WHY IS CONTEMPORARY FASHION SO UGLY?
At the Met Gala in New York, themed as an homage to the late Karl Lagerfeld, celebrities arrived in costumes made with the intention to make them stand out from the crowd. Jeweled man-thongs, ornamented bodysuits, and dresses in the shape of cocoons were not worn for comfort, but for attention.
In 2010, Instagram was launched.
Already before, the fashion image had been more important than the actual garment.
French philosopher Roland Barthes stated already in the 1960s that, “the magazine is a machine that makes fashion”.
By this he meant that fashion is different from clothes; it’s a symbolic value, only temporary ascribed to certain garments. The most powerful manifestation of fashion is thus not in garments, but in images.
Instagram and Tiktok have accelerated the trend of promoting image over object. The two-dimensional representation of a look carries today more cultural weight than the three-dimensional outfit.
When fashion photography was produced exclusively for magazines, this was not so strange: The stylized images would appear, meticulously processed in post-production, on the glossy pages of Vogue, ELLE or Harper’s Bazaar. The work process was hidden from the reader, who knew nothing of the conditions behind putting together a fashion photography.
Today, fashion images are no longer produced by editorial teams, but by people working for social media celebrities, including their stylists, as well as the paparazzi taking photos as the influencers enter a party like the Met Gala.
The consequence is that garments, not made for walking but strictly for posing, are exposed in all their ridiculousness, for the world to see as they struggle to walk on the red carpet.
Seeing people attempting to look dignified while wearing something that is made with the sole purpose of going “viral” is to witness in 3D what was intended only to be viewed in 2D.
This is what makes fashion appear so irrelevant these days; it has become all about people trying too hard to get the attention of the audience.
Fashion has always been about the surface.
But if fashion before digitalization had an air of dignity, today’s constant need to document everything, and to move fashion shoots from photo studios to the red carpet, has changed the aesthetics of things, making fashion appear mundane, even though the garments are stranger than ever.
Fashion is no longer about making someone look more beautiful, but about attracting attention by wearing something meant to surprise, even shock.
It’s no longer about design, but about being looked at.
And this is what makes contemporary fashion not only ugly, but worse than that, it makes it boring.
/Philip Warkander