Okay, scarfie boy, so that’s how it is. Fashion is a waste of time and you have nothing to do with it. You don’t care about what you wear. It’s a scam, a marketing ploy for the girls and the gays. But here’s a question for you, little scarfie boy – how do you show people you are a scarfie? Is it a tank top with stubbies and jandals? Winter or Summer, doesn’t matter, still the same?
Although it’s widely been considered that approximately 0% of scarfies actually give a fuck about it, fashion is a very important part of everyone’s daily lives. If you choose to wear clothes at all then you care about it. If you choose not to, you still care about it. If you dress like Dobby the House Elf, believe it or not, the decision to do so means that you do care care about fashion. Bearing this in mind, and with iD Fashion Week fast approaching, I set out to get Critic’s audience clued up on the state of the fashion industry in Dunedin, New Zealand and the wider world.
Responsible Personalities
The commercialization of clothing is often misperceived as a new problem, blameable on contemporary capitalism. But not only has it been around for what seems like forever, it’s also not necessarily such a bad thing. Historically, there’s always been an interest in the so-called global “fashion centres”. Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, very wealthy English women would frequently head to Paris to check out the latest collections.Historian Dr. Sandy Callister points out that even in Victorian times, “women were always following what the court and royalty in society wore.” It was a way of showing your place in the world and escaping, for a brief moment, the patriarchal society in which you lived. Fashion was a medium through which one could display individuality and personality; the latest fashions were aspired to and admired.
If the commercialization of clothing is an old phenomenon, the contemporary concept of globalisation is still relatively new. It’s globalisation which has lead to such a diverse ecosystem within the industry; to differentiations emerging between the likes of high street, couture, and indie. Dr. Callister says that emerging markets have only recently started to get caught up in the torrent of world fashion, with China and India, for example, now publishing their own versions of Vogue, and major brands from Europe setting up their retail chains in these new markets.
Although a lot of modern people seem to be in utter fear of globalisation, and its apparent cultural homogenisation, those in the fashion industry point out both its inevitability and its positive attributes. Marie Holly, a design assistant at Dunedin-based label Nom*D, believes in the important role globalised fashion has to play in crafting our individual identities. “People are always wanting to be different,” Marie says. “People say in their minds ‘I need this’ a) because it has a fashionable label on it and b) it’s kind of what they wanted, in the sense that it’s a jacket or something like that, and so they tell themselves that they need it.”
Labels play on this. They tell us that we want to buy something, and it’s the massive accumulation of these different design angles which have provided the wide selection we all have in front of us these days. In a way, it allows for a wide range of different people. “You can buy the label because it’s different,” Marie continues, “or you can go to Glassons and get a $30 jacket which is practical and cheap. But then again, you’re not any different from the other hundreds of people who have bought that same jacket for that same reason. So it’s all about your identity, and whether you want to portray that you are someone different, or that you can afford these sorts of clothes.”
But both Dr. Callister and Marie strongly believe that you need to be a responsible and well-read buyer. For example, Stella McCartney has just produced a video for PETA which is turning heads because for once it isn’t about fur; it’s about leather. “She really has made me think about some of the implications of leather goods,” Dr. Callister says.
Chain stores are definitely something to avoid too. “It’s about your value set,” Dr. Callister continues, “I’m not for buying cheap products where I think people have been producing them in factories and they’re not well-cared-for and they’re using too many chemicals. Even though fashion is very ephemeral and it’s here and gone, I really like the idea of something that’s really sustainable - which you’re going to like for some time. Or if you don’t, that you can gift it on. As we learn more about the source of materials and the processes behind them, you can’t be ignorant, you’ve got a responsibility in that.”
“I would love to never go into chain stores purely because I know where their clothes are made and I don’t like it,” affirms Marie.
Look At This Fucking Hipster
It was Oscar Wilde, arguably the world’s greatest hipster, who ironically stated that “fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” But as daunting and unfavourable a picture as this paints of the industry, it’s important to differentiate between style and fashion. Although different fashions will come and go, it’s a sense of style and individuality which will endure.Karl Lagerfeld, for example, wears exactly the same outfit every single day. Yet as the head designer for Chanel, he’s considered one of the most stylish and fashion-conscious men in existence. He’s fashion-conscious in designing the latest trends. He’s stylish for not having to personally dress head-to-toe in them season after season.
While changing fashions will always have an important place in culture, it’s the ability to consistently piece together outfits that work which denotes the all-important sense of style. Rather than purchasing an item of clothing merely because it is “in fashion”, a person with style will build up an outfit through a creative process involving aesthetic imagination and suitability to their body shape.
It’s still important for brands to create new trends, as style would be a real mission without them. But diving headfirst into fashion without a sense of style can result in inevitable tragedies, such as larger women inducing the cupcake effect with a pair of too-tight Levis.
In a world so saturated by the media, having this individual style seems to necessitate that we avoid following what is dictated to us through the mainstream. The influence is breaking down because the likes of Vogue work on an old business model – a model that assumes they’re the primary influence and that they have the power to dictate what’s “in” to the world.
It’s a model which fails to recognise the enormous influence of blogs, which also serve to disseminate information to consumers; a recent movement reflected in the most recent CFDA awards, in which two renowned style bloggers – Garance Doré and Scott Schuman, who runs The Sartorialist blog – jointly won an award for their work in fashion media.
Blogs now serve a much higher purpose than angst-driven teenagers with a tumblr: they are legitimate parts of the media, particularly within the fashion industry, which have the phenomenal modern power of communicating in real-time. And it’s not just blogs which are moving forward. Shows are now streamed live with instantaneous feedback from all around the world, and designers are trialling letting their VIP customers assemble at certain global points to watch shows they otherwise couldn’t attend.
Dr. Callister thinks that the old monthly model of Vogue is “probably struggling now to be vertically integrated, where the likes of net-a-porter.com can go from selling-mode back to producing collated magazines online. I think it’s very interesting, because a lot of the new media models are cross-referencing. So net-a-porter just commissioned Garance Doré to do a series of videos over Fashion Week.”
Dr. Callister collects Vogue - in particular she loves the photo shoots which Grace Coddington has styled - and she loves them as comfortable things which you keep. “But I don’t feel I’m dictated to by Vogue at all,” she affirms. “It serves a different function now.”
We’re at a very interesting time regarding influences in the global market. Miuccia Prada, for example, isn’t just selling clothes on her Miu Miu site. In a section called Miu Miu Musings, the site runs group discussions in the world’s fashion empires. A recent “musing”, for instance, concerned Audrey Hepburn and her little black dress. “So [websites] are the new ways of editing what consumers see,” Dr. Callister says, “and I think people who are very passionate like me probably follow a few of them. So Vogue would be one form because it is a paper copy, but there would be others.”
Vintage – Here to Stay
Dr. Callister builds on this. Talking of Yuk King Tan’s exhibition Overflow, on at the Wellington City Gallery at the moment, in which there’s a photograph of a cargo ship loaded up with clothes, she points out that “when you see the scale of that, you realize that vintage is just a small thread of the fashion world.” She mentions the importance of realising that there are aspects of vintage clothing that can never be relived. Once, when she was talking to Violet about some of her clothing, she remembers being told that “the kind of quality and the materials they’re made of will never be repeated.”“For some people it’s an appreciation of the craft and the history of clothing,” she continues. “For some it’s not that, it’s just how do you become a citizen of the world by juxtaposing something from the ’60s and something that’s from now, and building your own eclectic way of expressing your identity. Vintage allows you to do that.”
And there’s always a changing benchmark of what vintage is. “I used to think of vintage as Edwardian or Victorian, and maybe into the ’20s, and now I see it as something you might have loved two years ago. You loved it and you put it away and then it’s vintage in your own wardrobe! Because we live in that nano-second culture now.”
Light Speed To New Zealand
Traditionally, New Zealand has been ages behind world trends. In the colonial days, it took new European fashions about six months to reach us, and by then new things were happening. This trend, however, has become much less apparent in recent years, to the point that New Zealand designers like Karen Walker are considered world-leaders. There’s also a particularly interesting “fusion” starting to go on in New Zealand, with our young Asian population, particularly in Auckland, bringing in their own trends which are still somewhat under-the-radar.Rather than considering ourselves behind the fashion scene, we need to consider ourselves as tangential leaders. Our culture has a high degree of informality and inclination to the great outdoors, which all influence fashion here. Nice footwear, for example, is hard to maintain if you walk a lot, whereas in centers like London, the fashion-conscious have it easy by taking the underground.
The cultural melting pot of New Zealand has actually sparked international interest of late. The huge fashion event Pacifica has had a huge global impact: “Clearly we aren’t Paris and New York and London,” Dr. Callister reiterates, “But I think that we still have our own kind of interesting take.”
Marie, who was trying to set up her own label in Wellington when she came to work at Nom*D in Dunedin earlier this year, represents a large number of New Zealanders who find inspiration in their unique surroundings. “I suppose that’s why people start up their own designer brand,” she says, “because they want to do their own thing in their own environment.”
But it’s not easy. For Marie, “I’d be working 40 hours a week at my work, then come home and design it all after-hours. It’s tiring, and it’s a lot of money.” But people still try, and Marie can see that there are opportunities in the market, even if they are limited. “You’ve got a really small target market, and so it could go either way.”
In fact, you may have recently noticed the appearance of t-shirts around campus bearing the prints of painted cultural icons. The work of recent University of Otago Design School graduate, Jon Thom, these are from the up-start brand Moodie Tuesday which is beginning to become a well-known local brand. The challenge for these labels then, is getting beyond the local market.
We Want Meat!
Why the fuck are skinny bitches everywhere in fashion? It seems that if ever a discussion turns to fashion, the issue of skinny models will quickly rise to the top of the agenda. Not long ago, artists would paint their muses with beautiful, healthy curves; the extremely skinny were the freakes to them.But that in itself could be the problem. For Dr. Callister, fashion has never been “about normal people.” When models are walking down the runway in shows, “it’s just about body shapes that can wear those clothes to a phenomenal effect. They’re theatrical shows which are very different from people in the street. Everyone says ‘we’d like to see more normal people,’ but it’s not true for that inner circle … They’re always interested in strange beauty, and that beauty that’s slightly ugly, and bodies that are slightly exotic and rare.
“You look at the models when they’re not on the catwalk and you see that they’re young and they’ve got pimples and goodness-knows-what. But it’s a world which is packaged for an event in a certain kind of way. I see it as theatrical, I don’t see it as aspirational in any sense. And when I look at images in magazines, I know they’ve all been photoshopped.”
Where we should focus more then is in education. “I guess it’s a terrible thing if you think that’s real. And that it’s somehow a global standard, because it’s not. It’s just the fashion industry.” And from time to time they do have breakthroughs: Vogue Italia, for example, recently did a whole issue about black women. We’re starting to see a much wider expression of global beauty, even to the extent that we’re seeing older models like Kristen McMenamy and Stella Tennant.
“I’m sure those strange creatures are just as worried that they’re not as fabulous and beautiful, too,” Dr Callister concludes. “They’re just creations. They’re mediated constructions of beauty and exotica.” Marie also says that it’s all to do with the media and what they portray as wanted. “If they start pushing models which are curvier, then we will slowly go back that way,” she says. “But I think where some other fashion weeks banned certain size models, that’s a good start. Because you get girls who are just not eating. I remember watching a really skinny girl on America’s Next Top Model, then Tyra Banks said ‘we’re portraying the wrong message, that being underweight is fashionable or good,’ and so she couldn’t carry on. When people are noticing it and not allowing it, that’s a good start. It stops people going over that line.”
So What’s So Good About iD Fashion Week?
iD Fashion Week, one of the biggest annual events in Dunedin, is starting to mean a lot in a country in which we rarely see international guests, and whose national Fashion Week in Auckland is boring and commercial. One of the key platforms behind it is the local fashion school, as well as the huge attraction of the world-class emerging designers awards.For Marie, the event last year was a kick-start to her career, to the point where she was able to show her line over in Italy. It was all about creating those opportunities on an easy playing field rather than having to go up to the main NZ fashion week. “I also think it’s a fantastic opportunity in general for people to realize what’s going on,” she says. “And they can come to see what Dunedin and others in the South Island are doing. Where else would I get this opportunity?”
Dr. Callister also enjoys the “lovely hometown audience who are really enthusiastic. I’m really impressed by how many of the women from Southland and Otago are really interested in fashion. And interested in fashion in a way that is quite, quite different from their Auckland counterparts. That because of the presence of Plume and Nom*D and brands they’ve imported, people are more into the Rick Owenses and the Martin Margielas, which are quite indie.”
Boom
Fashion and style are crucial aspects of our identities, our culture, our socializing and our history. Every day on campus, every one of us will walk by hundreds of other students between lectures and make snap judgments based on the clothes they wear. Whether you are the student with Prada creepers entering hourly style posts onto your Tumblr throughout the day, or the one adamantly committing the fashion crime that is sneans, fashion and style will always affect your life. If you thought you could wear a potato sack to uni from now on in protest, too late; Project Runway made them into fashion items two years ago. Maybe an outfit of steaks? Everyone knows you can’t do that thanks to Gaga circa 2010. Everything is fashion. And you can never escape that.Hazel and Kayleigh wear Cupkakes Lingerie
Photographer: James Stringer
Models: Hazel @ N, Kayleigh @ Ali Mcd
Makeup: Christal Allpress
Hair: Vicki & Darleen @ Moha
