The Oxford English Dictionary puts it at its’ most straightforwardly blunt: clothes are – plain and simple - ”items to cover the body”. Fabric cut, shaped and sewn to facilitate protection, convenience and comfort. Form following function. And in the face of our shifting twenty-first century culture of managed microclimates and tolerantly easygoing dresscodes, you’d have thought the aesthetics of fashion would have long ago been realigned to suit.
Far from it.
Because while our lifestyle seems to demand democratically ergonomic basics, skewed into quiet luxury or vibrant excess to suit the wearer’s personality, the reality is that the catwalk seems to be drifting ever further from the real world: celebrating a strangely out-of-time fantasy over the simple power of the everyday.
Two decades ago, Alexander McQueen started out with the lean bravado of thigh-skimming busters and tautly cut vests (uncompromisingly of the moment, the swaggering ease of Nineties sportswear flayed into exquisitely cut tailoring). Yet by comparison Sarah Burton’s latest, rapturously-received collection for the label might as well have washed up from an alien world – its’ foamy ruffles, padded hourglass waists and trailing tiered skirts cast ashore from the wreckage of the nineteenth century. The shapes, the exaggeratedly feminine proportions, and the intricately crafted surfaces belonged to a world dominated by Queen Victoria and her far-flung brood of grandchildren: a shimmering, gas-lit universe of Romanovs, Saxe-Coburgs and Habsburgs, blasted into oblivion long ago in a hail of revolutionary gunfire.
All that should have been left were stories.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful fairytale princess. In fact, there were shedloads of them. Beautiful ones, plain ones, young ones, too-long-on-the-shelf ones, wicked ones, bookish ones – scattered across Europe in a blaze of marriageable magnificence, sparkling with diamonds and wrapped up in shoals of virginal tulle. But their world of ballrooms and debutantes is gone: the overblown decadence of fin-de-siècle gowns collapsed into the slick flapper razzle-dazzle of the Jazz Age, and then streamlined into the poised clarity of mid-century couture and the graphic edge of the Sixties. And as society became increasingly horizontal, and ever more casual (the pub instead of the cocktail lounge, Bacardi Breezers the disco replacing champagne at the dancehall), the sedate romance of eveningwear seemed set for obsolescence.
But on the cusp of the Seventies the children of the revolution had a change of heart. In swept Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes, Bill Gibb and Celia Birtwell, replacing fitted functionalism with a sea of whimsical flounce. Ironically, the decade when the world became definitively modem was also the one where they discovered nostalgia.
Ever since then, we’ve moved in split-screen. On the one hand, design zooms into the future, tracking technology with thrillingly innovative results: while on the other, a rip tide seems to pull fashion obsessively back into daydreams of the past. Dior, Saint-Laurent, Valentino – in their day, and of their time, each label was resolutely modern: yet their descendants seem lost in fantasy. Flick through any fashion week’s coverage, particularly in the European capitals, and you’ll find houses parading entire collections of eveningwear – as though we still live in a world where it’s always Martini time, and where there’ll always be time for one more dance. And even the most hardened of modernists are susceptible: Rick Owens’ apocalyptic abstraction has subtly reshaped in the last few seasons into something which seems possessed by mid-century beauty: the future, as imagined by Edith Head. (And it’s intriguing to see the continuing pull that the 1950′s – the decade when couture ground to a halt and the formal charade of “dressing up” finally gave way – has over today’s designers, from Raf Simons to Miuccia Prada and beyond.)
So we’ve become accustomed to the oddity of these beautiful irrelevances – headline-grabbing showpieces which seem to exist solely for their own sake, from Craig Lawrence’s tangled knits, to Corrie Neilsen’s exquisite Elizabethan pleats, to Anthony Vaccarello’s slashed, sinuous coils of liquid satin. Masterful constructions, created for occasions which will never come to pass.
It’s understandable: the sweep and full-bodied drama of rhapsodic gowns and sensually masculine tuxedos evokes a world of now-unimaginable certainty and glamour, of plain Janes turned into Cinderellas and average Joes transformed into louche, worldly Prince Charmings. Eveningwear has become our impossible escape: cascades of frothy Chanel lace or pastel Versace chiffon, enjoyed vicariously through the red carpet and its’ new breed of interchangeable princesses. (Just as Fred and Ginger, sweeping across the silver screen in swirls of marabou feathers, embodied a way out for the cinemagoers of another, long-ago depression.)
So we’ve come to find ways to drag that vanished peacock dazzle into the cul-de-sac of the present. And it doesn’t seem to matter that the world where ballgowns were considered a practical necessity has disappeared: the bleakness of the ordinary just doesn’t cut it, in this particular ever after.
