Fall 2022

Vague World

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Or, when the contents of the Vogue Closet fell onto a street in New York

Serena Williams opening Vogue World with an uninspired stroll

On the Vogue website, there was a black-and-white digital clock that had been ticking for days, counting down to an event that the brand/magazine did not describe in detail, possibly so that curiousity about it could be kept burning. Even Anna Wintour was mum about Vogue World: New York, as it is called, only hinting in the recently shared video 73 More Questions with Anna Wintour that it would involve lots of clothes, so much, in fact, that it required the “Vogue army” to organised them. Not even the venue was disclosed (was it even an IRL event?). It did eventually happen last night (New York time) on a street in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, a now-“glamourous” hipster neighbourhood (its name gives you an idea of what it was before) that is sandwiched between Chelsea to its north and the West Village in the south. Much of the streets here are paved with cobblestones made of Belgian blocks. That Vogue would stage an event down here on streets that could be high heels’ enemy, rather than at some place glitzier and carpeted is perhaps indication that the magazine is making itself—and the brand—a lot more accessible.

It described Vogue World as a “first-of-a-kind event” and a “global” one. Although staged in New York, it was live-streamed to the rest of us nowhere near that part of the city. The show was also a celebration of the magazine’s 130th year. On account of that, it had to be big and boisterous. (And no one more so than Kanye West, who arrived late enough that, while walking to his seat, he was mistaken as a model.) The show was prefaced—somewhat inexplicably—by a group of runners exercising their legs in the dim light, some with what appeared to be flags flapping behind them, like capes. Then it opened with Vogue’s September-issue cover girl Serena Williams in Balenciaga cape and dress, who looked like she was not quite thrilled to be on the runway, sauntering while a voiceover of her saying how she wants to be remembered could be heard over the apt soundtrack of Arthur Russell’s This is How We Walk on the Moon.

‘Sports couture’ at Vogue World

Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz enjoying themselves on the runway

Although Vogue World took place during New York Fashion Week, it was not quite a fashion show like the rest that were staged in the city at this time. This was a Chingay approach to fashion presentations. The carnival mood was unmistakable, with street-style performances between each fashion segment to pump up the revelry (the cultural part was there, too, when a trio of sari-clad girls came out to do their Bollywood number). The clothes, purported to show the trends of autumn/winter 2022, were not based on collections. They were single looks from many designers (name them and they were there), but you might not know or remember the styles unless you have an encyclopedic memory of what were mostly shown back in February and March. Who wore what was not identified for the benefit of viewers. Although Vogue had sussed out the supposed trends (there were five main ones, as vogue.com reported later), you can‘t help but feel that they were rather forced (gowns and boots!). And somewhat haphazardly grouped, rather luan (乱 or messy). Perhaps Lil Nas X’s performance (that began with the singer seated next to Ms Wintour) to wrap up the runway extravaganza was designed to play down that shortcoming.

Vogue World was not just a show. As it turned out, what the models and stars wore could be purchased, reviving the old see-now-buy-now model that brands introduced with enthusiasm some years back, but is now largely forgotten. You could go to the Vogue website and find the links to the items that caught your attention and shop away. If you need to try before buying, an AR element, conceived by Snapchat, allows you to virtually put on the clothes no matter where you are. Like its print form, this is to push purchases for their advertisers. Is vogue.com then also sort of an e-store, and did we see additional revenue streams for the multi-platform title? Is the site now into live-stream selling, minus an ebullient host? According to Vogue’s creative editorial director Mark Guiducci, the show is a reflection of “all the ways in which fashion is changing. It comes at a moment when designers have become multi-disciplinary creators, innovating how we engage with fashion—even virtually.”

Shalom Harlow, one of the many ‘supers’ in the final segment of the show

Lil Nas X starting his performance while seated next to a delighted Anna Wintour

Vogue World could be seen as a big-budget, celebrity-endorsed, brand-building exercise. It reminded us of the eponymous Fashion’s Night Out (also launched in New York), the just-as-flashy, get-people-shopping-again initiative that was launched on 10 September 2009, twelve months after the doomed Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The year 2009 also saw Barrack Obama sworn in as the United State’s first Black president and the perpetuation of the financial crisis and recession that hit two years earlier, in late 2007. Fashion’s Night Out was Vogue’s contribution to improving the grim retail climate then. It eventually spun off into international editions in different hub cities. Could Vogue World—presently linked to New York—too have other editions in cities where Vogue operates. There was, for example, a Fashion’s Night Out in Tokyo in 2008. In 2013, Fashion’s Night out in New York ended it’s increasingly disfavoured run. But in Tokyo, the event continued until 2020, but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, took place as Fashion’s Night In—an online affair.

It is hard to say how Vogue World will pan out. The show might be enjoyable to those who were there to see it, but to some (perhaps more?) of us watching on our devices, it teetered discomfortingly close to blah. This was Vogue at its inclusive best. The community-arousing performance, with its strong street culture, would have won the approval of the late Virgil Abloh. But what else could we glean from it? Former British Vogue’s fashion director Lucinda Chambers, after she was “fired” by the then in-coming editorial head Edward Enninful in 2017, now considered the most powerful Condé Nast editor after Anna Wintour, told Vestoj in a revealing interview that “we don’t need any more bags, shirts or shoes. So we cajole, bully or encourage people into continue buying. I know glossy magazines are meant to be aspirational, but why not be both useful and aspirational?” And why not magazines’ promotional events too? This may be a Vogue World, but is it a new, better world?

Screen shots: vogue.com

Schoolgirl Sass

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Dior’s fall 2022 is for the very young?

At the end of the latest Dior show, Maria Grazia Chiuri took her usual bow, wearing a varsity jacket of the Ewha Womans University (actual name). It confirmed what we were thinking while watching the livestream of the show staged in the 185-year-old private school: she is creating her own ‘campus chic’. This is, of course, nothing akin to what you’d see in the corridors of NUS, where fashion is secondary, but the xiaomeimei (小妹妹) vibe is unmistakable and the look-at-my-young-abdominal flaunt apparent. This is collegiate girliness lensed through the Dior studio, with the usual plethora of sheerness and a paucity of innovation. Liberal education in the company of rote designing for an increasing homogeneous sorority.

The show might be staged on the grounds of an institute of higher learning, but it seems to stop at the steps of virtuosity and brilliance. Or, as the British indie rock girlband Wet Leg sang out in the opening track of the show proper, 2019’s surprise hit Chaise Lounge: “I went to school and I got a degree. All my friends call it ‘the big D’.” While the song is deliciously irreverent and so incongruous to the do-your-best ethos of varsity pursuits, the clothes have less the cheek that one might expect to reflect those individuals inclined to provoke, if not challenge the status quo within the relative safety of academic walls. They lack the lyrical playfulness of the Wet Leg song; they are, at best, catchy, but vacuous.

There is, unsurprisingly, the undercurrent of feminism that is tagged to Ms Chiuri’s work for Dior, if not the past overtone. The 88-look presentation opened with a group of skateboarders—all girls—displaying their fancy footwork, with almost a machismo that seems to dispel any belief that skateboarding is a male sport or that girls can’t be good at it. All that as-strong-as-the-guys sporting excellence, however, does not preface the extreme femininity of the styling that Ms Chiuri has embraced. While some of the looks could pass off as ‘andro’ (even if only in the attitude of the models), most are a reprise of her brand of cool-girl ethos and emptiness, including the oddly omnipresent tie, neckwear that guys are fast abandoning, even among those working in banks. Now, more incongruous on the built-for-the-show skatepark.

It is often said that the Fall—aka pre-fall—or any ‘pre’ collection is a more accessible take on the main RTW. Dior’s vision is not spectacularly differentiated; it is the Dior that has become the Dior of Maria Grazia Chiuri: those unstoppable sheer skirts, the white-shirt-as-base-garment, workwear-as-sportwear, as well as corny sports clothes, bicycle shorts under feminine skirts, negligee over shirts and such, belted dresses of various lengths, and high boots with everything. And if the schoolgirl has a prom to attend or a fashion show at its school compound to grace, there are always the sexy evening dresses. When the young need to impress their peers, sometimes, as Gen-Zers have repeatedly shown, not that much effort is needed.

Screen grab (top) and photos: Dior

Hint Of The Literary

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Dior’s next season for men is inspired by the American novelist Jack Kerouac. Kim Jones is again a wanderer

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars” — On the Road: the Original Scroll, Jack Kerouac

The next season’s collections are showing earlier and earlier. Sure, the end-of-season sales have begun, but we have not celebrated Christmas. Yet, somehow brands are certain that we like seeing what we might desire to wear (at least) nine months later. Dior’s fall 2020 (with some reports labelling it as a “pre-collection”) appears just a day ago, and around the same time as the collection shown in Florida in 2019, also labelled “fall”. Based on the absence of winter coats, it is quite certain that the autumn/winter season will be staged in January next year. And, with the show brought to London, we can be quite certain that the not-in-Paris showing is resort/cruise/pre-whatever. Does it really matter? Would we remember?

Kim Jones may have brought the fall 2022 collection back to his home in London, but for the clothes, he had America in mind. A very specific America, based on the work of the Beat-Gen novelist/poet Jack Kerouac, whose contemporaries include Allen Ginsburg and William S Burroughs. Mr Jones’s fascination with the writers of literary movements first manifested itself early this year with his debut Fendi haute couture collection, which was inspired by the British Bloomsbury Group, a set that included Virginia Woolf, which prompted the press to suggest that he brought “Virginia Woolf chic to Paris”. There was nothing Woolfian about that collection. Similarly, it would be hard to find anything Kerouacian about the latest Dior.

But, Americana is evident. It is, however, not the Americana that Raf Simons imagined for Calvin Klein when he briefly designed for the label. Nor, Stuart Vevers’s for Coach. Mr Jones approach is more, shall we say, an amalgam of sources, not necessarily from the author of On the Road himself, who was not especially noted for his sartorial strength, even if he was considered a “looker”. Prior to attaining fame as a writer, Jack Kerouac was a sportsman (he played [American] football in college, before he dropped out), a gas station attendant, a construction worker, and, very briefly, a marine.

Mr Jones had elements of workwear in the collection, but a few pieces looked to be inspired by what Junya Watanabe has been doing for years, including the contrast-coloured straps on the outers. Or those blazers with contrast utility pockets an additional shirt placate. Even those Fair Isle sweaters, were they not explored in Mr Watanabe’s current autumn/winter collection? Sure, there is a vague ’50s vibe in the collection, but missing is the certain roughness—aided by sex, drugs and jazz—that unabashedly described and played up in On the Road. The only literal association is the set of the show: a reported 80-metre long scroll that represents Mr Kerouac’s own 120 feet (36.5m) long manuscript for On the Road, that according to lore, was written in three weeks.

The Dior fall 2022 collection does not appear to be put together in such a haste. And, that, to us, is perhaps why it looks so inauthentic. To be fair, it is one of Mr Jones’s better collection, but if the Beat Generation is noted for their waywardness and rebelliousness, the clothes seem too composed and calculated, and devoid of the risk-willing and devil-may-care attitudes of the youths that one sees from reading Jack Kerouac. Was there too much concern with the street to be aware of being on the road? There is no denying that Mr Jones’s Dior embraces elegance, but some styles appear to be from the Giorgio Armani play book, in particular look 39—the mocha-coloured, asymmetric, stand-collared leather jacket (itself seemingly like a fitted take of a vintage Swedish army motorcycle jacket), teamed with mottled grey wool pants. To strengthen the likeness, the model wore a beanie and a pair of sunglasses. Search as we have, no image of Jack Kerouac came to us that way.

In On the Road, Mr Kerouac wrote: ”The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.” We are not hoping that Mr Jones—or Dior—become this mad (although that would be great), but we really wish to see something burn, even if just a flicker.

Screen grab (top) and photos: Dior