There's a "trend" this season—if it can be called such a thing—where the most fearless designers are looking at what seem to be the certainties of an early 20th-century avant-garde past. Or should that be the uncertainties of the avant-garde past? In some ways, the collections in question have more in common with the art movements and values of 1914 than with 2014—and we all know what happened in 1914.
It sounds equally glib and facile to say that Rei Kawakubo started this "trend." Maybe what Kawakubo actually did was engage her instincts and growing unease at what was happening in the world—and was plain for all to feel—and articulate it quicker than most. In her extremely challenging collections of the last few seasons, she took that leap of faith and asked her audience to do so, too.
This evening, Kawakubo continued with her odyssey, and it became a blood-soaked one, like a Jacobean revenge play of sorts. Roses and blood were her key words backstage, and it was important that roses came first because there was a struggle going on in this collection to turn something disturbing into something beautiful—it seems that this is Kawakubo's own personal creative struggle expressed time and time again. Her familiar motif of the rose or rosette was there from the first look, cascading down in long flowing red ribbons of fabric, and this was the most conventionally beautiful look of the collection. It was all red, as was the entire offering—apart from one ominous black hood toward the end, echoing an earlier version of a red riding hood that appeared in patent leatherette. There was not even a major variation in reds; it was the same rose red, or poppy red, expressed again and again in widely different textures and silhouettes that ran like exploded and tattered versions of an invented history, one of Kawakubo's own making.
Kawakubo does not do "political" collections, as that is equally facile and idiotic and makes disaster into a "trend." But this week we have entered into another blood-soaked period of history and you cannot help but read that in a collection that must have been fermenting in the designer's mind for months. It felt powerfully unnerving—and sometimes isn't that what fashion has every right to be?
Wherever and whatever that strange site of creativity is that feeds the great fashion designers, that makes them understand what is to come before anybody else and makes them immediately try to transform their unease into something approaching beauty, is a fascinating question. And it's not just a question for frivolous fashion types who "don't live in the real world" because we all actually do. Eric Hobsbawm, the late Marxist historian, said in The Age of Extremes: "Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously nonanalytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, remains one of the most obscure questions in history and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."
The question is, what will the next season bring?
