Recently I had dinner with a fashion and culture commentator who is based in Asia. He was describing the scene at a party celebrating the newly opened Prada flagship in Shanghai; how the impeccably tasteful shop was filled with young kids with too much money and too little taste, dancing to bad music in celebration of conspicuous consumption. “That’s who buys this stuff,” he concluded. And with this one phrase he got to the crux of why today many people cannot relate to luxury fashion. Simply put, if you are a person of taste, intelligence, in possession of a certain attenuated sensibility, a degree of elegance and sophistication, you are no longer luxury fashion’s target audience.
It wasn’t always thus, and taking a glimpse at the history of contemporary fashion is helpful here. Fashion, being a marker of status, amongst other things, has always had a tug of war between the sophisticates and the vulgarians. The birth of (at least nominally) classless society after the American and the French revolutions also gave birth to the dandy, whom the French poet Baudelaire, in his modernity-defying essay The Painter of Modern Life, described as the first aristocrat marked not by birth but by taste. Beau Brummel, widely considered to be the first dandy, was of humble origin, but he lifted himself through paying utmost attention to taste – not only in dress, but in manners – setting the blueprint for the dandies who came after him, until a deep but popular misreading of Oscar Wilde’s life began to equate dandyism with peacocking. Here, our postmodern culture did what it does best – decoupling a look from its meaning. But Wilde, like many dandies before him, was the absolute paragon of sensibility as a marker of intelligence. And there is such a thing as intelligence of taste – don’t let the poptimists tell you otherwise. One is not born with a sensibility – sensibility is acquired through education and effort, all led by curiosity and desire for self-creation and self-betterment. And today it’s open to everyone, if only one is willing to make an effort – take it from an immigrant from Belarus who spent most of his life in blue collar Brooklyn.
The dandy by no means had the monopoly on taste. When Cristobal Balenciaga closed his house in 1968, he did so not because he wasn’t doing well but because, as he said, “There is no one left to dress.” What he meant was that the kind of woman he was accustomed to dressing – not just rich but sophisticated, was disappearing (one apocryphal story goes that he walked his best client, the American socialite Bunny Mellon, across the street to Hubert de Givenchy’s atelier, and told her to dress there from then on). And Balenciaga, the consummate aristocrat of taste who was revered by everyone from Christian Dior to Coco Chanel (who otherwise had nothing positive to say about anyone), was well-positioned to say so. And maybe he was onto something, because on some level the ‘70s disco and the ‘80s capitalist excess swung the pendulum of taste towards a new wave of moneyed ostentation.
But swinging is the nature of a pendulum, and in the ‘90s it swung back when the minimalists, the Japanese, and the Belgians supplanted the glitzy look of the ‘80s. Few people talk about one of the essential reasons designers like Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Martin Margiela, and Ann Demeulemeester were so esteemed. That reason is that they allowed intelligent, cultured people to no longer be ashamed of loving fashion. They gave such people – roughly, the creative class and its audience – a license to dress up. And if your average Joe didn’t get it because what they wore didn’t look expensive – all the better. Because just like with all worthwhile culture, it took effort to understand it.
The ‘90s was the height of what was called conceptual fashion (see, even the very name denotes thinking), which culminated with Hussein Chalayan, the ultimate designer-philosopher. And these designers made no qualms about who these clothes were for. When Alexander McQueen famously denied entry to his show to Victoria and David Beckham, he said, “Why would I want this tart at my show? I make clothes for intelligent women.”
No one, with the exception of Rei Kawakubo, would deny entry to Beckhams or to any other celebrity to their show today. The mentality of the ‘90s came crashing down with the rise of the luxury conglomerates with their massification (not democratization) of fashion. No luxury brand today wants you to make an effort to understand what it does (and that includes Prada, another intellectual / minimalist darling of the creative class of the ‘90s), because its customer does not want to make an effort. That customer is an arriviste – someone who has the means to buy expensive things without having acquired intelligence of taste. After all, isn’t the ability to pay enough?
And make no mistake, the egregious price hikes that luxury fashion has engaged in since the mid-aughts, is not unrelated. Because only people who don’t care about their intelligence being insulted would pay such prices. To be sure, designer fashion has always been expensive, but it wasn’t that expensive, as the price hikes of the past twenty years have far outpaced the rate of inflation, rising as much as 20% in certain years. Why? Because the luxury brands can afford to do so, plain and simple.
So, if you feel that the logoed, garish, overpriced stuff of subpar quality that passes for luxury fashion today isn’t for you, you are right – it’s not made for you on purpose. My advice to you is to move on and simply stop paying attention. Why should you be interested in a market segment that is not interested in you? You can find plenty of other fashion does, but only if you are willing to make the effort.