design solutions
research essays
GA B RIEL A HERN Á NDE Z
LUIS IGN ACIO CA RMON A M A A IKE STA A L
research reports
mahkuzine 4, winter 2008
– 38 –
tattered clothes which are unfinished or deliberately undone, while Surrealist-Utilitarianism’s main component is bricolage ( Gill 1998: 25 ). “He ( Martin Margiela, ed. ) studies found objects around him and thinks, `Aha! How can that be made into clothes?’ “( http://www.fashion encyclopedia.com/Le-Ma/Margiela-Martin.html ). That sounds exactly like the description for a bricolage technique - only one of the many methods for working with discarded materials. Barbara Vinken has introduced the term Fashion-after-the-Fashion to nuance our view on postmodernity, and especially to describe the relationship to time. According to Vinken, Fashion-after-the-Fashion is different from other postmodern expressions. It is not simply eclectic in mixing and matching accessories and styles from all time periods. Fashion-after-the-Fashion offers a reflection on the passing of time, and proposes a different intercourse with time; one which is not simply nostalgic, nor lives up to the utopic ideal where the preceding fashion is replaced by the present one. Fashion-after-the-fashion describes a broader area than Trash-Worship; namely all fashion in which the element of time, especially the elapsing of time, plays an important role. This valuation of patina is not new, as the name Fashion-after-theFashion does suggest, but it is about a revaluation of old values. In reflecting on the ageing process, Caroline Evans states, “Patina was a signifier of social status until the eighteenth century, when it was eclipsed by the consumer revolution that formed the bedrock of the modern fashion system in which status is marked by novelty rather than by the signs of longevity and age… Yet at the end of the twentieth century, just as one group of designers began to play with historical citation in the most up to the minute clothes, so too did another group begin to introduce the theme of patina into their more avant-garde designs. The signs of ageing, and the idea of a history, were replicated in the work of a number of designers whose work was not overtly historically themed but which, instead drew on motifs of refuse, detritus, remnants from the past which were transformed in the present” ( Evans 2000: 104 ). So values from before the “mode-de-cent-ans” ( the period between Charles Fredrique Worth in 1957 up until the 1960s ) became important again. The word “fashion” in Fashion-after-the-Fashion might also be a point of discussion in relation to secondhand clothing. Do the secondhand clothes of a urban vagabond differ that much from the vintage discoveries of the hip youngster who wants to distinguish himself from the masses? Why would the one not be fashion, while the other would? As for a designer who uses secondhand clothes in his or her designs: Is that fashion or a collection visibly inspired by the 1950s? Fashion-after-the-Fashion as well as Deconstruction Fashion, TrashWorship and Surrealist-Utilitarianism are examples of the so-called bubble-up effect - a fashion which rises upwards from the lower echelons, from the streets to the catwalk. But working with traces of time in clothes could be seen within various street styles long before fashion designers started working with this seriously in the 1980s. In the context of street styles and the secondhand, Angela McRobbie claims, “Most of the youth subcultures of the post-war period have relied on secondhand clothes in jumble sales and flea markets as the raw material for the creation of style. Between the 1960s and 1980s a series of recycling of clothes were connected with the development of Punk, the New Romantics, Glamour and cross-dressing styles. All of these were street-fashions, created on the margins of commodity capitalism, which in time began to feed back into the fashion industry which either reproduced the originals or mimicked the modifications achieved by the street-styles” ( McRobbie 1989: 26 ). According to McRobbie, secondhand clothing played an important role in most post-war subcultures. The clothes worn by the “members” of these street styles were
•
• •
• • •
• • • •
• • • • •