This is Connecting the Dots, a series in which writer José Criales-Unzueta looks at how fashion, pop culture, the internet and society are all interconnected.
This past weekend I watched the entirety of the Disney+ series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. I excused my binge with the fact that I was somewhat on assignment for Vogue Runway. I was to watch the show and see if there was anything worth writing home, err, the website, about. I had lots of thoughts, but the last episode, in which a young and fast-ascending Thierry Mugler makes an appearance, gave me the most to think about.
The story goes that Pierre Bergé, who presided over the Chambre Syndicale du prêt-à-porter (which he created in the ’70s to unite couturiers and ready-to-wear designers under one organisation), had something to say about the runway extravaganzas Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier, along with their rising class of fellow designers, were putting on. “The clothes should be the spectacle,” he said, reprimanding them. But Mugler et al persisted — in the end, the tide shifted in their direction and fashion moved away from couture salons and intimate presentations.
We seem to be in a similar situation today. Macro-presentations have once more become the norm. Each season, shows get bigger and louder. But the June shows in Paris, a menswear and couture twofer, cemented what has been in the air for some time now; the pendulum is swinging. Brazenly vying for attention, it seems, is passé. An X (formerly Twitter) post I read the other day summarises this: “Posting on Instagram feels so cringe now.” It’s the internet, I thought, that is causing this shift. We’ve become self-conscious. This tool that has given fashion and its makers and promoters access and exposure has also given onlookers too much information. Now they see right through us. They know too much, and we’re retracting as a result.
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Daniel Roseberry changed the venue for his autumn 2024 couture show this past season. He moved from the grandeur of the Petit Palais to the privacy of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild basement for a smaller showcase. Backstage, as my editor Nicole Phelps reported for Vogue Runway, Roseberry said that he wanted to leave behind his reputation as a “meme-weaver”. He has, after all, made some of the most memeable couture of the past decade in only the last couple of seasons. Remember those viral animal heads and robo-babies?
Being overexposed online is a somewhat double-edged sword. The work might be popular, sure, and even well received, but it very easily becomes reduced to that. Virality. A TikTok or two, a very funny meme. This comes with its own dose of anxiety. Fashion is pop culture, but it can also be very serious — and self-serious — and being the butt of the joke is not always ideal. “The risk for me here is that there’s nothing that’s meant to break the internet,” said Roseberry backstage. “I think that was an angle that we played to lift the visibility of the house, and I think we’re shifting gears, I’m shifting gears.”
Roseberry is a clever designer. He is good with press, and certainly aware of how his work is received and discussed. If there is any form of internet-induced self-consciousness in this shift, I think it’s masked by an instinctual and well-timed temperature check. There is a thin line between being popular and being overexposed.
Last week, I was discussing Berlin Fashion Week with my Vogue colleague Mark Holgate, who covered the shows for Vogue Runway on the ground. He made a point about how these designers appeared to be more freewheeling than their counterparts in New York or Paris. I chalk part of this perspective up to the novelty of covering a new scene, but also to the fact that designers outside of the four core weeks — New York, London, Milan and Paris — tend to be less self-conscious when it comes to how they’re seen or even how hard they try to be seen. I notice this when I cover shows in Shanghai, too. The work is less exposed in our go-to social channels and media, and there’s a self-awareness about this that makes designers less preoccupied by online reactions. If anything, they are actively chasing them. Think of the cheeky slogans at Namilia in Berlin or Mark Gong’s runway stunts in Shanghai.
“Self-consciousness is an interesting way to put it because I tend to think more about attention,” said critic Rachel Tashjian, fashion writer at The Washington Post, over the phone earlier this week. She first referred to Rosebery as a “meme-weaver” in a past headline about his work. Tashjian pointed out, too, that at these peripheral fashion weeks, it became a regular occurrence for designers to seek out attention with their shows, something we’ve come to accept and now see right through. “I wonder if that’s made designers feel a little bit awkward about doing that,” she continued, “because now so many people are thinking about it that it’s obvious when a designer or a brand has decided to stage a show around creating some kind of viral moment or becoming a sort of personality on social media.”
This applies to more than designers and brands, though. I’ve noticed that some of my influencer friends have started to be more self-deprecating either on par with their own — often sponsored — content or by splitting personas between Instagram (manicured, curated) and TikTok (off the cuff, playful). When I asked one of them about this, they said that, perhaps counterintuitively, poking fun at themselves somehow validates the sponcon and the self-seriousness of “influencing”. “It’s as if me knowing that it can be or look silly makes it less silly,” they said. Being in on the joke prevents them from becoming it.
The rise of lo-fi TikTok-type content has made Instagram feel a bit overdone, which is why I see less and less of my friends posting there — or I see them post as “unstudied” as possible (ever heard of a photo dump?). But now we’re also in on the TikTok of it all. We know that street ’fit checks come with tonnes of outtakes, and that makes them cringe, unless you embrace them.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and in fashion, we tend to saturate ourselves with something to the point where our only option is to run in the opposite direction. “We have this tendency in fashion to think ‘internet big, so internet bad,’” said Tashjian. “When I came up with that headline, I thought that Daniel Roseberry’s clothing is more in conversation with the internet or about internet culture than it is cynically exploiting the way that the internet works.” It doesn’t make it good or bad, it simply makes it of the moment, which is what makes good fashion. And the moment is changing, so designers move on.
“The glory should be the clothes,” Roseberry concluded to reporters backstage at his show. Not dissimilar to what Becoming Karl Lagerfeld imagines Bergé preached to a group of fledgling designers. And so the pendulum swings once more.
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