Op-Ed: Why There May Never Be Another McQueen

Speak to fashion enthusiasts today, and they will tell you how impoverished today’s fashion has become, and how hard it is to envision a change. Inevitably they look back, more often than not to the ‘80s and the ‘90s, which many see as the golden age of fashion, the era when a generation of designers created clothes that did not serve as status symbols but had deep cultural roots. In this new, exciting milieu, the Camp greats like Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler coexisted with the seriousness of Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, the sober minimalism of Helmut Lang and Jil Sander was juxtaposed against the playfulness of Franco Moschino and John Galliano, and the Antwerp Six and Martin Margiela ushered in a post-bourgeois sensibility that was taken up by the second wave of Belgian designers and culminated in the brutalism of Rick Owens. The idea that fashion could be the provenance of intelligent, culturally educated people, and not that of Houston oil housewives and Thai princesses, came to a climax in the late ‘90s in London with the awe-inspiring work of Hussein Chalayan. And then there was Alexander McQueen, whose clothes-making skills equaled his aesthetic edge.

In the 21st Century it all came crashing down, leaving us with nothing but nostalgia and lots of vintage shops. The burning question on many minds today is where is the next McQueen? Can this culture and this industry produce a designer who can build a recognizable brand that is aesthetically and intellectually strong, one that can produce something challenging and brilliant? I am afraid that a few major signs point to an answer in the negative. What are these signs? In order of importance; the state of current cultural education, class inequality, and years of overzealous identity policing that have plunged fashion into a climate of fear and self-censorship.

First, the culture. By all accounts I read and hear from academia, students today are woefully undereducated in cultural history. Their attention spans are shot; reading books and going to museums have become esoteric activities, and most cultural information they consume comes from social media. (Even at elite colleges the humanities majors struggle with reading entire books.) Their knowledge of cultural history is scant and disjointed. Many students who enroll in fashion schools also display poor knowledge of fashion history. The rich archives of university libraries remain underused while students’ moodboards are full of images they glean from the first five search pages of Pinterest. When they do turn to the past, it is without any meaningful connection, only to plunder it for aesthetic clues that they remix. More often than not the result of such efforts is a soulless pastiche. The current cultural role model is Virgil Abloh, who declared that making something new today is impossible.

That students are undereducated is not entirely their fault. They are products of a culture in which successive generations of young people have been told, not least by marketers, that they are the most important people in the world. It is no wonder that self-regard and navel-gazing has become the provenance of the young, who tend to think that everything worth paying attention to happened five minutes ago. Meanwhile, the professional classes, especially those in academia, have by and large capitulated to this view and abdicated their authority.

On top of this, the unstoppable and ever more pervasive forces of popular culture, which with each decade seems to grow more visual, homogenous, and banal, can no longer be counteracted by the kind of contemplative cultural activities that people sought out in the past. Make no mistake, I am not advocating for Debussy and Shakespeare. But even in popular culture of the ‘80s both were referenced by bands such as The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys. In the ‘90s intelligent pop music of Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, and Nine Inch Nails was topping charts. It seems that today intelligent pop culture has become an endangered species. And if there is no intelligence in pop culture, how can there be one in fashion?

I am not asking for a return to cultural conformism or conservatism either; but in order to subvert something, you need to be familiar with it. McQueen, following Picasso, said that you need to know the rules before you can break them, and his training on Saville Row made him a tailoring master. Rick Owens was brought up on classical music and his father instilled in him a love of reading. Owens went on to reject  the childhood education he found suffocating, but which also equipped him with the very tools that he needed for his task.

Today, we are often told that in the age in which parents smoke weed with their teenage children and buy them condoms, there is nothing left for the young to subvert. I invite these people to look at the world, and that includes the fashion industry, and say the same thing.

McQueen and Owens came from unprivileged, working class families. So did Galliano, whose father was a plumber. Yohji Yamamoto was raised by a single mother who was consumed by running her small dress shop. Craig Green came from a family of civil servants. Vivienne Westwood was a public school teacher before she met McLaren, a serial art school dropout who slept on friends’ floors and in cars.

More often than not today’s fashion school graduates come from well-off families, cuddled and privileged. The low pay of the fashion industry that relies on armies of assistants and interns, coupled with the high cost of living in major cities, where the industry is concentrated, has made it all but impossible for the less well-off to pursue a career in fashion. The vapidly glamorous façade that fashion presents draws in mostly children of rich parents who confuse their love of shopping for love of fashion. This is not to say that the privileged necessarily lack creativity. But there is something to be said for the hunger, the drive, the passion, stubbornness and defiance that comes with growing up with adversity. It is no wonder that in today’s fashion we are missing that edge.

Already aesthetically impoverished through lack of cultural knowledge and education, designers now have been growing up in a milieu in which one of the most important avenues of creativity, drawing inspiration from various cultures, has been all but closed to them through insistent and incessant cries of “cultural appropriation.” Such narrowing down goes for both majority students who are discouraged from looking at other cultures, and minority students who are pressured to only look at their own. And yet, drawing inspiration from various sources has always been the prerogative of the artist. Looking back at the work of designer greats, beginning as far as Paul Poiret and ending with Dries Van Noten (not to mention Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gaultier, and many others), one cannot help but think how much less exciting fashion would have been if they would not be able to draw from the wellspring of global culture.

None of the above bodes well for the question poised above. To make truly great fashion, aesthetics are not enough. The work has to come from the deep well of creativity undergirded by genuine cultural drive and strong emotion; at the risk of sounding hokey, it must have a soul.