answer questions but sent statements declaring their commitment to equity, such as “diversity is an asset to be nurtured; inclusiveness is a moral and professional duty” (Armani) and “ending racism has been at the heart of our brand communication since its inception” (Moschino). The rest responded with partial information, usually with information that was already publicly available, like designer ethnicity. Several offered information on their general diversity initiatives and human resources programs instead.
Some meaningful initiatives have been established to increase diversity in the fashion industry. They include FIT’s newly established Social Justice Center, which has nearly $4 million in funding, and the Times reported “will aim to expose Black, Indigenous and people of color to fashion careers early in life (in middle school and high school) and support them through the executive level.” The “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund started by Virgil Abloh will announce its second class in 2022, and has awarded $7,500 to each of 20 winners so far. The Black in Fashion Council, started by The Cut editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner, helps companies move past virtue signaling and toward actually embodying the values they profess to hold dear. Kerby Jean-Raymond established Your Friends in New York with Kering, which serves as an incubator of sorts for emerging Black designers (Kering funds the operation and takes no stake in the labels though can profit from sales). And Brother Vellies designer Aurora James’s 15 Percent Pledge, which asks businesses to stock 15 percent of their shelves with Black-owned brands, continues to expand.
Looking back at all this, I see an industry caught between its pre-pandemic excess-embracing self and its better judgement to project progressive values — like inclusion and diversity and not trashing our planet — that appeal to the younger generation of shoppers. This was a year of extremes — Bella Hadid wearing nothing but jewelry over her nipples on the Cannes red carpet while most people looked on in sweatpants from home; labels casting historically diverse faces for runway shows and then declining to answer journalists’ questions about their companies; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wearing the words “tax the rich” on her Aurora James-designed dress at the Met Gala, where she spent the night mingling with those very rich people; Victoria’s Secret’s toxicity being further exposed in the midst of its woke-washed rebrand.
The industry is likely to attempt a return to pre-pandemic form as soon as possible because that was a more comfortable time, when people shopped and members were seldom asked about things like sustainability or efforts to be equitable and diverse. Back then, we could go to gimmicky parties and fashion shows and air kiss and post Instagrams like everything was just great even though it wasn’t.
The industry will find a middle ground between sweatpants and Fendace, but whatever form it settles into after the pandemic won’t be like what came before because consumers won’t have it. The people in power who expect a return to what was will be in for a rude awakening when the next Elise Harmon or Anna Sacks comes for them on TikTok. In steady decline for years, 2021 being no different, has been the power of legacy media gatekeepers that have historically been relied upon to disseminate PR statements from their advertisers to the masses.
Talk of slowing down or having fewer shows or making less stuff is too narrow a framework for thinking about fashion’s post-pandemic iteration. The fashion world should be thinking about how to be less full of bullshit in the face of outspoken, savvy, exhausted consumers. People whose lives have been completely upturned by this pandemic have no time for any more phoniness. If they do, it’s to call it out, go viral, and enjoy what may be just a brief amount of fame. And if fashion people can understand the appeal of anything, surely it’s that.
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