Not so long ago, Alessandro Michele presented his 2023 cruise show inspired by the history of the universe against the spectacular backdrop of the Castel de Monte in Puglia. At Etro, invitation cards featured poems recited instead of invitation prose, and Giorgio Armani curated an entire photo exhibition for Milan Fashion Week in June, featuring work by members of the legendary Magnum agency, which will be on display in the Armani silos until November 6th see is.
Some shows are designed almost like intellectual symposia or are accompanied by such. It’s nothing new that fashion and art make a perfect team and that interspersed cultural quotes go well together. What is new is that such references are obviously in demand in digitized times like they haven’t been for a long time. The capricious fashion has rediscovered the insignia of literature in particular, as a grounding contrast in a world that is becoming increasingly virtual. Catwalks are decorated with floor lamps, writers are placed in the front row, among the must-haves of the season. Fashion thus also opposes the cliché of superficiality that is widespread about it.
Artists and authors as style icons: Oscar Wilde was a dandy
While the news is rushing through, the need for deceleration and rituals grows, also in the form of fashion and accessories that you can wear in a coffee house while reading analog beautiful figure can make. The new proximity between fashion and educated middle-class shows that fashion has arrived there. That the rifts between entertainment and high culture have been filled up in many places, that both work and complement each other. Fashion is not only a seismograph for cultural events, it is itself a movens. A remarkable number of writers have written cultural history through individual looks as style icons.
Imago
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). His looks certainly promoted his fame as a dandy.
George Sand and Colette shocked in men’s suits, Tom Woolf popularized the white tailor-made suit. Oscar Wilde staged himself as a dandy in fur and velvet, Left Bank author Djuna Barnes appeared ladylike with a polka dot scarf and hat. Edith Sitwell preferred the grandeur, Sylvia Plath the neat. The Fitzgeralds celebrated jazz-age glamour, Dorothy Parker the little black dress with pearls. Gertrude Stein, the austere, sported a crew cut and cowl-like dresses in her later years, but also had a soft spot for couture and rewarded herself with a hand-made coat from Hermès for her bestseller “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” in Paris in 1934. And Joan Didion, the cool one, modeled for the Celine label in her old age.
They all had a personal touch that made them unmistakable, had “that certain something”. It seems that novelists and poets with a glamor factor are particularly successful, also and especially in intellectual circles: a pinch of glamor provided topics of conversation, made an impression, looked good in the salons. Glamor speaks of esprit, glamor makes interesting – as if the creativity that speaks from a moderately staged appearance were already a promise of the creativity of the work.
fashion and literature
An increasingly close alliance can be discerned between fashion and literature. The design houses have recognized that today their customers are much more often than twenty or thirty years ago academics with relevant interests who appreciate this connection if not demanding it. With “Les Rendez-vous littéraires Rue Cambon”, the house of Chanel has put on a literary-philosophical salon program that Coco Chanel would probably have liked too. Clever women sit in a beautiful atmosphere and talk about books. The hostess of the literary club de luxe is Charlotte Casiraghi, who chats with her guests, such as the writer Leïla Slimani, about Virginia Woolf or Lou Andreas-Salomé, which can be seen as a film on the Chanel website.
Chanel
The literary quartet at Chanel: Fanny Arama, Charlotte Casiraghi, Chantal Thomas and Anamira Vartolomei.
“Dior presented a men’s collection inspired by Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel On the Road at the Paris Défilés for fall 2022 last spring. She was presented on a catwalk that looked like a long scroll. In this way, the fashion show became a literary choreography in harmony with the movements of the models. The Dior looks seemed like a mix of couture and counterculture, the words from the “Unterwegs” manuscript about it like an energetic impulse towards the future. The designs presented themselves as not only aligned with the spirit of the times, but also with things that go back deeper, like this old novel. The beatnik lyrics brought something rampantly free-spirited to the collection in an inexorable search for meaning.”
Demna Gvasalia read a pre-recorded poem at the Balenciaga runway show, held shortly after the outbreak of war, and framed the presentation as a plea for love and peace. Alessandro Michele had a text about the philosophers Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, who both fled Germany in the 1930s, distributed at the opulent Gucci show on the Castel del Monte. The designer bridged the gap between the German thinker and his imaginative designs by certifying Benjamin’s ability to reassemble, reconstruct and update scraps of thought.
Imago
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the intellectuals of fashion.
And isn’t that also what fashion is about? About reconstructing identities? With its radically oriented towards the zeitgeist, Michele made Gucci one of the most discussed and thus most respected brands of the Kering group at the moment. Fashion, by definition hedonistic, must, it seems, become more intellectual and serious, weighty, if it is to hold its ground in these serious times. Miuccia Prada, who studied political science and was one of the first to focus on the connection between fashion people and the cultural scene, knew this decades ago.
Whereas in the past it was the fashion designers who tended to be the muses of the artists, such as Coco Chanel for Igor Stravinsky, Elsa Schiaparelli for Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent for Andy Warhol and Mondrian, today it is poets and thinkers, painters and writers who provide the fashion designers with inspiration. Ports 1961 fashion house prints Kazimir Malevich patterns in blue, red and yellow on sundresses. Comic-like pop art was the inspiration for the Fendi collection. The masculine style of the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach was a declared model for Givenchy a few seasons ago. Romanian artist Geta Bratescu inspired a collection by Swiss label Akris. Impressions of a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape can currently be found on a dress by Gabriela Hearst. The “Walter & Wassily”, a matt black round pair of sunglasses from Neubau Eyewear, was named after the Bauhaus grandees Walter Gropius and Wassily Kandinsky, and how many sneaker models were designed by artists can hardly be overlooked. Advertising also places campaigns in the middle of the hip art world. In a short film, Louis Vuitton lets the actress Léa Seydoux portray a new handbag in the ambience of a modern art museum. And Ralph Lauren invited to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin to celebrate the opening of his shop on Kurfürstendamm at the beginning of May, just right for Gallery Weekend. The list seems endless.
literature on new stages
The American designer Virgil Abloh used books and magazines as accessories in his collections, emphasizing Black Culture poets in particular. In 2016, Abloh, the master of collaborations, teamed up with Nike for a high-end sneaker collection. Under the title The Ten, they celebrated ten legendary models from the sporting goods manufacturer, creating a new sneaker hype and subsequent auction records. Inspired by Dadaism, Abloh deconstructed the originality of the original models. He scribbled fragments of text in quotation marks on the shoes, wrote dedications such as “For Serena only” on the soles, borrowed local idioms and used slang terms. With his text designs borrowed from street art, the superstar of the fashion scene, who died in November 2021, made artful assemblages out of kicks for millions and ready-made objects coveted by the fashion scene of our time.
The fact that fashion and literature as a dream team are currently pushing onto many new stages promises to be exciting. And also that designers like Armani and Ralph Lauren have long been inviting fans to their own cafés and bars, that Prada had filmmaker Wes Anderson set up the wonderful Milano Fifties bar “Luce” in the Fondazione Prada in Milan: you can immerse yourself in the dream worlds that the designers stage for the public over an espresso or Aperol-Campari-Sspritzer. Because even escapism is and remains a promise of fashion. That’s not bad news at all.