Plenty of fashion designers aim to create worlds. A few achieve it, crafting wonderlands of decor and clothing that manage to evoke a fantasy powerful enough to erase what’s going on outside their respective realms. But it’s rare to find a designer who is able to accurately reflect the world in which we live through their clothes, especially when the world, at any given moment, can be a strange and frightening place.show was strange, and frightening. What it wasn’t, however, was a fantasy.
The real-life images coming from Ukraine – albeit ones experienced virtually, through the internet, television and newspapers – recontextualised Demna’s show. His models, walking through howling gales to thrashing electronic music, were powerful reflections of real-life struggles. They are struggles Demna himself experienced as a teenager – he and his family lived in what is now the partially-recognised state of Abkhazia, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea.
It was a potent message, one heartfelt and true – how could it not be, when you’ve been through that? Trauma is something that a handful of great fashion designers have used as creative inspiration for their work: Lee Alexander McQueen used his sister’s experience of domestic abuse as impetus to empower women; the great Black American designer Patrick Kelly reclaimed and reframed the racist iconography of Southern American states as empowering totems of his own African-American heritage.
Often, fashion is an escape in moments of hardship – and you can judge for yourself whether that’s a good or a bad thing. Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look was, perhaps, the ultimate example – in a bombed-out post-war France, malnourished and still rationed, Dior unleashed a fantasy of profligacy and wealth. Some women adored it; some rioted and tore the Dior clothes from the back of models in the street.