Just a few weeks ago we mentioned in a post Stephanie Lake, designer, curator, auction specialist and the caretaker of the Bonnie Cashin archive. Lake, who is also the author of the volume Bonnie Cashin: Chic Is Where You Find It, recently decided to take action against fashion copies and started posting on a dedicated Instagram account (@cashincopy), images of contemporary designs showing direct derivation from the work of Bonnie Cashin.
Lake must have a crystal ball on her desk: she recently posted a juxtaposition showing Bonnie Cashin's Seven Easy Pieces made in 1975 with Donna Karan's Seven Easy Pieces, "designed" in 1985. In the meantime, Donna Karan, co-founder of Donna Karan International and owner of business Urban Zen, pledged her support to friend and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, accused of having sexually harrassed and assaulted dozens of women throughout the years (Karan, who is also a friend of Weinstein's wife, Georgina Chapman, co-designer of Marchesa, told the Daily Mail that women were "asking for it" by dressing seductively, but then stated that her words had been taken out of context).
Yet this is not a post about the Cashin-Karan connection, but about Cashin's essential black and white pieces that seem to have become fashionable again as another brand - Misha Nonoo - has indeed launched The Easy Eight.
This capsule collection consists in eight items that can be recombined into 22 different outfits. The pieces are manufactured on-demand to avoid contributing to more waste and to offer more sizes (from extra small to extra large, so from size 0 to 14), with a wider range of prices ranging from $145 to $450, and including basic pieces such as shirts or a jumpsuit that can be used for both formal and informal occasions.
Cashin's idea was brilliant in many ways, after all being able to reconfigure what you have in your wardrobe in endless ways is the entire purpose of fashion, but it is something we have forgotten as we are often confused by the barrage of multiple social media images of influencers who seem to possess vast wardrobes (often containing gifted or borrowed clothes...). Yet you seriously wonder what is the point of keeping on churning out new versions of old (though clever) ideas: maybe the next capsule of practical and essential pieces should be called "The Hateful Eight" (with excuses to Quentin Tarantino) rather than "The Functional/Easy/Practical/Cool Five/Six/Seven".
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