The recent news about Raf Simons leaving Dior and Alber Elbaz exiting Lanvin have spawned a series of articles about the state of fashion. Pressure, the fast rhythms of the industry and social media gone haywire have been blamed, but, when you sit back and think, you realise these may not be the only reasons why some designers have started to get off the fashion bandwagon. There could indeed be other explanations: one could be, for instance, the process of assigning random fashion awards to this or that label/designer or this and that product. Think about Kanye West's Adidas Yeezy Boost recently getting the Footwear News' "Shoe of the Year" award.
"This year's Shoe of the Year honour recognises the insatiable demand for all things Yeezy," read the official announcement, highlighting an important truth about fashion design. The words "insatiable demand" point indeed to quantity rather than quality, a quantity derived from the fact that West is a media sensation and not a designer with a terrific product up his sleeve.
West cleverly unveiled the Yeezy high-tops on the Grammys, sending them skyrocketing and turning them into a server crashing product; he also donned beige Boosts at the MTV VMAs in August to create the much-needed anticipation for their release during the holiday season. Besides, his wife Kim Kardashian, sister-in-laws Kendall and Kylie Jenner, were also often photographed wearing the sneakers. It was therefore only natural for the sneakers to become a coveted product by West's fans all over the world.
Yet West remains first and foremost a rapper and producer and a celebrity; he may know what he likes to wear and what kind of designer products he likes to receive for free, but these qualifications do not make him a designer.
As a matter of fact the Yeezy Boost 350 shoes do not have anything dramatically or radically innovative about them; they look indeed like any other knitted lace-up sneaker and you can just imagine how they assembled them at the Adidas HQs with West pointing to the desired rubber sole, nuance or graphic motif, and somebody conjuring up the final image on a screen in the same way consumers do when they customise sneakers online or in a dedicated sportswear store.
Taking a look at West's horrid collections of clothes (Kanye's Yeezy Season 1 Adidas apparel and Season 2 simply look the same, a combination of miserabilism in dystopic Divergent shades, mistaken by advertising money thirsty media for brave examples of social commentary tackling racism and promoting diversity...) - featuring tatty surplus army sweaters covered in holes, oridinary leggings, oversized sweatshirts, rather banal but ridiculously priced coats ("solutions-based" collection? Don't take the piss out of us consumers, come on...), and the horridly shaped Yeezy 950 Duck Boot, a remixed version of the classic bunny boots used by the United States armed forces (of the sort you can get from various retailers from Amazon to Aliexpress at a fraction of the price) - have the power to send shivers down any designer's spine.
Maybe the time has come to stop building the hype around celebrities' collections. Yes, it's true, when a celebrity shows his or her endorsement for a brand they make it instantly rich, but, while manufacturing a genuinely innovative product may take time and money, it is also a rewarding process that may win consumers's loyalty for life. Besides, we may be sending the wrong signals to an entire generation of young people who want to get into the fashion business and may start wondering what's the point of studying, learning and struggling if this is how it works.
The FN Achievement Awards - celebrating this year their 29th anniversary - will be presented on 2nd December in New York City. Considered as the "Shoe Oscar", the awards acknowledged throughout the years Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik, Stuart Weitzman and Pierre Hardy, as well as brands like Nike, and fashion houses such as Prada, while Adidas brought home the award in 2014 for an iconically classic product, the Stan Smith court shoe. You may like or not these names/brands, you may love or hate some of their designs, but at least they all fall under the categories of designers/apparel brands and are managed by proper designers or by teams of people wth the proper qualifications to be designers.
Now the self-proclaimed "God of Rap" is also an awarded shoe designer, even though they probably gave him a prize because it's better to shut him up with praise than tell him in his face he is not a designer and get sued (West asked models who walked for his Season 2 show to sign non-disclosure agreements that stated he could sue them for up to $10million if they spoke out about him, the collection, Kim Kardashian West and her family).
Yet Footwear News has maybe forgotten that it's not the price of a pair of shoes (around $200 per pair in the case of West's Yeezy), or their re-sale value (the Yeezy shoes can reach three times their original price on the resale market) that makes a truly innovative shoe.
Innovation is indeed a combination of factors, including materials, design, colour and fit (not to mention the fact that you may need to know basic principles of orthopaedic medicine to design great shoes - Salvatore Ferragamo studied the anatomy of the foot in his early days as a designer in the States), and it's not the result of a mathematical equation between your ego, your aura of coolness and your celebrity status. People who choose to get heavily indebted and study fashion/footwear design, struggling to set up their own business, know this pretty well; maybe it's about time that we as media commentators and consumers were reminded so.
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