Riccardo Tisci is probably the reason why I wear white AF1s every day. His work for Givenchy was instrumental in establishing my idea of what “cool” was when I was first starting to look at fashion. While I was definitely attracted to the whole Seductive Italian Widow vibe he was working with, the clothes also really stuck with me - those ornate leather jackets from the Fall 2010 couture are burned into my retinas. Those pieces are actually great signifiers of the world that Tisci was able to build at Givenchy. They’re unmistakably of that era.

Clearly, the world Tisci is building at Burberry is going to be pretty different. Spring 2019 checked all the boxes - an all-permeating but little-revealing social media campaign and the announcement of a sustainability initiative in the weeks leading up the show, beige trench coats of all shapes and sizes and tons of clothes designed to sell. I’ve been trying to figure out why I disliked it so much. The clothes themselves were fine, and I liked a lot of the individual pieces - definitely always need a PVC poncho to fantasize about. But I get the feeling that this is what it’s going to be like for the entirety of Tisci’s time at Burberry. This feels a lot like what he did at Givenchy, but under the constraints of the Burberry brand, which include an increased pressure to sell.

Burberry has one of the strongest brand identities in fashion, probably because it’s so easily visualized. We associate the check with British heritage, off-the-rack wearability and, for me at least, a omnipresent quality that often seems like a kind of false austerity. These are the parameters Tisci has to work with, so I don’t know if we’re going to see anything like the aforementioned jackets from Burberry anytime soon. Givenchy, as a storied maison and a more versatile brand, gave Tisci the arena and the resources to tell the story that he did there.

An Iris Van Herpen, to me, is one of the few things that belongs in both the world of fashion and the world of art. More than any other designer on the Paris couture schedule, Van Herpen pushes the notion of “wearability” to its breaking point. As evidenced in her latest collection, “Syntopia,” which featured pieces consisting of hundreds of layers of organza bonded to “chronographic lines of bird wing movements” cut from mylar and cotton, these are clothes to be seen, rather than seen in. When I stare at them on my phone, I’m not really thinking about The Fantasy - I’m actually not thinking of them as products at all, even though they are.

Clothes, I think, can definitely be art. I don’t think I’d be crying alone on a plane while thinking about something that wasn’t art (summer ‘17, leaving Vegas after a long weekend, Raf Simons for Dior Haute Couture). However, “fashion,” the ecosystem based around the consumption and enjoyment of clothes, doesn’t really have much to do with art at the end of the day. It’s about money, diluting the dream to make it accessible to more-but-not-too-many people. Art is also a money-centric industry, but it doesn’t match the level of commoditization seen in fashion. We see the couture, then the association of that with the RTW makes us buy a pair of jeans, and then it happens again when we see the fragrance campaign. 

If we follow this line of thinking, the most accessible products are the ones that are the most firmly situated on the “Fashion” side of the Fashion/Art Venn diagram - they’re the furthest away from the couture pieces, which, in many cases, could be considered works of art. Since they’re available to so few, and since they’re often the most elaborate work a house produces, the focus shifts from thinking about potential revenue or purchase to just looking at a beautiful piece of clothing. 

I still like the Balenciaga Triple S. Despite the insistence of of everyone on my timeline that they’re “over,” they still kind of do it for me. The black/white/red colorway reminds me of the hot guy in high school gym class.

It’s actually a little interesting to me that the Triple S became as ubiquitous as it did, given the explosion of call-out culture in fashion. The stacked sole idea as it appears on the Triple S has been around for a while - Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta did something similar, for example, when Eckhaus Latta was first beginning to pick up steam. What I’m describing sounds like great fodder for an IG exposé, so why haven’t I seen one? It feels like I see a new post disparaging one of a select few big-brand creative directors, or one of an endless stream of unknown brands trying to get on their feet, every couple of hours. These critics treat certain brands and designers as near-untouchable, while they seem intent on destroying the reputations of others. The message, as relayed by the comments section, is clear - if a designer is called out for copying another designer, the resulting product is undesirable and worthy of ridicule.

This is at odds with the way things actually are. Yohji Yamamoto, when asked to share his advice for young designers, said, “Start copying what you love…At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” We’ve developed the idea of fashion designers as Rei Kawakubo types, each one of them an iconoclastic, eccentric ultra-visionary, bursting with one-of-a-kind, original ideas. This kind of thinking gives way to the high expectations for newness and innovation that we place on designers, regardless of their skill level or the nature of their respective audiences or businesses. One need only follow the collections for a couple of seasons, however, to come to a startling realization - from haute couture to streetwear, there’s rarely a whole lot of new going on. Alexandre Vauthier’s latest couture collection, as beautiful as it is, also shows that he looks at recent Saint Laurent on the Vogue Runway app at least as much as I do.

If I had seen Dior Couture by John Galliano when it was shown in the early aughts, I would’ve lost my mind. I now realize that it was a near-perfect realization of my fashion fantasies as a child - a parade of vibrant, self-assured, beautiful people, each wearing something unlike anything I’d ever seen. Thankfully, he’s brought this same spirit to his work for Maison Margiela Artisanal, which further confirms his ability to merge his own strong sensibilities with those of the house he works for, often with spectacular results.

At the core of these sensibilities lies a very distinct character. It’s a person, but it’s really a general attitude - you know instantly when a photo is from a Galliano show, even if just from the look on the model’s face. There’s a feeling of irreverence about them, probably because Galliano’s inspirations come from everywhere. This was especially evident during his time at Dior, where he often based entire couture collections on stereotypical cultural references. Spring 03 was East Asia, Fall 03 was Spain, Spring 04 was ancient Egypt - somehow, it all feels cohesive.

The person wearing Galliano couture also represents an aggressive approach to leisure. Traditionally, haute couture is for people who don’t work, the “ladies who lunch.” Galliano takes this idea into the stratosphere. It’s hard to imagine someone in even one of the more “wearable” ensembles typing at a computer, and the pieces on the other end of the spectrum look to be made for an alien princess.