It took a while yesterday for the visitors to arrive at the Pitti trade fair. So, while I was walking around the semi-deserted stands, I kept on thinking if what surrounded me was still truly necessary. At the current edition of the Pitti there are indeed entire stands dedicated to manufacturers or labels that seem to consistently present season after season the same products.
There is obviously also the case of the company presenting new products completely stolen from a previous collection of another contemporary designer (I have seen men's shoes covered in assorted religious medals, an idea entirely lifted from Dolce & Gabbana's A/W 10 collection – because now it's popular to copy not what was fashionable decades ago, but what was fashionable two seasons ago....).
I do think that innovative, revolutionary and original products are completely missing at this year's Pitti and what is really annoying is the complete lack of research behind some of the products exhibited. We are indeed polluting the planet not to produce hi-tech amazing clothes and accessories, but by producing useless things nobody wants to buy and alienating the consumer (the final proof of all this comes from a simple trick I have devised: I usually wear one of the most over the top necklace I have done for myself and I usually get a lot of people asking about it, even exhibitors – which is a bad sign, since it should be the other way round, with me asking about the goods they are selling...).
Yet I see this edition of the Pitti trade fair as a mirror of our society: we are constantly surrounded and bombarded by too many things - by quantity in a nutshell - and not by quality.
Quantity in fashion means that we have cluttered wardrobes with clothes and accessories in excess and we're not even inspired to create our own styles.
In a way this edition of the fair with its rather uninteresting mix of clothes and accessories, reflects not a crisis, but a confusing period of time, on a financial, social and cultural level.
So, I wonder, is this format still sustainable or should we maybe turn to digital fairs and save money and time? Is it really worth it travelling to another country to see a pile of a polo shirts, coloured denim trousers and sneakers that look more or less the same season after season? While going entirely digital may be a solution (though most fairs, the Pitti included, have a “digital” section nowadays...), I think the best option would be turning these events into trade fairs-cum-workshops and opening the workshops to the public.
It would be very interesting if, rather than mind-numbing lectures about trends, there would be lectures about the state of fashion, objectivity in fashion writing or seminars about fashion design courses (and how to choose them if you're a student) since such events would definitely have an impact on the exhibitors as well (who would benefit from the intelligent feedback and exchange of opinions...).
While it would break my heart seeing an Italian institution like the Pitti going, I think the time has come to radically reinvent the traditional trade fair as we know it and possibly to kill the fashion industry to rebuild it from scratch in a more intelligent way.
A final note goes to the person who compared me to another journalist, then proceeded to tell me that my colleague now works for an important Italian fashion publication because he cleverly accepted to compromise while I don't accept to compromise and never shout my mouth. Languages are funny things since in my vocabulary "to compromise" equals lack of honesty, impartiality, integrity and objectivity. Maybe, before thinking about how to save the fashion industry and trade fairs we should start thinking about how to change fashion journalism...
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