EVERY ACTION HAS A REACTION – THE NEW ORDER
Fri 17 Jun
If you examine menswear and its key trends from a pop cultural point of view, you’ll find that reaction is a key driving force for fashion. As humans, we constantly react to events, people, newness and fatigue, it’s part of everyday life and it shapes our world view. How a creative mind works is unique to each individual, and that’s also why we have such a healthy plethora of brands out there today, all with their own viewpoint and philosophy. But outside of their personal style preference a designer will inadvertently be influenced by the time and place in which they live: their work will reflect a reaction to those times, everything that is happening around them – both positive and negative.
For example, if we take the shape of clothing and dissect it throughout fashion as we know it in the 21st century, for every major menswear movement, we can see that silhouettes and structure are pivotal when aesthetically defining those periods. You can look at the trouser silhouette over the last few decades, remembering how baggy and loose it was in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, defined by rave and skate culture, and effectively fed by hip hop and Britpop as a continued source of musical inspiration for its silhouette. Brands such as Maharishi and their famous Snopants, brought this further into menswear’s zeitgeist and made it part of the 90s uniform.
But whenever a prominent trend goes beyond the boundaries of sub-culture and pushes into the mainstream, most designers almost instinctively react to this with a pendulum move to seek the opposite. To lay waste to what is now and look to what they see as the future. Look at how the trouser width drastically shrunk in the early 00s when Hedi Slimane took over at Dior Homme, fuelled by his obsession with post punk. The skinny jean had arrived and as an overriding silhouette it prevailed for the better part of that decade, influencing the high street as well as fellow catwalk designers before it became mundane.