Have a little sympathy for the John Gallianos and Alber Elbazs of this world, says fashion journalist Suzy Menkes. Her latest column for T Magazine highlights the plight of designers having to adhere to a fashion calendar that's increasingly go, go, go.
Gone are the days when there were only a handful of fashion houses producing four collections. Gone are the simple markers for trends like, say, summer, autumn, winter and spring. Today, there are thousands of designers competing for our wardrobe space. And with ready-to-wear, prêt-a-porter, men's, promotional shows in Asia, Dubai and Brazil, and in-between showings such as "resort" in mid-winter and "pre-fall" in mid-summer, they can be called upon to design up to 10 collections a year. That's almost one a month when you factor in their annual holidays to Belize or St. Barts.
With 138 worldwide fashion weeks, and schedules that pack in up to 264 shows over five days, designers sure have their work cut out for them. Menkes calls it the "fashion treadmill" and designers are nodding their heads in agreement. As couture maven Hussein Chalayan says, "It's become like being in a diamond-plated hamster wheel, these days you have to go faster and faster and faster. At some stage one's got to fall."
Could Menkes be right? Could the heavy strain placed on both budgets and designers be doing some serious damage? We can't help but think of Alexander McQueen's tragic demise, Christophe Decarnin's descent into exhaustion after six years at the helm at Balmain, or Marc Jacobs' stint in rehab post-Louis Vuitton. Are more designers destined to crash and burn?
Though Menkes doesn't point her finger at any one culprit, there are a number of contributing causes: chains such as H&M, Topshop, Zara and J.Crew out-pacing international shows; the bigwig executives at LVMH and Kering, who owns Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Christopher Kane and Saint Laurent, hell-bent on chasing a profit; our unquenchable thirst for trends; that never-ending need to be 'new' and 'exclusive', exacerbated by the internet, which can now make live catwalk shows 'shoppable' at the click of a button.
"If we accept that the pace of fashion today was part of the problem behind the decline of John Galliano, the demise of Alexander McQueen and the cause of other well-known rehab cleanups, non-stop shows seem a high price to pay for the endless 'newness' demanded of fashion now," says Menkes.
As goes the trickle-down trajectory of fashion, this ultimately affects the clothes that end up in our wardrobes. While Lanvin's Alber Elbaz once went on global recce missions and scoured downtown galleries for inspiration to pump into his collections, he simply doesn't have time these days. Collections risk becoming less creative and more commercial as a result.
Though we're not always sympathetic toward the collective angst of clothes critics, Menkes may just have a point here. Yes, she choose to express it in rather colourful language ("As the fashion carousel spins ever faster." Again with the circus imagery, Suzy?) and in parts sounds a bit too compassionate towards John Galliano (You can't blame the frenetic collection cycle for acting like a Anti-Semitic Asshat, John.), she does give us fashion and fabric for thought ahead of September and it's big four (New York, Paris, London and Milan) fashion weeks. Why, if even someone who's paid to watch the fashions can't keep up, what hope do the rest of us have?
