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There was a moment, midway through the Balenciaga show at the New York Stock Exchange in May, when the venue’s countless stock-ticker displays began to freak out, screens flashing and pixelating in time with the techno soundtrack as latex-masked models clad in satirically large business suits stomped by, never breaking stride. Aha, I thought: Yes, truly we are living in the extended-dance-remix era of late capitalism. Everything’s breaking down—global pandemic, culture war, actual war, climate crisis, inflation, what even is crypto, anyway?—but the song keeps playing on its endless loop, and so we keep dancing to its beat.
At its best, this is what fashion does: It shows us the now. Through the lens of a collection, we see a stylized snapshot of our time—its obsessions, its dreams, its anxieties, its strategies for making sense of the world—and, counterintuitively, it is this keen responsiveness to the present that points the way forward, to something new. As Diana Vreeland once famously said, remarking on the mirror fashion holds up to society, one can “see the approaching of a revolution in clothes.” What’s fascinating about this particular fashion moment is that it augurs not a single revolution, but many all at once.
The designers featured in the portfolio accompanying this piece are all trying to “reestablish fashion in a new way,” as Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele says, referring to his own idiosyncratic approach to reinventing a legacy brand for the modern era—an ongoing process, he notes. For Michele, that means embracing the fact that fashion is no longer meant to speak to an insider elite—a perspective shared by Glenn Martens, who heads up both Diesel and the conceptual label Y/Project, and Telfar Clemens of Telfar, two designers very different from Michele—and from each other—in all other regards.
Michele also finds common ground with both Paris’s sui generis upcycler Marine Serre and New York City indie darling Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada in their commitment to sustainability—and the suspicion that part of the answer to fashion’s overproduction problem lies in aesthetic continuity: We may very well be witnessing the beginning of the end of the concept of so last season. “The goal for me is to show people you can have a brand that’s relevant without reinventing the wheel every collection,” explains Taymour. Serre, who uses many of the same materials and prints in each of her shows, hopes that by doing so she alleviates some of the pressure on the consumer to be constantly chasing novelty.
“There’s a difference between novelty and newness,” notes Serre. “Novelty is here and gone in a moment; newness is changing the way someone sees. That’s what I am trying to create when I transform a kitchen towel into a skirt or a dress—taking this humble textile and recontextualizing it as a garment some fabulous girl will wear.”
Of course, the production of novelty—the better to stimulate shoppers to add to cart—is at the core of the contemporary fashion business model. Mercilessly so, in the case of fast-fashion brands that turn over their inventory on an all-but-daily basis, but the obligation to churn out product extends up to fashion’s luxurious tippy-top: One reading of the latex masks at the Balenciaga show, according to the label’s creative director, Demna, was that they underlined our often fetishistic relationship to stuff and the way trend-chasing can efface the individual underneath. “Fashion is a tool,” he explains. “It can disguise you or serve as camouflage, or it can help bring your [visual] identity to life. It’s up to the consumer to decide how to use it.”
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Demna of Balenciaga
Demna—formerly Demna Gvasalia—is, arguably, his generation’s most influential designer. At the helm of Balenciaga since 2015, he has recast fashion in his image, mixing flights of sartorial fancy with fun-house-mirror versions of tailoring and streetwear that imply a social commentary. Both the latter were on display at Balenciaga’s recent resort show at the New York Stock Exchange, the tailoring a selection of archetypal Demna silhouettes—vastly proportioned, drop-shoulder suits and overcoats—and the streetwear riffing on Adidas’s iconic three-stripe.
“Logos, historically and tragically, are symbols that require the shortest time to be digested by the brain,” Demna says, explaining that this makes them vital shorthand in a Twitter-speed era. How, though, to describe what Demna accomplished with his reintroduction of Balenciaga couture after a half-century hiatus? The collection was revelatory both in the polished homage it paid to Cristóbal, the original master, and in its nakedness, as Demna revealed the tender spot in his designer soul entirely free of irreverence. It made you see how deeply felt his project had been all along.
That impression was ratified a few months later at the fall 2022 Balenciaga show in Paris, mounted as Russian tanks crossed the border into Ukraine. Once a refugee himself—from the former Soviet republic of Georgia—Demna opened by reading a poem in Ukrainian, and gifted everyone in attendance a T-shirt in the colors of the Ukrainian flag as models made their way through a fierce artificial blizzard to the mournful sound of Dvořák. More than a few guests departed the venue in tears. “We live in a terrifying world,” Demna pointed out at the Stock Exchange in May, as—in another accident of timing—crypto bubbles popped and markets began a precipitous slide. “I think fashion ought to reflect the world.”—Maya Singer
Christopher John Rogers
Christopher John Rogers made a colorful return to the runway in June. Mid-pandemic, the New York up-and-comer opted to move to the pre-season schedule to boost his sales and stand out from the Fashion Week crowds. Not that Rogers has any trouble standing out—his exuberant, eclectic aesthetic is resonating widely. After he nabbed the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund prize in 2019 at the age of 25, fresh from the Savannah College of Art and Design, he went on to dress Rihanna, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Lizzo on the red carpet; Michelle Obama chose one of his suits for her Becoming book tour.
He’s since built a devoted community around the brand. “I think we represent a hope—making clothes that have an earnestness to them that people can identify with,” Rogers says.
That June show drew comparisons to Isaac Mizrahi and Christian Lacroix—but what links his work with Gen Z, despite those influences, are those proportions. Rogers cuts his trousers so that people can feel comfortable in them, regardless of identity. “I like the idea of clothing not holding any expectation for a specific type of body,” he says. “It’s not a unisex or non-gendered collection; it’s identity-expansive.”—Nicole Phelps
Alessandro Michele of Gucci
Since taking the reins at Gucci in 2015, Alessandro Michele has infused the century-old house with a mi casa, su casa ethos reflected in his exuberantly eclectic clothes and accessories, his platforming of young designers—notably with his launch last year of the Gucci Vault, an online concept shop hosting both vintage Gucci and a curated selection of pieces by emerging brands from all over the world—and with the mix of models, artists, musicians, and actors of all ages, ethnicities, body types, and gender identities in his campaigns and catwalk extravaganzas.
Oddly, for such a modernizer, Michele’s taste tends toward the baroque, or even the rococo—the man has seemingly never encountered a frill or furbelow that displeased him—and his collections are littered with vintage references. This is part of his charm: Michele wears his enthusiasm on his (blouson) sleeve, incorporating whatever catches his fancy into his designs with the same gusto he posts to his well-trafficked Instagram. It is, he explains, the same gesture: “For me, perhaps the signature modern experience is the feed, or the Google search,” he says. Michele’s love for excess has a flip side, however. It’s an open question whether any company engaged in mass production can ever truly be considered “sustainable,” but Michele and Gucci president and CEO Marco Bizzarri are setting aggressive targets to reduce waste and emissions and cleanse their supply chain. One key move: the 2020 launch of Gucci Off the Grid, a travel-oriented line of ready-to-wear and accessories made from leather and textile offcuts and upcycled materials.
For Michele, though, the most important change may be an aesthetic one. “I love to take in ideas, I love to remix—but my instinct right now is telling me: Slow down. Open a book and look at one image for an hour. Read a poem and think about one word. Be in stillness. Be in your body.
“Perhaps,” Michele adds, “this is the next thing. After many voices—quiet.”—M.S.
Telfar Clemens of Telfar
Telfar Clemens prefers not to do interviews, and when he chooses to stage a fashion event, it tends to be on his own schedule. The best way to get in touch with him? Post a photo of yourself on Instagram schlepping his vegan leather Telfar tote—if you can get your hands on one. “If someone tags themselves with my bag,” Clemens says, scooting around his studio following a fitting, “that’s me double-tapping back, saying, I’m here—I recognize you.”
Recognition is a key word where Telfar is concerned. As Clemens notes, for more than a decade his brand was more or less disregarded by the fashion establishment, even as its experimental streetwear—e.g., a pair of trousers that could transform into a shirt—found acolytes in the art world. The most important of these is Babak Radboy, a conceptual artist and creative director who is now a partner in Telfar—and Clemens’s all-encompassing consigliere.
It’s Radboy who makes the case that the fashion establishment’s sudden embrace of Telfar, circa 2016, was mainly to do with optics—that mounting political pressures made it convenient to turn a queer, Liberian American, outer-borough designer creating unisex clothes into a poster boy. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we won the CFDA/Vogue Award a year to the day after Trump was elected,” Radboy says, though he might also have pointed out that their collections had evolved into something more broadly accessible by that time.
The duo has also laid the groundwork for a wholly independent business model, exiting investors and quitting stores to sell directly to consumers. Their latest initiative: Telfar TV, a streaming channel that posts user-generated content and serves as a QR code–enabled launchpad for product drops.
All of this is premised on a desire to reach shoppers long ignored (unrecognized) by the fashion mainstream—something that’s led Telfar to continue to grow, largely in less-affluent neighborhoods, like the one where Clemens was raised in Queens.
“I feel much cooler now,” Clemens says. “I feel like now I’m designing for real life. I’m here for everyone.”—M.S.
Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada
You know that Banksy image The Flower Thrower—of a masked protester about to launch a bouquet like it’s a grenade? As visual metaphors go, that’s not a bad one for Collina Strada designer Hillary Taymour. Over 14 years, Taymour has built her New York City–based brand on the strength of an ethic, and an aesthetic, of militant lovingness—for the Earth, for her community, for social justice. “I want to be the girl showing that you can have a successful, respected business without producing a million units of everything,” she says.
Sustainability-focused from the day she launched, Taymour remains devout in her commitment to upcycling, organic dyes, and doing more with less, even as her label now welcomes an international following. Fans come for the clothes—rave-inspired layered ensembles in glow-stick colors, hand-painted jeans, a panniered floral gown, to cite just a few standouts from her fall 2022 collection—but they stay for the values undergirding those playful garments: All Collina Strada pieces are manufactured in New York, with embellishments often applied by hand in the studio, and she produces only as many painted-on jeans, for example, as her deadstock denim sourcing will allow.
“I don’t need this brand to be for everyone,” she says, “and I don’t expect—or want—the Collina Strada shopper to feel like they’re losing out if they miss one particular piece.”
The approach has earned Taymour some high- profile fans—notably Alessandro Michele, who invited Collina Strada into the Gucci Vault, a curated offering of items by independent, up-and-coming designers, and Marni’s Francesco Risso (Taymour is the face of the new Marni campaign). They’re all part of a tight-knit community that also includes Betty actor Katerina Tannenbaum and musician Oyinda.—M.S.
Glenn Martens of Diesel, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Y/Project
The genial Belgian, whose high-concept designs for Y/Project have been taken up by the likes of Kanye West and Rihanna, climbed the fashion ladder from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts to the studio at Jean Paul Gaultier to the helm of Y/Project, known for looks that transfigure wardrobe staples like jeans, polos, and fisherman knits in ways that are both accessible and avant-garde.
This knack for reengineering has earned Martens accolades, legions of admirers, and, in 2020, an appointment as the creative director of Diesel. All along, he says, he figured his job was to pursue his craft and let his clothes do the talking.
“There were always star designers, but before the internet, the focus was still on the collections,” Martens says. “You didn’t have this thing of people wanting to enter the designer’s universe, see who they hang out with, where they’re getting their ideas. You have to find this delicate balance.”
Although he’s often cited as an avatar of fashion’s streetwear revolution, Martens draws a rather classical distinction between clothes made for every day and “crafted” looks that shock and awe on the runway. “I know this is considered elitist to say these days, but I do think there ought to be a space carved out for the artistry of fashion—and that artistry does equate to rarity,” he says.
He’s made himself adaptable, toggling between the idioms of art and the mass audience of Diesel with remarkable grace—but he is wary of brands surfing online hype cycles. Perhaps that’s why his guest stint last year designing couture at Jean Paul Gaultier was literally a welcome change of pace.
“It’s the place where fashion really touches art,” he says, referring to the couture generally. “No one needs it. All it’s there for is to make people dream.”—M.S.
Meet Fashion’s New Faces
Since the early aughts, fashion funds—initiatives to highlight and nurture fledgling designers—have proven to be game-changers. (The CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund was established in 2003, the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund in 2008, and Italy’s Who Is On Next? in 2005.) You’ll know the names they helped launch into the world, from Proenza Schouler to Erdem to Paul Andrew. This year’s 29 finalists, pictured here, span across the United States and Europe—but beyond their mere geography, they reflect the aspirations and values of fashion’s next generation: not just who we will wear next, but what the industry will stand for, and believe in, tomorrow.
Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton
Where is fashion going next? It’s a subject guaranteed to inspire heated debate—about sustainability and diversity and supply-chain transparency, for starters. One thing, though, is for certain: Wherever fashion goes, it will enmesh ever more tightly with technology—whether this means robots sewing your clothes, AI engines enhancing your shopping experience, or dressing up for a night out in the metaverse.
Few designers are as profoundly fascinated with those head-spinning possibilities as Louis Vuitton’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, whose obsession with the creative potential of technology spans from the practical to the theoretical. “It’s the strange and unknown that fascinates me—whether that means cult futurism or underground sci-fi,” he says. “It’s that dynamic between curiosity and seduction. I’m fascinated by the promises of the future.” His 2023 cruise collection, presented against the backdrop of the Salk Institute on the outskirts of San Diego in May, showcased everything from sci-fi-warrior power shoulders to metallic fabrics draped, Dune-style, around the body and shredded tinsel fringe that erupted from sleeves like extraterrestrial jellyfish.
For this image, one of that collection’s most future-facing looks was reimagined by the artists Justin Ridler and Sarah Woodall, whose work in fashion image-making breaks down boundaries between the virtual and the physical. The role that technology plays for Ghesquière, after all, is alchemical: It allows him to leap across centuries and break down boundaries between the organic and the synthetic. “It got me thinking about fashion’s intimate link to the notion of time,” he says of the collection. “Not just because fashion is the perfect mirror of the moment, but because it plays such a role in shaping our future.”—Liam Hess
Marc Jacobs
At his fall 2022 show in June, Marc Jacobs explored everything from Gilded Age bustles to jean jackets dipped in pink plaster to bra tops and corsets for all genders. He’s come back from the pandemic with a pair of tour de force shows at the New York Public Library featuring some of the most imaginative, out-of-this-world fashion of his career. “This is a different chapter,” he says. “We are a successful company with our fragrance, with our bags, with other products that are democratic in price, and it allows me complete freedom to do whatever I want.”
The designer, of course, has been shaking up fashion for decades. (His legendary grunge collection for Perry Ellis—the one that both cost him his job at that heritage brand and made his reputation—turns 30 this November.) He’s reinvented himself and his company for our new era—from the experimental runway collections, which he sells only at Bergdorf Goodman, to Heaven by Marc Jacobs, a diffusion line (where he’s installed Ava Nirui, the Instagram-famous fashion bootlegger, as art director) that reimagines his ’90s heyday for a young audience.—N.P.
Gabriela Hearst, Aneeth Arora, and Marine Serre
Far from a greenwashed afterthought, responsible clothing production is now finally integral to the industry, with some of the most imaginative and impactful design placing environmental considerations front and center—led by a sweep of women-fronted brands from Paris to New Delhi, including Marine Serre, Gabriela Hearst, Péro, Ahluwalia, Bode, and Rave Review.
Marine Serre has been on a mission to drill down into supply chains, pioneer upcycling, and educate consumers since she founded her label in 2017. (Case in point: her fall 2022 show, staged as an anthropological Paris exhibition, with an astounding 70 percent of the collection’s materials “regenerated,” as Serre puts it, from deadstock.) Uruguayan designer Gabriela Hearst, meanwhile, has brought the ecological impetus (and the crafty inflection) behind her seven-year-old eponymous label to the Parisian powerhouse Chloé, where she is also creative director. In 2019, she staged a carbon-neutral runway show in New York—an industry first—and her latest collection is made using deadstock materials ranging from speckled tweed and cashmere corduroy to waxed linen wool.
Aneeth Arora’s 13-year-old label, Péro, is based in New Delhi, but the brand—built around the lightweight, embellished fabrics traditionally used in saris—collaborates with skilled artisans all over India. “Recycling is at the core of our line—we do not discard a single scrap of fabric,” Arora says. “Our fabrics are too precious to be wasted.”—Laura Hawkins
Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli
The Dallas-born Daniel Roseberry, 36, had been a trusted design lieutenant for Thom Browne for over a decade, having dropped out of FIT to join the brand, but in 2019 he had no public-facing profile when Diego Della Valle tasked him with helming the storied house of Schiaparelli. The wild-card choice has paid dividends, as Roseberry’s singular vision—one that focuses on strong silhouettes, whimsical embellishment, and embroidery—has captured the fashionable imagination, bringing life to the couture house, founded in 1927 by the Italian-born aristocrat Elsa Schiaparelli but languishing since she shuttered the maison in 1954.
As Roseberry noted in his show notes for his fall 2022 haute couture collection—inspired by the late-1980s whimsy of Christian Lacroix’s mini pouf dresses, bustles, and toreador jackets, along with socialite designer Carolyne Roehm’s high-impact flower arrangements—Schiap’s “understanding that we need fantasy in complicated times…feels relevant, and necessary, for today.”
The soft-spoken Roseberry’s work has appealed to high-profile figures who like to make an entrance—from Beyoncé at the Golden Globes to Lady Gaga at President Biden’s inauguration to Adele—ensuring that Schiaparelli boxes well above its weight on the global fashion stage.—Hamish Bowles
Tyler, The Creator of Golf Wang and Le Fleur
In 2016, long before he’d even been to Fashion Week, Tyler, the Creator staged a runway show that became, arguably, one of the most spectacular Los Angeles has ever seen. With a gigantic skate ramp built into the catwalk, a fleet of mini motorized bikes to bring the noise, comedy skits, and a surprise musical performance from the two-time Grammy-winning rapper himself, the event was a forerunner to the immersive experiences that are driving the conversation in fashion right now.
The 31-year-old multihyphenate was ahead of the curve, too, when he cast Paloma Elsesser, a then little-known model, to walk in the show, with the likes of Kendall Jenner, Kanye West, and Janelle Monáe cheering everything on from the front row. Much like the genre-defying sound he’s become famous for, Tyler has proved he can fashion a mesmerizing universe all of his own—one that’s brimming with childlike wonder, playful SoCal hues, and a deliciously wry sense of humor.
“A lot of the clothing I make is motivated by the music I make and the feeling it gives me,” explains Tyler, whose full name is Tyler Gregory Okonma. “I just tried to showcase the clothes in my world.” Six years on from that pivotal show, the cult following he has amassed with his Golf Wang and Le Fleur lifestyle brands speaks for itself. You need only take one glance at the line of impeccably dressed Gen Z’ers at his flagship store on Fairfax in L.A. to understand that his meticulous approach to personal style is the blueprint, right down to the pastel Le Fleur nail polish he wears on his fingertips.
“You don’t really see it until you see it on someone else—when a kid runs up in the tie, the shorts, and the loafers and is like, What’s up!” he says, flashing his trademark gap-toothed grin. “It’s really a thing now—it’s not just me and two friends wearing the samples.”—Chioma Nnadi
Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre of Ester Manas
When Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre met at Belgium’s La Cambre university, neither intended to get into fashion. Manas, now 29, had been studying graphic design while Delepierre, also 29, had chosen type design. “After a year, we started to help each other with our projects,” Delepierre says, with Manas quickly picking up the thread: “I mean, we are a couple, in work and in life—we can’t help doing everything together!” So when Manas switched majors to try her hand at fashion design, Delepierre joined her. Their final year of studies, in 2017, proved to be a formative one. With Delepierre’s help, Manas had designed a plus-size graduate collection, and her boundary-breaking and curve-accentuating pieces were starting to get noticed by the industry at large—by 2018, the collection was a finalist for the H&M Design Award and at the Hyères fashion festival, and won a young designer prize from Galeries Lafayette. The couple decided to incorporate the Ester Manas label in Delepierre’s native Brussels—Manas hails f rom Toulouse, France—and give themselves yet another challenge: Make garments in a single size that can work on any body type.
To do so, they threw fashion’s straight-sizing and plus-sizing out the window. Working almost exclusively with stretch fabrics, bias draping, and ruching, Manas and Delepierre created a flexible garment that can expand or contract across shapes and dimensions. “I am a French size 44,” says Manas, “and I try it on, Balthazar tries it on, friends try on the clothes while we are designing—we couldn’t work any other way.” The results of their crowdsourced fittings: curve-skimming minidresses, tops, and skirts in joyous shades of violet, tangerine, and limoncello—very little basic black. Four years after their initial foray into the industry, fashion insiders are taking note again. The timing is right: Alongside other genre-defying designers in Vogue’s Fashion’s New World portfolio, Manas and Delepierre are part of a generation reimagining how women are portrayed in the world of high fashion. Their Paris Fashion Week show in March sent tears streaming down the cheeks of both models and the audience, “because these women never thought they could be a part of Paris Fashion Week,” says Manas. At a recent resort show, a petite colleague turned up in one of Manas’s bright orange dresses. “I wanted to see if the one-size model really worked,” she told me, flaunting a stomach cutout and thigh-high slit. The consensus among the crowd: Yeah, it really works. Manas and Delepierre hope to set a precedent for how fashion can reconsider sizing and inclusivity. “One of our first shows was called Big Again, about how a big girl can find her way in the fashion world,” says Manas. “The question was: Can she?” The designer pauses. “Well—I am a big girl. And I am in fashion.”—Steff Yotka
Jonathan Anderson of Loewe and JW Anderson
It’s easy to obsess over the intricacies of a Jonathan Anderson collection: It’s where the mundane meets the strange, the commercial makes peace with the experimental, and the historic confronts the future. JW Anderson launched in 2008, while his fêted tenure at Loewe began in 2013, in precisely the kind of low-key manner he favors. “No one was looking,” he says, “and in a weird way, that helped—it reduced the pressure so that I could instinctively break things down.” Not to mention pushing both the design envelope and the way collections are shown: He live-streamed JW Anderson on Grindr in 2016, and more recently explored the cult eroticism of Tom of Finland. “What I found really important,” he says, “is that we tackled this idea of gender in a moment where I felt like it helped people.”
Melding that instinctive experimentation with a studied understanding of artisanal craft and heritage is, perhaps, to be his legacy. His JW Anderson patchwork knitting pattern caused a crafty fervor during lockdown, and at Loewe, establishing his annual Loewe Craft Prize is one of his proudest moments.
How does Anderson compartmentalize the tricky work of carrying not one but two labels into the future? “I like to feel it’s two different characters within myself,” he says. “I’m addressing two different parts of my brain—and that’s an amazing feeling.” And what might these characters—JW Anderson and Loewe—think of one another, should they meet one day? “Oh—they’d probably argue all day,” he says, laughing.—Emma Elwick-Bates
Precious Lee, Paloma Elsesser, and Devyn Garcia
A woman’s body is a battleground, as recent legal rulings have reminded us. And whether the fight is over what a woman may or may not do with her body, or how that body is “supposed” to look, the question at the heart of the conflict is the same: How free is a woman to be herself? In that light, the prominence of models such as Paloma Elsesser, Precious Lee, and Devyn Garcia is a breathtaking assertion of female liberty. “At a moment when it’s sometimes hard to feel hopeful, this is a sign of real progress,” says Elsesser, referring not only to fashion’s overdue embrace of models who, like her, don’t fit the sample-size 0 mold—Ashley Graham, Jill Kortleve, and Tess McMillan also come to mind—but to emerging brands like Brussels-based Ester Manas that treat shape inclusivity as a first principle in collection design.
Though seeing models like this on catwalks and ad campaigns may help relieve some of the still-pervasive cultural pressure on young women to diet and exercise relentlessly to maintain a lithe physique, for the models themselves, occupying the role of standard-bearer comes with its own complications—and its own rewards. “I feel lucky to be able to share this transitional space with women I admire, with whom I can speak freely about how weird it can be, to be staking out this ground,” says Elsesser. “There’s a real kinship. And, you know—sisterhood. That’s what it’s all about.”—M.S.
Maximilian Davis of Salvatore Ferragamo
When the Manchester-born Maximilian Davis, 27, was appointed creative director of the craftsmanship-steeped, near-century-old Florentine label Salvatore Ferragamo in March—just two years after he launched his eponymous brand from his North London bedroom—he hadn’t yet staged so much as a solo catwalk show.
Refined, sensual, and cut with razor-sharp precision, Davis’s debut collections—quickly fangirled by Rihanna, Dua Lipa, and Kylie Jenner—are the result of a rigorous design process that draws on his post–London College of Fashion apprenticeship with the academically inclined Grace Wales Bonner. They also reflect the designer’s family legacy, from the Sunday best suits worn by his father to the calypso vinyl beloved by his grandmother.
In the months before his secrecy-shrouded designs for Ferragamo are unveiled at Milan Fashion Week in September, Davis has been digging through the archives “to identify what the new house codes will be,” says the designer. “It’s about imbuing the sophistication of my own brand into Ferragamo today.”
Davis’s own narrative—which travels from his parents’ birthplaces in Trinidad and Jamaica to the nightclubs of East London—is now firmly rooted in Florence’s Renaissance skyline. “My designs always start with something very personal,” he says. “But lately I’ve been trying to understand Salvatore. I’m stepping into the Ferragamo family.”—L.H.
Fashion’s New World, continued…
In other words, Demna’s show was lodging a critique—a tricky proposition when, as he acknowledges, Balenciaga is still very much in the business of making lots of things lots of people will want to buy. But that, too, reflects the moment. We’re in an in-between state. Many of the “disruptive” changes over the past few years are now baked into the way the fashion industry operates—to wit: the democratizing impacts of social media, with its emphasis on spectacle, celebrity, and hype; and the pressure on brands to take up social and political causes—speaking out on behalf of women’s and LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights; issuing calls for gun-control measures in the United States; showing solidarity with the citizenry of Ukraine. Social media has also amplified demands that designers and brands reflect their publicly progressive stances in how they cast their campaigns and staff their ateliers, an evolution that is ongoing. Though the industry as a whole has made great strides in inviting a broader spectrum of demographics and points of view into its fold, embracing body and ethnic diversity and challenging the gender binary, one would be hard-pressed to say that work on that front is complete. “There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance,” says Paloma Elsesser, one of a handful of full-figured supermodels to have emerged in the past half-decade. “Sometimes I’m walking in shows where I know the designer doesn’t actually produce clothing in my size—but then again, the fact that I’m on that runway at all indicates, Yeah—the fashion landscape has changed.”
In the meantime, long-established industry practices have been called into question—notably, the tick-tock schedule of biannual Fashion Weeks followed by ahead-of-season delivery to stores, usurped by streetwear-inspired “drops” and “see now, buy now” direct-to-consumer sales. All is flux. Many designers no longer call themselves designers, preferring the polymath descriptive creators as they play in a variety of mediums—as seen with Virgil Abloh, who before his death last November modeled so much of the current change, while still accommodating himself to traditions such as Fashion Week. Even that institution was nearly dealt a mortal blow by COVID-19; that Fashion Weeks persist speaks both to the utility and the feel-good factor of gatherings and live experience, along with the fact that no compelling rival institution has emerged—though it yet may. As an industry, fashion is in the challenging position of building a bridge to the future while navigating the rickety infrastructure already in place.
While this is flummoxing, and sometimes frustrating, it is also exciting. With no obvious path forward, the most curious and creative designers working today are engaged in furious processes of experimentation, laying down tracks others may follow toward a fashion future less wasteful, more just, and—this is important—bolder in terms of ideas, craft, and style than the one we currently have. The key is not to turn back.
“It’s easy to overstate the change,” notes Babak Radboy, Clemens’s hand-in-glove partner at Telfar, referring to the convulsions wrought by the election of Donald Trump, the rise of antidemocratic forces worldwide, the pandemic, and protests everywhere from Los Angeles to Lagos sparked by the murder of George Floyd. “There’s a desire in fashion—and by the way, it’s not just fashion; you see it in a bunch of industries—to produce a narrative of progress that makes it seem like, Great, the work is done, when in fact there’s been very little shift in terms of who holds power or how things operate.”
“Like, we spent two years calling each other out, and now that it’s all out, everyone’s figured out how to get back to business as usual without pissing people off,” adds Clemens.
There is, of course, comfort in the way things were. But business as usual is gone, with Clemens’s and Radboy’s own story illustrating the possibilities that have opened up in the fractures of the old systems and old expectations. They have managed, for example, to establish a brand that detaches aspiration from class, mapping fashionable precincts beyond the country’s wealthiest zip codes. This is one path to the future; another, Glenn Martens’s version, leads out of tumult and into the shady, secluded spot where a designer can fiddle around and daydream.
“In order to innovate, we need to reclaim some of what’s been lost,” Martens says. “The fast turnaround of collections, the way social media creates this frenetic ping-pong of exposure and feedback…. Maybe other designers generate creative energy that way, but for me, new ideas require privacy. And time. That was a joy of working on the couture,” he continues, referencing his guest stint designing the Jean Paul Gaultier spring/summer 2022 couture collection. “I was able to focus on technique—and to discover ways of translating the grandeur and poetry of couture into something modern and conceptual.” A new language emerging out of an old vocabulary: This is the situation of fashion now, at a moment of becoming. Eyes on the horizon, we join the designers in this portfolio in celebrating the chance to explore.