In The Age of Extremes the late Eric Hobsbawm stated: "Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, remains one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."
When he wrote the book, producing one of the most loved quotes of all times for the fashion industry, the historian seemed annoyed by the fact that scholars and politicians had failed to see the developments of the world, while fashion designers had proved very capable, amost as if they had a crystal sphere in their ateliers.
Those ones who do not agree with Hobsbawm, argue that this is not true as fashion designers do not predict the future, but have their finger on the pulse of society. Hence we got Space Age fashion in the '60s as trips to the moon brought a wind of optimism and hope in space discoveries.
But there is a way for fashion designers to predict the future - and that's by knowing the past. Yet there are some interferences in this process of analysis of the past that make you wonder if fashion has lost its magic to predict the future. The fashion industry's skill to predict has indeed been replaced by a mad desire to jump on the most successful bandwagon passing by.
The industry started losing its magic around the end of February 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic spread in the North of Italy. In Milan Armani decided to hold his runway show behind closed doors, but, to some, the decision sounded like an exaggeration, and the Parisian runways continued as if nothing had happened. You can't predict a pandemic maybe, but the industry failed to acknowledge this was an emergency. When it did, though, it reacted quickly by producing face masks and PPE. At the same time, while students started following distance learning classes and most people worked from home, it took a while to fashion houses to see the potential of the digital realm and a few months before realising there was some genuine fashion potential in videogame titles à la Animal Crossing.
Then slowly, little by little, after endless digital runways, things returned to normal and the circus more or less restarted in the same format we had lost in March 2020. The Metaverse in the meantime expanded, with fashion weeks and fashion stores and boutiques, but then again virtual worlds where we can be whoever we want to be already existed in the early 2000s, so what's new with that?
The realization that NFTs may have been the future (several months after that infamous Christie's sale), prompted fashion houses to join the madness with their own NFTs. Yet, by now, you feel this is a market that has already been saturated often by better ideas and designs than the ones offered by fashion houses.
But the failed predictions continued: at the beginning of May, Gucci announced it will start accepting a wide range of cryptocurrencies, but the crypto sector has just gone through a major slump. On Thursday stablecoins collapsed; Bitcoin and ethereum, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, shed 5% and 12% respectively (they both fell more than 20% over the past week); dogecoin fell10% on Thursday and 35% over the week.
You wonder, has fashion lost its Midas touch or developed the flip side of the Midas touch? Well, there are a few things that happened to the industry: first and foremost, fashion is succumbing to the general chaos we are living in. It is distracted by the all embracing noises of social media and by the urge of posting on Instagram quick things that will keep people engaged for less than 24 hours and hopefully generate media revenue that will turn into real money. Besides, fashion is also intensely looking at the present to find inspirations and trends to follow (yes, rather than generating trends, it seems more interested in following them). Last but not least, it has partially lost its touch with reality: there are brands, companies and houses that expressed their support to Ukraine and organised donations as well. But, for the most part, the industry seems to be sitting and watching rather than acting in the case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, maybe worried about a future when the war will be over and they may not be able to re-enter the Russian market after the sanctions on Russia.
There is something that fashion has developed and that's a talent for proposing some ideas that may solve current issues: climate change has pushed fashion to develop more sustainable options or materials, but only in the long term we will see if they will have some real benefits. So, the question at the end of this post is simple - is there a way to restore fashion's divinatory power? Well, if it wants to go back to being a veritable oracle rather than a follower of passing trends, fashion will have to start again investigating the past, analyse hard-learned lessons and look at history from a critical perspective. A clear vision of the future, doesn't come indeed from uncontrollably jumping from one Insta-trend to the next in the desperate hope of making more and more money, but from taking the time to find clues in the past to read into the present and finally foresee the future.
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