Creating the Future: How Fashion Designers Are Responding to the Crisis
“THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT IS OVER,” says Donatella Versace, and she’s right. Across every spectrum of society in virtually every nation, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended our outlook. As for the future? In a script that’s being rewritten each day, there are a few constants: We’ll need to look forward, to adapt, and to take nothing for granted.
Fashion has long been a community driven by passion, artistry, joy, and invention, though, of course, around it has evolved an industry of perpetual motion, always moving, faster, faster, faster . . . until everything stopped. Thrown from our carousel, sheltering in place, coming to grips with our ever-shifting new reality, we’ve all had the opportunity to reflect—and then to react.
It took only a few days to realize that the fashion community could be of immediate practical help in a global medical emergency. Factories and studios that were able to pivot to producing hand sanitizer and medical gowns and masks quickly retooled and got to it. Many emerging designers across America anticipated shifting CDC guidelines and began developing their own takes on what will be the defining garment of this year and maybe more to come: the face covering. Meanwhile, we looked out for one another: In collaboration, the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue launched A Common Thread, a fund to help the most vulnerable designers and their teams weather the sudden shutdown. (As CFDA chairman Tom Ford observes of the landscape these designers must negotiate to survive, “It’s brutal.”) Contributions at press time totaled $4.1 million—money that is being carefully distributed to save jobs and keep some of America’s most talented young creatives in business.
Until March, the one thing in fashion that was set in stone was its perpetual calendar of seasons, collections, and shows. This year, however—for the first time in the history of fashion—all of these long-established plans have been rudely scattered to the winds. The resort shows planned for April and May were canceled; the menswear shows set for June have been canceled. The couture shows in Paris this July—also canceled.
What is apparent from all the conversations with designers that helped to shape these pages, though, is that in addition to the obvious practical challenges, the short-term changes have created space to conceive of purposeful, galvanizing change over the long term, and given them the sort of time needed to reinvent—or reimagine—creative leaps forward.
“I think we are rediscovering a whole new value to what we do,” says Francesco Risso, Marni’s creative director. “It may be a paradox, but this isolation is leading us through unexplored paths.”
While each designer is of course unique, the broad consensus seems to be that the garments and objects that fashion produces, the manner in which it produces them, and the way in which it shows them to the wider world all need to be reassessed and redesigned for the better.
“I hope that the system, which has to change as a result of all of this, will allow us to define what we do in a new way, in a different way,” says Marc Jacobs, “to express it in another way. To show it, to make it, to produce it, to distribute it, to communicate it: All of that will have to change.”
Along with this instinct for disruption is a parallel imperative to use fashion’s creativity and passion not to return it to where it was but to take it to where it should be.
“There is a realization that we have too much product,” says Joseph Altuzarra, “that some things are antiquated and out of date: flying to different cities, collections being too big, draconian markdown cycles. We need more creativity, things that make us feel optimistic and positive. What’s going to bring people back into stores are things that are emotional and exciting. We should be brave. We should break the rules.”