This week the city will be distracted by the mild hysteria surrounding the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival.
It will provide nuggets of human interest for TV News, and excuse to put a saleable fashion image on the front page of newspapers, and a slew of product-sponsored events for the duration of the week.
Yet for a city that prides itself on being the epicentre of Australian Fashion, no one seems to comment on what a bonfire of mediocrity the festival itself is. A walking, breathing retail catalogue, wrapped up and wooped up as if it were to be seen alongside London, Paris, Milan and New York.
The biggest parade of the Melbourne fashion year, the showing of the winter collections is a whitewashed selection of the least outrageous of what Melbourne has to offer. This is due to the fact that a single ‘stylist’ appointed by the festival surveys each of the participating designers’ ranges and chooses which garments are shown -representing them in their most department-store-friendly form.
Rather than experiencing the full brunt of Australian design talent, all you will see is ‘style according the Herald Sun fashion editor’.
Therefore, fashion journalists and the witnessing public are fed the idea that fashion is meant to be safe, that it is meant to be basic, that it is meant to appeal to the ‘every man’. Impressionable youths return to their suburban enclaves and mimic what they see on models. They are encouraged to ‘tone it down’, play it safe or suppress an urge to follow an impulse that might otherwise start a wave of something more daring.
It’s as if we are so esteemed to have a week of expensively executed parades, we forgot to demand the same level of forward thinking and ingenuity that would any of the other artistic mediums we regard in this city. Year after tiresome year, the parade week leaves people bereft of remark, uninspired by an affair so otherwise full of pomp and circumstance - it should display more than just ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.
Ironically, the way many international style makers find their direction is via trend forecasting networks like WGSN, who charge their members a few thousand dollars a year to allow them into their database of current style catalogues.
These are compiled by paying ‘style watchers’ to photograph what trendy kids are wearing on the street, at art schools and at clubs in cities just like this.
These pockets of individuals, like ‘trend weathervanes’ unintentionally gage what the zeitgeist will gravitate towards next. Ready-to-wear designers then follow this advice, making collections based on the nucleus of the same idea, which Australian fashion festivals then try and mimic, dumb down and re-package back to us.
At best, all one could hope to gain from attending a parade like LMFF is to look at what the audience is wearing.
If there were to be a shift in this guileless trend, it would need to come from the ground up: those who are showing their wares should demand more exposure for their ground-breaking ideas; those at the journalist level need to comment on the how artistically waning the affair really is, and those at a consumer level need to demand a platform for design that is not indicative of what Myer will be stocking next season.
In the mean time, if you want to know what you’ll be wearing in three seasons time, don’t look to the catwalks, look to the streets.
As sure as the eventual return of the baggy jean, the Melbourne Fashion Festival in it’s current incantation is the antithesis of what fashion should be.
For those in need of instant inspiration:
http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/
A celebration of individual style. Scott Schuman travels the world photographing people in the street who’s style he deems worthy of the term ‘sartorialist’.
http://cyanatrendland.com/category/designer/trends/
A good example of a free trend-forecasting site, giving you an overview of looks that will eventually penetrate the mainstream.
and the style.com iPhone app. are a great way to see every single international runway collection within hours of their premier.
My advice: create a file of images that speak to you, either copied and pasted digitally, or literally torn from magazines. Look this over and go op-shopping allowing your style to emerge though a combination of instinct and inspiration.
The best-dressed people in the world don’t buy designers as much as they inspire them.
What some of my favourite 'Melbourne Fashionables' are wearing. Images courtesy of the fashionista, complied by the author.
Its not so often for me to see clothes that are beyond usual. Congrats to you cool wearers.
ReplyDeleteStacey
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