Words: Ana Kinsella
Even the most ardent style-spotter couldn’t have seen this trend coming. But over a few short years, the runway show started to take a new form. These days, instead of picking up a magazine, most of us get our fashion news online. It’s speedier and cheaper than waiting a month or two for new season collections to make it into print. So it’s up to savvy designers to adapt accordingly. And this year print whiz Mary Katrantzou, London’s current favourite, admitted she designs her collections in sets of six, anticipating how they’d be presented on Style.com. She could hardly be the only one aware of the site’s influence.
And then a curveball. As September’s month of Fashion Weeks kicked off in New York, Style.com changed their mind. After years of the rows-of-six thumbnail format, the site switched to four. Four! I can imagine that designers in London and Paris were scrambling desperately backstage to reassemble shows into sets of fours. Because Style.com’s become the dominant critical authority in the industry. Its archives, starting when the site launched in 1999, are the first stop for anyone looking for a designer reference, and its reviews are considered canonical. And ten short years ago, the site could barely get invitations to the big shows.
This is the tip of the iceberg. The internet has brought fashion to the masses in an unprecedented way that few could really predict. But the changes have been huge. It’s allowed us to browse and shop from our beds, to share our outfits on blogs and to find a fashion reference at the click of a mouse. It has simultaneously widened and narrowed our perspective, allowing us to hone in on specific sources of inspiration in a world of visual information. But then, isn’t that what fashion is all about?
Style watchers like to give out about rip-offs and copycats: after wunderkind Nicolas Ghesquière stepped down from Balenciaga this month, a timely Tumblr called Balenciaga Did It First started highlighting where other designers had copied Ghesquière’s game-changing innovations. Twitter and the blogs lapped it up. Actual fashion designers probably didn’t care, because designing is kind of all about plumbing the archives of others for inspiration. The Tumblr was taken down in record time and hasn’t been seen since.
The fashion world calls it referencing, and before the internet, designers had to depend on libraries and old magazines to pillage history for some new notes to riff on. It was harder to be a nerd about fashion. With the way collections are produced and delivered, once they’re out of the shops and the mags, they’re pretty much invisible until someone eventually makes a coffee-table book about them. The internet changed all that. Now there’s a Tumblr for every designer who’s made a mark, from couture’s Coco Chanel and Cristobal Balenciaga through to 1980s rule-breakers like Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang.
