FASHION MATTERS – Is The Global Media Destroying Fashion?
The preview of the spring/summer 2011 collections at fashion week in New York, London, Milan and Paris finished a little over a month ago. Since then I have blogged over 30 celebrity looks from these very same collections. Celebrities from Kristen Stewart to Gwyneth Paltrow and designers from Rodarte to Erdem have all had their designs hit the red carpet hot off the backs of their catwalk models. Consequently these looks in addition to being instantaneously available to view online on sites such as Style.com are given the added publicity that comes with celebrity endorsement. A very grumpy but growing body of thought in the fashion world is beginning to assimilate this exposure to overkill that is slowly destroying the industry.
When Tom Ford made his victorious return to the fashion world during New York Fashion Week last month it was with dismay that many excited fashionistas learnt that no pictures would be released to the public from this collection until January 2011. But the ever shrewd Tom Ford had his reasons; directly pointing to the over exposure and consequent lack of excitement that comes with over publicised collections. And his argument does carry some weight. From the perspective of press in the fashion industry it’s very hard to get excited about camel coats and shearling boots when you’ve been looking at them for 6 months before they’ve even hit the shops. This only becomes a problem where this type of boredom begins to spill over into the fashion buying masses.
Burberry Prorsum have for the past two seasons spearheaded a new initiative where following the live stream (yes now we can all sit front row) of the show at London Fashion Week for a limited time, items from the collection are available to buy online, giving a high fashion dimension to instant fashion. The high street has always been the go-to place to get a fashion fix fast but the designer world is harder and faster to keep up. Already for many labels there are four collections a year; spring, pre-fall, fall and resort, in an attempt to meet the voracious appetite of today’s consumer.
The point Tom Ford is making is not about the demand for clothing, rather it’s to do with the excitement and buzz surrounding that demand. Can you really be excited about a Burberry aviator jacket when they’ve been thrust in our faces since February and just about everyone is wearing some sort of high street lookalike? It’s akin to hearing a song a hundred times on the radio and getting completely sick of it; overplay. Tom Ford is aiming to keep the buzz about his clothes and consequently giving his customers back the thrill of wearing something new and exciting (either that or this is a particularly clever media manipulation exercise). Whatever his actual motives are, his logic is resonating around the fashion world and whether this can actually work in an age of lightening fast global consumerism we’ll just have to wait until January to find out.
