Fashion is a mirror of culture, and the unrest and uncertainty that have defined 2020 were apparent in the latest round of collections. At Moschino dresses were designed inside out, threads draped from exposed seams at Marni, and tailor’s markings were exposed at Dunhill and Boramy Viguier. All of these details nod to the deconstructivism—or “la mode destroy,” as the French press coined it—that Martin Margiela and others popularized at the tail end of the 1980s and early 1990s, a time of recession.
Margiela didn’t think the description fit. “When I recut clothes, old or new, it’s to transform them, not destroy them,” he said. “Too much importance has been placed on slick, polished images,” stated Rei Kawakubo when interviewed by Vogue for the same 1992 article. “I show clothes that aren’t finished and expose their construction to indicate the value of things that are primitive and imperfect.”
One of Xuly Bët designer Lamine Badian Kouyate’s signatures is using red topstitching for patchworking or seams. He linkens these lines to veins; this season they could also be read as exposed nerves. Similarly, Franceso Risso’s ragged constructions at Marni manifests this year’s persistent frayed-around-the-edges feeling. The message was not about coming undone, though, but rather about taking the future into one’s own hands and finding new paths forward.
