OF A GOLDEN AGE

After a long list of shows ranging from unexceptional to cumbersome (Sugar-pink fuzzy sweaters and matching hats? Really, Chanel?), of course leave it to Alexander McQueen to turn everything upside down.

McQueen’s new collection is sort of a self- and industry-mocking spectacle, exactly what we should be seeing for a season when few people are purchasing anything, let alone the safe or downright dreary — but still couture — crap issuing forth from most of the designers:

After the triumphs of [McQueen's] recent collections, this was a risky show, entirely uncommercial and intentionally provocative, and it generated extreme reactions. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, was visibly ecstatic watching the show; but another magazine editor, afterward, compared the trash-bin styling to “a collection inspired by Wall-E.”

How funny that someone trashed (hurrr) McQueen for a supposedly Wall-E aesthetic when that movie also took a risk and aimed to provoke by commenting on the failing status quo. In a way, this is a crisis time for fashion, but it presents an opportunity too, one which McQueen embraces in this collection: Fashion has the potential to reinvent itself as a legitimate commentary and art form. I can buy safe clothes at the mall. And I can watch reruns of 90210 if I want to relive the 80s.

As part of a recent list of retooling and reinspiring ideas, Seth Godin offers a simple, lovely mantra (from Pivots for change):

Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.

Well said.

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