The fashion industry is characterised by contradictory forces: the messages we get on a daily basis encourage us to go out and buy more clothes not just every six months but every single week to make sure our wardrobes are impossibly trendy and hip. At the same time we are reminded that our clothes should be more sustainable and that we should opt for a minimalist approach to life reducing our consumption habits.
So while one fashion house may be showcasing during one single runway show over 100 outfits, other brands may encourage us to reduce and edit our wardrobes. Australian designer Josh Goot and Vogue Australia stylist and fashion director Christine Centenera for example recently came together to produce Wardrobe NYC, a collection of high-quality essential pieces.
The collection features eight designs for men (including an overcoat, a blazer, a T-shirt, trousers and a hoodie) and eight for women (among the others a wide coat, a collarless shirt, black leggings, and an A-line skirt).
The idea behind this project is simple – producing a simple, timeless and impeccable wardrobe for all sorts of people, no matter their jobs, ages, sizes and body types (the collection includes pieces going from Size Small to Size 3XL) or styles.
All the designs are produced in Italy and sold on the brand's site, so they are priced without retail margins. It is not possible to buy one single piece, but only the entire wardrobe for $3,000, or the edited version with four-pieces for $1,500. Expansions can be added (sounds a bit like modern videogames like the ones for Nintendo Switch…) as the designers plan to introduce new-themed collection each season.
Now, the idea of edited collections are perfectly fine, in fact we should all try to have smaller and more compact wardrobes.
That said, in this case the project doesn't sound particularly new: just two months ago (as we saw in a previous post) Misha Nonoo launched The Easy Eight, a collection of eight pieces that sounded more or less like Donna Karan's 1985 Seven Easy Pieces, an idea that was probably stolen – pardon, borrowed/inspired – from Bonnie Cashin's 1975 Seven Easy Pieces made in 1975.
It seems therefore that the rule of the seven has suddenly turned into the rule of the hateful eight as we highlighted in a previous post.
You could argue that even Bonnie Cashin was reinventing in her times an old idea (albeit she was doing it in a clever and original way…) that came from other times when people were low on resources but high on resourcefulness and tended to have very compact wardrobes that maybe featured one good coat and one immaculately tailored suit, pieces they had to cherish forever because they were made to last and because they couldn't afford more of them.
This rule was still pretty fashionable around thirty years ago: I grew up in the '80s in Italy and most grown-ups seemed to have just one good coat in a sensible colour, while women tended to accessorise their clothes with unique pieces to make them look fresher (younger generations nowadays seem more focused on buying clothes, shoes and bags, but they do not seem to have talent for extravagant subtleties like a statement necklace).
It is all fine to be minimal, but making an old idea pass for the epitome of radical fashion or as the antithesis to fast fashion sounds a bit contrived. Centenera has also worked as a consultant for Kanye West's Yeezy line that mainly focuses on rather bland athleisure supported not by the forces of style and timelessness but by celebrity power.
In a nutshell Wardrobe NYC (a label that, as it stands, may last between 6 and 9 months) sounds like a new take on an old concept that suddenly seems fresh and trendy to younger generations of consumers used to buy more than they should. The real solution to fashion madness and extreme consumption? Make your own quality wardrobe by buying the best pieces that fit you and not the best pre-packaged, pre-styled eight pieces that somebody wants to impose on you.
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