The year that put fashion in its current place – Weekend – Kommersant
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At 1997 Fashion Big Bang, we have about 50 looks and lots of videos. Thus, in a rather concentrated form, the curators show the history of changes in the fashion system, which in 1997 achieved a qualitative breakthrough and created the very configuration of the industry that still exists.
Of course, these changes did not happen suddenly, they accumulated throughout the 1990s, but in 1997 they became not only noticeable, but finalized. Despite some formality, the rigid chronological approach captures the turning point and focuses the audience’s attention on it.
This year, however, differs from the calendar one – it is 12 months between October 1996 and October 1997, from the shows of SS 1997 to SS 1998. “Fashion Big Bang” in the title is the definition of the French Vogue of that time, that is, contemporaries perceived what was happening before their eyes as an explosion. At its epicenter there are four SS 1997 collections, everything else that fits in these 12 months diverges from it, from the opening of the legendary Сolette concept store to the funeral of Princess Diana.
The four collections in the center are the Stockman collection, Maison Martin Margiela; collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, Comme des Garcons; the Ann Demeulemeester collection and the Tom Ford collection for Gucci. All of them, as they say, are textbooks – Margela and Kawakubo, of course; Demeulemeister, perhaps to a lesser extent; Tom Ford is more like one item, on display and on display, a thong with a double G on the coccyx.
Demeulemeister’s androgynous style – black jackets, white asymmetrical shirts – was already well established until the spring of 1997, but then she showed one of her most famous and most integral collections, which consolidated this style with the image of Patti Smith and her appearance on the catwalk. Ford had more high-profile collections at Gucci, such as the previous one, FW 1996, tight-fitting dresses made of white silk jersey with cut-out sides, but, of course, those same G-strings became a real meme. By October 1996, Margiela was already quite famous, but the collection, using tailor’s mannequins not as a tool for the designer and tailor, but as part of ready-made clothes, became almost a conceptual fashion manifesto. As well as the Kawakubo collection, which deforms the silhouette with growths and bends in the most unexpected places, nicknamed “lumps and bumps” (“bumps and bumps”) for this, about which journalists competed in shocking comparisons, from tournaments of the 19th century to pregnant bellies and cancerous tumors.
It would seem – where are Margela’s mannequins, where are Ford’s thongs, but there is something in common. At that moment, both conventional, commercial and conceptual fashion, avant-garde fashion actively explored the relationship between the body and clothing – literally the space between fabric and skin – and changed the standards of beauty and sexuality. Ford recalled that by 1995 everything had become so minimalistic and decent that he literally felt like people wanted to look sexy again. However, his thongs are complemented by quite decent slip dresses and column dresses in harsh dark colors with high leather boots. On the one hand, deconstruction is a cliche of sex appeal, and on the other hand, it is brought to the limit, to hypersexualization.
The same Ford said that, looking at vintage photos of celebrities with Gucci bags and scarves in the Gucci archive – Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren – he realized that the glamor of these images, the glamor of Gucci, lies more in these celebrities themselves than in what they are wearing or what they have in their hands. Not only did the specific glamor of 1995-2008 settle down in exactly the same way, but besides, starting from 1997, a symbiosis of celebrity and fashion arose, with which we still live. Two tragic events worked to identify the latter: the funeral of Versace, who was killed on July 15, 1997, which, among other famous clients, was attended by Princess Diana, and then the funeral of Diana herself, at which the entire establishment of the industry was present among aristocrats and politicians, from Lagerfeld, Armani and Valentino to Anna Wintour and Bernard Arnault.
1997 is also a year of hurricane shifts within the main fashion houses. Bernard Arnault, who by this time has a number of major Parisian houses in his hands, appoints John Galliano as artistic director of Christian Dior, and appoints Alexander McQueen in his place at Givenchy, where Galliano spent a training year. At the end of 1996, an exhibition dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Christian Dior opens at the MET Costume Institute, where the still living Princess Diana appears in a Galliano dress. That is, in fact, Arno uses Dior’s anniversary and Galliano’s appointment to launch a new business management model as effectively as possible. If before the position of artistic director of the Parisian house of the first row was the result of moving up the career ladder from house to house (such comets as Dior and Saint Laurent are an exception), now it is appointed very young and not yet really known to anyone. McQueen, when he finds himself in Givenchy, is 27; Ghesquière, when he becomes artistic director of Balenciaga, is only 25; as much for Stella McCartney assigned to Chloe; Hedi Slimane was appointed head of the menswear line at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche Homme at 28, with no design training at all. Their first collections just fall into the chronological space of this exhibition, and everything is shown on it. In the future, the practice of appointing people from nowhere was adopted by other houses, it became ubiquitous, and a number of recent appointments, in the same Gucci, are an example of this.
Of all the events of that year, the words “Fashion Big Bang” in the title are most suitable for Galliano’s first show at Dior and the entire SS 1997 couture week – then, in fact, they sounded in Vogue Paris. The Dior haute couture show on January 20, 1997 was a real explosion: exhibition curator Alexandre Samson, head of the haute couture and contemporary collections department, considers it the key event of that year, completely changing the idea of \u200b\u200bwhere the boundaries of what is permitted by Parisian grand houses and how you can handle with their legacy. From this moment, the theatricalization of fashion will begin, the transformation of seasonal shows into real shows, into performances, into performances. Galyanov’s theatricality, McQueen’s performances, Jean Paul Gaultier’s burlesque cabaret (who also began making haute couture in 1997) – all this will change the standards of shows, and we still see reflections of those legendary defiles, or even direct quotes.
In addition to these fundamental structural changes in the fashion system, there are also allusions, quotes, reminiscences, homages and other traces of the influence of those collections on the current ones. Alexander Samson jokes that he can literally reduce about 70% of the current collections to a pair of those of that time – Kawakubo’s “bumps and bumps” and Margiela’s “Stokman” jackets. The share of truth in this joke, it seems to me, is even higher than 70%, just look at the shows of the current Paris Fashion Week, on the last day of which the exhibition opened. Here they are, these very bumps, in Balenciaga sweatshirts, and Margell’s deconstruction of the cutting and sewing process is simply ubiquitous – from the small Rokh to the large Louis Vuitton. And this nostalgic immersion in that great era is one of the most pleasant effects of the exhibition. Understanding the fundamental changes that led to the birth of the modern fashion system is, of course, important and valuable, but emotional involvement and immersion is a very modern way of interacting with the viewer. And 1997 Fashion Big Bang does a great job with that.
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