Was Fashion Really Better Back Then?

A collection can be so careful with a house’s history that I start wondering why it needed a designer. The archive was already there. I want to see what the person hired to work with it would change, even at the risk of wishing they had left a few things alone.

McQueen, Elbaz, Mugler, Gaultier and Lagerfeld each give me a different reason to miss that period. Gaultier could put a skirt on a man without needing every man to approve. Mugler’s articulated robotic armour, unveiled in 1995, demanded a fairly substantial departure from everyday dressing. I would struggle to imagine a customer who wanted everything all five proposed. That leaves plenty of room for the customer to have a taste of their own.

I want more people to take an interest in fashion, with the possibility of a proper argument once they get there.

Elbaz interests me because so much attention could go into how a woman would actually live with a dress. At AZ Factory, he wanted her to be able to zip herself into and out of it without assistance. At Lanvin, his spinnaker-inspired dress for spring 2008 could swell with a breath of air. I like placing those two thoughts beside each other. A dress can be extravagant, and its designer can still spend time on the nuisance of getting into it.

His departure from Lanvin in 2015 is difficult to leave out of this. Elbaz attributed the decision to the majority shareholder. Richemont agreed to back his new venture four years later. I’m glad somebody was prepared to pay for him to work again. Those two decisions give me good reason to be careful about blaming finance in the abstract.

I would still ask the owner of a house how much room they intend to give the person they have hired. There seems little point in employing somebody for a particular vision if everything the customer might object to has to go before the clothes reach the runway. Some of those objections might disappear after a couple of collections. Others may be perfectly reasonable, and the designer will have to deal with them.

McQueen’s No. 13, for spring/summer 1999, ended with Shalom Harlow on a rotating platform while two industrial robots sprayed paint onto her white dress. I can admire the dress and remain troubled by the scene. The encounter between her body and those machines gives me something to think about beyond whether the dress is beautiful. I would want a designer to have the freedom to put that in a show.

My selection leaves out a lot of forgettable fashion from the same years. Roseberry’s scorpion-tail forms and sculpted bird-head accessories for Schiaparelli’s spring 2026 couture also make a miserable fit with any claim that daring has vanished.

Lagerfeld’s work across Chanel and Fendi was commercial, too. His sketches gave the ateliers instructions they could use, with decisions already made about how the clothes should be built. I expect that much authorship from a designer. I can live with a few decisions I disagree with.