Fashion blends colors and textures in interesting ways

Fashion is meant to be interesting

We talk a lot about the function of fashion in our lives but we don’t spend enough time breaking down the genius and centrality of its artistry and design to its success as an art form. Fashion, to survive, is meant to be interesting.

Just as fashion is meant to be personal and therefore paces its market choices around the general taste of people, fashion also has to present new ideas that people normally wouldn’t go for. In this sense, fashion plays on the dichotomy of pushing tastes to their limits while embracing the old and traditional way of things. The evolution of the house of Chanel through the decades is a perfect illustration of melding a long-established house aesthetic with experimental ideas yielding interesting results. Coco Chanel’s was known for her black and white polished style but that can get boring very easily. The question then becomes; how does her successor Karl Lagerfeld keep Chanel at the top of the game? Firstly, he had to get a perfect understanding of the urban young adult and its social importance. Because as much as Chanel caters to the society matrons and their Emily Post sensibilities, they want to dress the young socialites who star in rock-n-roll videos (when that was a cool thing to do) and the ones with a million plus followers on Instagram who are so famous that they get personal nicknames from followers.

But there is a reason why Giorgio Armani is the complete opposite in terms of exploring avant-garde themes yet is so incredible successful. He has something equally as dull as it is interesting going on for him — he’s predictable. People trust his work because it doesn’t (and didn’t) evolve from its core aesthetic. His color scheme is instantly recognizable. He cuts his jackets the same way every time so when you want an Armani jacket, you know what you want. And next year it might come in a different color or shinier texture, but it’s classically Armani.

That’s an interesting concept too, in fashion, creating a classic. And it’s probably harder to create a classic fashion garment than to push boundaries with new collections every season. The person who creates a classic piece had to rework a single theme over and over again in new ways and still make people want to buy it even though it’s nothing new. When Marc Jacobs was at Louis Vuitton, he shocked people. You wanted to sit at the Vuitton show because you never knew in what new ways you’d be thrilled. And the clothes themselves were thrilling but they seemed to belong more on the runway than on the street.

Fashion is the playground where two divergent ideas both lend an equally important lens into what makes it so interesting. Some designers think the traditional is sterile. And some designers think that true artistry is real focus into craftsmanship and the mastery haute couture which hold traditional values about dressmaking. But there is no question that this artform continues to be interesting. The final product always stuns.

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Margael St Juste, Hunter College ’15

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