In the race to be all fashion, all the time, opinions are the first
thing to go
dateline: 09.20.99
More than 100 years ago, Charles Worth, the first designer to sign his work with a label and produce a catalog, had an iron grip on what was deemed fashionable. When one patron, the beautiful Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III of France (who dubbed Worth le tyran de la mode) threatened to leave him if he didn't ease his prices he said "You can not" and she didn't.
Today, you might hear about someone like Zoran, who according to The End of Fashion by Teri Agins, tells his clients to try on clothes and show them to him before looking in the mirror. "I am your two eyes and I will tell you what looks good," he says.
But for the most part, the days of fashion designer as oracle have long passed. Instead, the media defines fashion, struggling to find common threads in divergent collections, identifying and labeling trends and shaping opinion through editorial spreads.
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Fashion journalists have been wrapping up Fashion Week , Spring 2000, in New York where they've issued pithy quotes like "Forget black" and identified coming trends such as "Nostalgic Americana." But there is an influx of new players and according to the Look On-Line, there were probably close to 100 fashion Internet companies vying for a spot at the shows. This race to be all fashion, all the time, has affected the speed, form and influence with which scribes deliver their messages.
Vogue (now merged with W and called Style.com) is among the newly Net savvy companies concerned with rapidly delivering information to readers. In addition to near real-time photos of the collections (every item of 34 different designers' collections) Vogue also offered an exhaustive list of celebrities at events and even had a live cam pointed at different spots throughout the venue and backstage gossip.
With only brief editorial descriptions of the collections, the photos were left to speak for themselves. So a venerable fashion opinion-shaper such as Vogue has changed the form of its message from high-concept editorial to merely an opening of a virtual window on fashion -- allowing viewers to see fashion shows much the way an attendee does.
The Internet is chock-full of sites that offer eye candy. Firstview was one of the first online services to give a birdseye view of the collections and an extensive archive. CNN has even gone closer to its TV roots with more video and photos than analysis.
Unlimited, unedited visual coverage of fashion is a good thing because it assumes readers are mature and opinionated enough to draw their own conclusions about fashion. But it also assumes that people actually have the time or inclination to wade through thousands of styles (of which maybe a third will actually go into production in a modified form)
In trading analysis for access, the media gives up its role as gatekeeper and becomes a mere chronicler of events. And with nothing but eyewitness accounts to rely on, consumers and fashion followers may soon find themselves longing for an occasional opinion with the clarity and influence of a Charles Worth or Zoran
