In yesterday's post we looked at two runway sets and made a comparison between them, wondering if the fact that they looked the same may have been a mere design coincidence or a plagiarism case.
Yet it is clear that most copyright infringements happen at garment/accessory level, but, while up until a few seasons ago the main trend was copying one garment or accessory from one designer or one era and remixing things a bit, the latest fad seems to be copying multiple recent collections by one designer/fashion house as it happened on Helmut Lang's runway. Lang left his eponymous label in 2005 and yesterday's runway was supposed to be one of the highlights of New York Fashion Week.
The label was recently relaunched with 26-year-old Dazed & Confused Editor-in-Chief Isabella Burley acting as Lang Editor-in-Residence. Burley revolutionised things a lot, launching a series of collaborations and rebooting the brand with designers that will take up seasonal residency at the brand.
The first collection was Hood by Air's Shane Oliver's personal interpretation of Helmut Lang and the results were rather dubious.
Admired for his sensual minimalism, here Lang was filtered through Hood by Air's fetishistic lenses, a trick that produced a pile of asymmetric bras (of the sort that look amazing on a runway donned by thin flat-chested models and look ridiculous on women with more generous and less ideal proportions but with real bodies), harnesses, o-ring-accessorised thongs, leather codpieces and pants with garter-like waistbands.
There were a few sporty moments and the accessory offer included an oversized leather bra that you can turn into a handbag and Helmut Lang branded tote bags with newsprint for that Schiaparelli-meets-Gaultier-meets-Galliano-touch.
A white coat (not included in the images in this post) that was maybe integrating a pair of trousers beneath the collar pointed at Margielaisms, but the main reference for this collection wasn't Martin Margiela. The square shouldered jackets and leather boots donned by models carrying a Perspex case were indeed strangely reminiscent of Balenciaga's S/S 17 collection by Demna Gvasalia (infused with just a bit of Balenciaga's A/W 17 collection). A black coat with a loose silhouette seemed instead lifted from Balenciaga's Pre-Fall 2016 collection (again by Gvasalia).
Variations were introduced by moods taken from Gvasalia's Vêtements' runways (S/S 18, S/S 17 and A/W16) - references that went from supposedly conceptual ill-fitting clothes to the diverse cast at times wearing samples from the limited edition capsule entitled "Helmut Lang Seen by Shayne Oliver Autumn Tour Merch" (available to buy from today).
Oliver wanted to bring back the "sensuality" of Lang's designs in his creations, but, bizarrelly enough, he brought something completely new on Helmut Lang's runway - a sense of millennial superficiality, déjà-vu and plagiarism.
All these "Balements" exercises seemed indeed like taking the piss out of consumers: you can't copy the silhouette of a specific look on a recent runway, tweak it a bit and convince yourself you have done something memorable that will help relaunching a fashion house and find it new fans.
This is not about fashion's cycles coming and going, but about revomiting fashion six months later (then if you consider that Vêtements' designs are also borrowed from Margiela, you would get an endless concatenation of circles made of copying and remixing phases...). The good news is that, if this is a seasonal residency, Oliver will be out soon; the problem is who will be the next plagiarist that Burley will let in...
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