Today we woke up to the news that the up and coming designer Duran Lantink has been appointed as the creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier. This completes his recent victory lap that began with sweeping a handful of fashion prizes, including the Andam award and the LVMH prize.
And while it is commendable that a young designer gets a crack at spearheading one of the most important brands in the history of contemporary fashion, it’s also worth taking a fresh look at what he actually makes. The artifacts that can be called garments in his oeuvre are pretty forgettable – there is little innovation in terms of the silhouette, nor is there a very strong discernible aesthetic statement. Lantink is not without talent, but his true strength lies in making outlandish, sculpted outfits that look good on Instagram. The look from his last collection that was shared the most was not a garment at all, but a sculpted male bust, shown on a female model. Things like this are designed to go viral in that look-at-this-silly-thing way. They are fashion as memes.
Memes, not clothes have been the main output of the fashion industry for the past ten years. It began with Demna’s Vetements Snoop Dogg tees and Balenciaga hoodies with the Bernie Sanders logo flip, and continued with Jacquemus’s tiny bags and Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s little bath towels as men’s skirts. Fashion shows are now retooled to be made solely for Instagram, as in Coperni’s spray dress stunt or its Paris Disneyland runway presentation.
What’s missing from these brands are actual designed clothes. Go into any Balenciaga shop and you will be treated to a parade of banal hoodies, jeans, and sneakers, with not a single item without a logo of some sort. Jacquemus is a laughing stock among those who actually know how clothes are made for his shoddy construction. De Saint Sernin’s and Coperni’s actual garments are not even worth the few extra keystrokes of my keyboard.
In the theatrics these meme brands put on they are following the fashion greats such as Alexander McQueen, Thierry Mugler, and Jean Paul Gaultier himself. But there is one crucial difference – the spectacles that those designers have put on were not for the sake of the spectacle itself. They were in the service of pushing the boundaries of fashion and revolting against the fashion bourgeois establishment by presenting alternative visions of beauty. Oh, and they made clothes. Well made, beautifully designed garments meant for a three-dimensional world. What we are treated to today is a simulacrum. Fashion now is hyperreality, in which the real has been replaced by a collection of empty signs and symbols that replace reality itself. Real, three-dimensional life with genuine culture does not matter; what matters is how you look on social media and virality.
McQueen once famously told a BBC reporter, “I don’t want to do a show where you come out feeling like you just had Sunday lunch. I want you to come out either repulsed or exhilarated, as long as it’s an emotion. If you don’t feel an emotion, I’m not doing my job.” What we get now with one viral moment on top of another is Sunday lunch. The primary emotion that fashion memes elicit are amusement. They are junk food, easily digestible and forgotten. And because they are easily digestible they require constant replenishment to keep our attention on the brand. Hence the proliferation of fashion memes – Balenciaga’s bag that looks like a coffee cup, the J.W. Anderson bag that looks like a pigeon, one from Louis Vuitton that looks like a can of paint, Bottega Veneta’s $10,000 leather flowers, a cotton Prada tank top that costs $1,000. No one expects to buy the latter two, they are designed to go viral with the price itself becoming an absurdist meme. The countless collabs, like Balenciaga x Erewhon or Balmain x Evian are memes. The clothes themselves don’t matter – they are just merch with zero design value.
And the sad thing is that it works. Hyperreality is more real to fashion than reality. Memes are more important than clothes, because they keep customers coming through the door. And the utmost purveyors of hyperreality get plum jobs – Demna is going to Gucci and J.W. Anderson to Dior. The cost of hyperreality to fashion is real. By now fashion has taught an entire generation of young designers and design students to make memes not clothes, to make not fashion shows but viral stunts, to live in a simulation and not reality. Lantink’s appointment is just the latest proof that this strategy works. The idea today is to start a viral brand and hope that you will get attention and eventually a major appointment. Of course we know that often such appointments don’t last. But it works for a while, until consumers realize that they have been duped, that there is no there there, and that reality matters and a simulacrum is just not enough.