Fashionably Fruity
Do gay men's preferences dictate fashion trends? And if not theirs, then whose?
A guest post by Maya
Note: Some of the posts to which I'm responding use “haute couture,” “high fashion,” and “designer fashion” interchangeably. In this article, I try to preserve the distinction between haute couture and ready-to-wear high/designer fashion as best I can.
As an established fashion hobbyist, it’s rare for my perspectives on dress to change very much or very quickly. My aesthetic preferences are well-defined and (often too) thoroughly considered. Shifts in direction are preceded by an eternity of feverishly agonizing over lookbooks, archival collections, and strange websites as I struggle to sincerely understand what, if anything, I’m trying to get across about myself through my clothing. While I’m no expert, the industry’s quirks and foibles are well-known to me, built into the shared understandings and tropes laid out like brickwork to support a forum on which designers and collections interact with each other.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s rarer still for me to think too long about the nature of that foundation. The conversation it supports is a vibrant one, refreshed every spring and autumn, and while new collections occasionally demand that I brush up on an archaic reference-point with which I was previously unfamiliar, it’s all too easy to get so caught up in seeing the sights that the stones beneath my feet are taken for granted. In the end, it was an infuriating twitter thread, posted at the beginning of Paris Fashion Week that forced me to stop moving and look down.
The basic claim was banal and fairly silly: women’s psyches have been severely harmed by the “bodily aesthetics of gay men'' as expressed through their roles as fashion designers, especially in the 1990s. It cited a blog post titled “Dispelling Beauty Lies” that, among other things, claimed that runway models are tall, slim, and androgynous due to the disproportionate number of gay men acting as creative directors at fashion houses. The author noted that “it would be unreasonable to assume [their sexuality] has no impact on their tastes”. I fired off a few tweets in reply, pointing out that the “heroin chic” aesthetic of the 90s was a trend that came and passed, and that the harms it (and the subsequent pendulum-swing into a pop-culture that promoted “thick” women in the 2010s) caused are separate phenomena from the enduring preference for waifishness and androgyny in haute couture. Few people are even aware of most couture collections, and fewer still will wear them. To the extent that couture does drive trends, it does so through several layers of abstraction, trickle-down inspiration making its way to the masses through ready-to-wear lines, homages from high street brands, and eventual absorption into fast fashion. And after all, couture models are as thin today as they were at the height of heroin chic; that phenomenon, however it is caused, is not an ephemeral trend, or even a long-term fluctuation in preferences - it’s nearly static.
Midway through another reply about how the thread continued to misunderstand the purpose, artistry, and intended audience of one of my strongest interests, I got distracted by something fascinating. While it’s obviously reductive to point to gay men’s preferences as the primary driving factor behind women’s fashion, it’s also reductive to point to any of the other usual suspects: wealthy people’s desire to signal status, designers’ artistic vision, or broadly-defined consumer preference. More so than other types of art, the preferences that are expressed through designer fashion are interconnected and complex, even to the point of being directly self-contradictory, and collections nonetheless have the ability to clearly express themes, motifs, and a coherent design language. At minimum, the following factors must be considered.
Fashion houses do not have an exclusive ability to set trends, even within the industry. Just as often, designers are interacting with, or reinterpreting, aesthetics and stylistic choices coming from subcultural scenes and street style from both the past and present. When Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent dominated discussions of men’s fashion in the 2010s, its rebellious take on male androgyny drew heavily on rockstar staples from decades past, including cuban-heeled boots, painted-on jeans, and the double rider jacket. Even economic trends have some pull, despite designer fashion’s status as a luxury good; recessions in both the 1990s and 2000s resulted in industry-wide shifts towards minimalism. Grand couturiers, therefore, do not rule consumers’ bodies by sartorial fiat - trends and movements can just as well be imposed on the industry as born within it.
Designers, fashion journalists, and hobbyists attempt to understand and engage with a complex conversation. Fashion is an incestuous form of art, and trends, motifs, and particular pieces are often playthings across multiple designers and collections. Very little is truly outsider art, and in the most controversial cases, the line between homage and unoriginality is dangerously blurred. This results in an intricate web of interpretation and reinterpretation, where everything from high-effort deconstruction to playful allusion is expected to be noticed and understood as part of an ongoing and continuous dialogue.
At its core, ready-to-wear fashion is still luxury clothing. While couture on its own runs much closer to high art, designers with ready-to-wear lines need to keep in mind that runway looks ultimately must be translatable into clothes that sell well. For wealthy customers who buy designer clothing at retail prices, this means not only fine design, but often fine construction as well, and intentionality in every detail such that pieces are not only aesthetically intriguing, but clearly indicative of discerning taste and a pocketbook to match. The recent popularity of streetwear and the concomitant cultural valorization of urban rags-to-riches stories muddies this somewhat, but designers were historically in conversation with high-class luxury past and present. In some cases, this simply means creating beautiful, well-made clothes and accessories, as Hermès does. In others, such as the distinctive use of the jadot in Margiela’s debut runway, historical luxury is repackaged for the modern elite. In either case, the need to showcase status is a load-bearing concern.
The industry as a whole is ritualistic and traditionalistic. Runway shows, initially flashy advertising by retailers, have evolved into elaborate performance art staged by fashion houses in order to extend their portfolio from clothes to vibes. High fashion is more popular now than ever, but the mystique and exclusivity of the fashion show as an institution remain. As such, truly novel takes on the fashion-show concept are rare (and soon integrated into the canon), and even iconoclastic displays like Margiela’s playground show or Elena Velez’s New York salon cannot fully shed the trappings that have ingrained themselves deeply into the structure of the industry. In fact, words like “canon” and “iconoclastic” are apt, as all the motions and objects involved - unconventional invitations, dramatic sets with lighting and music, gaunt models with androgynous faces - exist as components of a liturgie de la mode that experiences schism and reformation, but never conversion. Key high points and narratives in the doctrine’s history, from 18th century court dress to distinctive styles from each decade of the 20th, become parables that serve as common background for reference and revisionism.
Despite everything, radical - and popular - artistic vision is critical. Ultimately, for a designer to “make it,” in the sense of becoming an industry- or trend-defining figure, they must set themselves apart from the pack somehow. In modern terms, this often results in starting or catching onto a trend and building “hype” such that a particular piece or collection becomes coveted as a status symbol, but even that requires enough uniqueness that a given piece cannot simply be imitated. Likewise, a strong personal vision and a penchant for sensational pieces and shows can catapult a young designer to stardom, as occurred with Lee McQueen in the 90s. Finally, it would be cynical to disregard the value of fashion as wearable art. This has long been my first line of defense against those who’d accuse fashion of being purely an exercise in capitalist overindulgence, since it’s clearly and fundamentally true in a way that offers a bit of pathos. Vision matters, not just because it sells clothes, but because earnest self-expression is the whole point of it all.
Thus, any given piece of clothing has an impressive number of roles: an expression of a designer’s aesthetic direction, a statement in a complex conversation going back decades, a demonstration of wealth and taste, a sacred item in evolving ritual practice, and a straightforwardly sincere product of artistic effort. It seems almost impossible for anything to exist at the confluence of so many competing forces, but so much does: an entire industry shaped by this tension, with customers who may only consider a handful of the tasks for which their clothes are designed.
When confronted with several dozen people from his corner of the internet attempting to explain the nature of high fashion, its rituals and symbolism, the man whose tweet I initially replied to said the following:
overall everyone trying to explain haute couture to me is giving contrary explanations that make no sense given laws of aesthetics and of industrial organization which leads me to think its fundamentally cultic behavior with no rational or artistic basis whatsoever
In light of the competing interests and preferences involved, anything less would be shocking! Ultimately, it’s his (and everyone else’s) right to decide how they feel about the appearance and artistic worth of the clothes involved, and it’s far beyond me to answer questions about the nature of beauty, in this article or elsewhere. In fact, it’s precisely this kind of disagreement - between designers, between consumers, between whole eras of fashion - about what clothes should look like and who they should be for that has brought forth the fascinating complexity which underpins something so basic as the clothes we wear. I disagree with nearly everything he said, but he shouldn’t stop talking - he should put out a collection.
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