This season, designer Tom Ford showed his collection for the Spring/Summer 2021 season, unlike any show we’ve seen from him before.
Past collections showed lace dresses embellished with ribbons and tailored velvet suits, conveying wealth and boldness.
This collection, presented through a lookbook rather than a live show, was much more pedestrian, showing loose shapes cut to resemble sweatpants and bathrobes.
It seemed to be designed for quarantine, with its pajama cuts and lax fittings. Despite their bright prints, they conveyed casualness. It was clothing meant to be worn at home, outside of public scrutiny.
As New York fashion week began this past September, this kind of change was not uncommon. The pandemic has seemed to permeate all parts of our life, including the minds of designers.
These changes were most apparent with the release of the week’s schedule. Many of the city’s leading designers were nowhere to be found.
Some, like Michael Kors or Christopher John Rogers (recently named Best Emerging Designer by the Council of Fashion Designers of America/CFDA), opted to show their collections at a later date.
Others, like industry heavyweight Marc Jacobs or Kerby Jean Raymond of Pyer Moss (named best American Menswear designer by the CFDA), chose not to show at all.
New York is not the only city that has been affected by the COVID pandemic. However, when compared to other nations that also held fashion weeks, the U.S. languishes from the highest death rate, death toll and the highest number of coronavirus cases.
Another designer that showed was reality TV star Christian Siriano, who presented his collection in his own backyard.
His models walked out in masks paired with their outfits. One of the most discussed looks of his collection consisted of a simple boater hat paired with a slim fitting dress, both emblazoned with the word “vote.”
It was a detail that both highlighted frustration with this administration’s handling of the pandemic and its effects on Siriano’s design process.
Both Ford’s and Siriano’s collections were meant to leave a message. But as they are part of a collection, their overall purpose is to be sold, and the need for these clothes to be sellable supersedes both the integrity of these messages and the quality of the garments overall. So is it appropriate at all for designers to be peddling clothes amidst a pandemic?
We do not need to see bathrobes to be reminded to stay at home. We do not need to see the word “vote” on a model to be reminded of our civic duty as citizens. If these collections are not necessary to our current situation, and the clothes are not impressive enough to warrant any attention otherwise, why were they presented to begin with?
This is not to say that fashion should not exist during this time. One of the most beautiful displays of NYFW was a suite of dresses by Zac Posen shown beside a pond in Central Park.
The shapes were whimsical, ethereal and playful, the fabrics were airy and translucent. They were all draped by hand on the spot by Posen, displaying the technical skill that has made him one of New York’s most celebrated designers.
Posen’s brand went bankrupt last year, so these dresses were not part of a collection. Instead they were meant to be a display of encouragement to a city gutted by the virus. Because they were not meant to be sold, this message seemed clearer and more genuine.
The dresses were a radical response to the aggressive commercialization of the fashion industry that has developed in the past few decades. Of course, we can’t expect designers to abandon their livelihoods by no longer selling any clothes. Nonetheless, Posen shows us that beautiful and meaningful clothes can be made by stepping back from fashion’s marketed and profit oriented zeitgeist.
