Zeitgeist. It’s a word that’s tossed around like so many post-modern salads and applied to everything from musings on film to cocktail conversations about Paris Hilton and iPods. But barring the word “modern,” it is probably the one most often used to describe the ever-changing winds in the world as magically reflected in fashion.
“Fashion is all about zeitgeist,” says Karl Lagerfeld backstage at Chanel’s haute couture show. “It has to be something that comes to you, but you have to be like a watch: right on time, because ‘zeit’ means time. One has to be a well-working Swiss watch.
“I’m only interested in now and tomorrow,” he adds, before being hustled off to chat with Martha Stewart. “Yesterday was OK.”
But what he neglects to say is that “geist” also means spirit or ghost.
Anyone who follows the news knows that the never-dead ghosts of religious crusades past are, to put it lightly, stirring. And this fall season, designers have taken the message of modern holy wars to heart, sending out runways full of overriding themes of darkness and defence. After a whirlwind three-year flirtation with flower power and the Lady—for, as Miuccia Prada already observed in 2003, the world was in “desperate need for beauty”—fashion is once again listening to the winds of war.
“Fashion designers are like artists,” says Julie Thomas, an associate professor of international communications at the American University of Paris. “They can plug into a feeling in the air months before the media start reporting it, although the media also often create and contribute to the ‘feeling in the air’ in the first place. Don’t forget, after the November riots in the Paris suburbs and the angst over the veil law, designers were already at their drawing boards for fall’s collections.”
Call it a new sobriety, or even the “Muslimization of fashion” as Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune famously dubbed it, but the brooding mood for Fall 2006 is unmistakably full of misty greys and charcoal blacks. Viktor & Rolf showed severely clad Dior New Look–esque creatures gliding down the catwalk in mysterious woven fencing masks and veils, and the likes of John Galliano, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rochas, Lanvin and even Christian Lacroix are all marching to the ghostly drums of war.
But this isn’t the first time in recent memory that fashion has had a literal take on wartime. At the beginning of the current Iraq conflict, just over three years ago (six long seasons ago in fashion time), designers in Milan and Paris (New York being too commercially oriented to plug into zeitgeist proper, and perhaps a little too close to the action) were presenting looks with similarly medieval themes of armour and protection—ideas they’d conjured up months before the first American tanks rumbled onto the streets of Baghdad. From Tomas Maier at Bottega Veneta to Jil Sander to Ennio Capasa at Costume National to Helmut Lang, fashion’s front liners seem to know the major preoccupations of their time months before the headlines begin.
“Why is it a Middle Ages thing?” mused fashion journalist Godfrey Deeny of Fashion Wire Daily during the 2003 Milan ready-to-wear shows. “Maybe psychically the designers have a deep-seated fear that we’re about to enter into a grotesque conflict, which a lot of people worry about. And this might be the new Dark Ages—it is going to be a very sexy-looking Dark Ages. But designers are frighteningly prescient, and if what we are seeing comes true, I’d be a bit worried for the future of the world in six months’ time.”
The question is, are consumers ready for this medieval zeitgeist?
“You know, everyone is talking about sobriety,” says Robert Burke, a New York–based luxury fashion consultant. “I think the concern and the fear from retailers is that you don’t want a floor that’s too terribly sober. It’s not going to be an interesting shopping experience, so we’re going to really have to make sure that we have interesting pieces that are motivating the customer and that are emotional purchases.”
“Even though I’m seeing a lot of sombreness, I’m also seeing a lot of beauty in the sombreness,” says Chicago retailer Ikram Goldman. “There are so many touches and beautiful details to each piece. Yes, it is sombre in a way, but it is so incredibly beautiful and elegant—I love that.”
But whether designers use their fashion artistry to reflect the times we live in or, on the flip side, offer an escape from tragedy, ultimately their role is to situate a woman inside the zeitgeist, so she can float through it with the greatest of strength and assurance.
“The veils were a kind of armour,” admits designer Viktor Horsting of Viktor & Rolf. “But it is also about giving power with clothes and accessories. It is not just about hiding; it is also about being your own person.”
Themes of strength and self-reliance took a fairy-tale twist at Galliano’s Fall 2006 haute couture presentation for Dior. Elaborately clad Botticelli princesses strutted down the catwalk with underpinnings of—you guessed it—clanging armour peeping through.
Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel chose denim leggings, denim body armour and bejewelled, golden Dark Ages brooches.
“Though neither designer is especially interested in politics,” wrote Cathy Horyn in The New York Times, “Mr. Lagerfeld said the reason [they] both may have chosen the same theme is the extent to which religion, and fear, can undermine rational thought. And certainly, armour is a symbol of protection.” But in the end, trust Alexander McQueen to come up with the most provocative reflection on the meaning of feminine strength.
As the lights dimmed and suddenly darkened at the end of his stirringly melancholy, romantic ready-to-wear show, the room was filled with the haunting strains of the song “Eli, Eli,” featured in some versions of Schindler’s List—a 1993 movie about the Holocaust. In the middle of the runway, the vaporous form of a beautiful woman floated into view. It was a ghostlike hologram of Kate Moss, clad in a multi-layered, pure white confection of a gown. Her body spun gently, then disappeared into thin air.
“There was a real sense of ghosts and references to spirits of the past,” says Ingrid Sischy of Interview magazine. “Whether the spirit of avant-gardism, spirits of history, the spirit of our time, the whole religious thing that we’re going through, the fact that the world is divided by these religious wars—and this show took all that, and there was the sheer beauty...and in the middle of it all came this extraordinary comment on the nature of fame, the nature of our times, and the nature of survival and giving power back to Kate... He really figured out how to make great fashion and, at the same time, [he] always searches how to say something about the world. It was really about the nature of survival.”
First published in FASHION Magazine October 2006
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Kelli writes:
Extremely well-written article! Thanks!
—posted October 13, 2006 at 10:27 p.m.
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