What a bore. Reasons to bring a smile back to fashion

Not that there aren’t very serious reasons – political, cultural and also highly commercial – why John Galliano has been chosen as the star of the Met’s Costume Institute’s upcoming fashion exhibition (in no particular order: since his early days in the early 1990s, he has been the favourite designer of Anna Wintour, who supports and essentially guides the institution, and it is hard to disagree with her, as such a genius has never been matched; he has recently signed a two-year consultancy contract with Zara, which will undoubtedly be one of the major sponsors of the exhibition and the upcoming Met Gala, definitively establishing itself as a leading player in high-end fashion; after fifteen years, it is high time to forgive him for his infamous anti-Semitic remarks, made whilst under the influence of drugs, which cost him his job at Dior; and were it not for Renzo Rosso, who was the first to give him a second chance, he would still be in the gutter: in Western civilisation, redemption does exist, after all), one might say that this is a perfect choice because it brings back into the limelight an artist who has made not only the finest tailoring but also irony his hallmark. No one who has been fortunate enough to attend his shows for Dior, or even that magical series of cinematic presentations for Margiela in recent years, has ever forgotten him. From all of them – even those conceived during the darkest moments of history (both Galliano’s and in general; see the stunning reinterpretation of Federico García Lorca’s "Bodas de sangre", filmed during the Covid pandemic) – there emanated an understanding of the cultural dynamics of society, both contemporary and past, of its constraints, but also of the importance of being able to step back from them with a smile, a quality hard to find not only amongst the new generation of fashion designers – who consider it their primary duty to appear increasingly sullen in proportion to their rising fame – but also amongst Galliano’s own contemporaries, with the possible exception of Alexander Lee McQueen and, sadly, during only a limited number of his deeply troubled seasons prior to his suicide. His return with an exhibition whose very title is a promise, ‘Horizons’ (he’s back; all is forgiven, or almost), represents a signal – or rather, a warning to the system – following a long descent into boredom characterised by reasons that, for better or worse, everyone is familiar with: multinationals obsessed with EBITDA, the dizzyingly rising prices that must be countered by the product’s timelessness – that is, its endless repetition to justify its purchase – and then there’s ‘woke’ culture, cultural appropriation and the anxiety of saying or doing something wrong in a globalised world that’s impossible to control – but when listed one after another, they make it legitimate to ask not so much why fashion is struggling to regain ground after five years of crisis, but how it has managed to survive such a vast number of distortions of its very nature and of setbacks which, when all is said and done, have very little to do with the economic climate – a climate that has been unstable for far longer than the time this sector began to take itself too seriously, cloaking garments designed to accompany everyday life, even in its most sophisticated and celebratory forms, in the sacred aura of liturgical vestments (no one understood better than Federico Fellini where fashion shows were heading when he imagined the ‘ecclesiastical fashion’ show in Roma). When I first began working professionally in fashion, some three decades ago, the world had not yet fully recovered from the Gulf War; the war in Kosovo was underway, the most sordid implications of which we are still uncovering today; a few years later came the attack on the Twin Towers, and the whole of Europe was already grappling with one of its many migration crises: in short, even if one were to take an optimistic view – which is the basic premise of this newspaper – the global situation then, as now, left plenty of room for improvement. And yet, the fashion world was still a fun place where – I remember certain Gianni Versace shows, of which I was a loyal customer – the models were smiling and happy to look so fabulous, and designer clothes were an exciting diversion, as well as being affordable even for a newly appointed section editor like myself. There is a wealth of material from those years, including videos, magazines and collections. Recently, whilst conducting some historical research, I leafed through the 1980–1990 ten-year retrospective volume of Donna, that glorious monthly founded and edited by Flavio Lucchini and Gisella Borioli, and it still exudes an energy and enthusiasm impossible to find in today’s dreary magazines, victims of budget cuts, the diktats of advertising executives who even hide behind the interview with the cover actress, and the dominance of social media. The essence of that spirit is distilled in a brilliant editorial by Ettore Sottsass, who, without mincing his words, explains the importance of the ephemeral in human existence as, it seems to me, no one has been able to do since, thereby refuting – a full decade in advance – a large part of the fashion marketing strategies that followed. “There are those who maintain,” he writes, “that true creativity is that which is destined for eternity: palaces, cathedrals, monuments, immutable objects destined to enter museums. There are those who think, quite simply, that even with a piece of fabric, with powder and glitter, with sticks and paint, with unstable materials and temporary forms, one can attain and possess life, the very essence of existence.” It was precisely this idea that Galliano’s final fashion show for Margiela seemed to respond to, organised beneath the Pont Alexandre III in Paris in January 2024, with those prosthetics, those unsettling dolls with porcelain skin that would launch a trend in the beauty industry still in vogue two years later, those wandering spirits in search of a role, and at the heart of all that uncertainty, the realisation of someone who knew they had gambled everything away once again, yet also possessed everything it took to do so.

That Generation Z discovered Galliano on that occasion (it had taken just a few years for him to slip off the radar of young people with an ultra-short-term memory, not to say no memory at all), and that that fashion show was followed by his appointment by Zara and the exhibition due to open on 9 May 2027, is entirely logical, at least according to the established order of things and the balance of power that prevailed until a few years ago. The designer had something to say; he said it in an accessible yet powerful way; someone footed the bill for his narrative, reckoning that, in the long run, it would help sell a few more T-shirts and a couple of pairs of trousers. All these opportunities in the fashion industry are now a privilege, as became clear from conversations with analysts and, more rarely, journalists, following the half-yearly results presentations by the major fashion groups and brands a few days ago. Although the situation is showing a slight improvement for Kering and LVMH or, as in the case of Cucinelli and Prada, has been following a steady upward trajectory for years (in the case of the group led by Patrizio Bertelli, which closed the half-year at 3.048 billion, this marks the twenty-second consecutive quarter of organic growth), the sense of strain, anxiety and obsessive control over every tiny detail is causing the fashion world to lose that aura of spontaneity and fun which, in the past, meant that when Giancarlo Giammetti and Valentino Garavani were calculating how much they’d spent on each fashion show long after the final applause had died down, people would smile indulgently and with interest, because who wouldn’t have wanted to be like two such cool guys? Whereas today, the Valentino brand – with all its controllers, its merchandisers and its badges designed to ensure that the intern downstairs doesn’t even dare to approach the creative bigwigs upstairs – has empty shops, and Kering’s CEO, Luca Di Meo, no longer knows how to put off the acquisition any longer, in the misplaced hope that it will be postponed indefinitely. And yet, although we’d all like to blame the financial sector for what’s been happening to the fashion industry over the past couple of decades, and pin the blame solely on the ‘men of numbers’ as the scapegoats for this rigid, hyper-controlled environment that has emerged – where, years ago, the very charm that the public now seeks in ‘travel experiences’ once reigned supreme – not everything hinges on the fear of going over budget. Or, at the very least, not directly. The most serious mistake occurred when, in order to justify the exponentially rising prices of largely mass-produced goods, there was a desire to turn these stylists – whether tailors or designers, but in short, honest professionals with generally uncertain backgrounds yet an excellent eye for detail – into maîtres à penser, ontologists of the handbag, the Kants of knitwear, in short, high-flying intellectuals whose gruelling press conferences on ‘seasonal inspiration’ were to be religiously recorded, much like Borges’s lectures on English and North American literature to students at the University of Buenos Aires – lectures which, sixty years on, we can finally enjoy in Italian translation. The fashion show reports by Elsa Robiola and Irene Brin are still a pleasure to read today, not to mention those by Oriana Fallaci, who, although she considered herself visibly superior to the world of fashion and approached it with annoyance, did not even bother to double-check names and dates before submitting her pieces – which are, in fact, riddled with errors (fact-checking has never been the strong point of national newsrooms).

Today’s news reports – at least in Europe, where the fashion industry wields the most influence, and Bernard Arnault’s tirade against "Le Monde", which brought the family feuds to light, is the clearest demonstration of this – how one longs for the days when he was not yet the richest man in the world and would drink Coca-Cola in interviews – represent a balancing act: ten lines for the favoured investor, five for the one who bought the least advertising. In response to this lopsided balance, the journalists themselves – not all, but many – take their revenge by setting up Instagram channels and accounts where, under a false name (which is certainly a bad thing, but with great success), they write the well-informed and highly entertaining reports they could never get away with in the media outlets for which they officially work (one of the most feared and, at times, incomprehensibly malicious of these, boringnotcom, is said to have been unmasked a few hours ago, and is believed to be the profile of Rasharn Agyemang, a photographer and stylist who works for a number of Condé Nast publications). He is not the first (everyone in Italy would love to know who is hiding behind ‘fashioncricket’ and ‘crispino21’), nor will he be the last – not to mention the illustrious precedents of the many female writers, starting with Charlotte Brontë, who wrote under pseudonyms to protect themselves and their work. If fashion designers did not take themselves so seriously these days, and if CEOs had not begun seeing themselves as film stars (when, last Christmas, De Meo – who comes from the world of cars and ‘masstige’ – filmed a humorous festive video, the fashion world discussed it for weeks), this would not even be a topic for discussion, but simply a normal professional exchange: I’ll invite you to my fashion show because I genuinely value your opinion, which I recognise as both knowledgeable and impartial; you write whatever you feel like writing, and thank you. Instead, in this game of mutual suspicion – where I judge you to be a fool who cobbles together ideas based on hearsay, and you invite me only because the publication you write for is useful to me or lends me prestige – nobody in their right mind would read an official fashion report anymore, whilst apocryphal accounts or those using nicknames boast tens of thousands of readers, hundreds of comments per post, and the savviest PR departments are learning to capitalise on the negative reviews and poke fun at them to defuse the situation and forge a connection with Generation Z, who seem particularly inclined to support those who don’t put on airs – as people of my generation would have said – or ‘stay chill’, as the current generation puts it. A few weeks ago, a video of Shay Mitchell, founder of the Bèis brand, went viral. In response to the scathing online criticism of the quality and construction of her travel bags, she placed one on an operating table, vowing to take care of the issue by redesigning them. And sales have started to rise again.