Fashion and postmodernism

Maison Martin Margiela for H&M

Chains of „instant fashion“ are collaborating with known designers as on the conveyor belt, street fashion is marching as never before, fashion bloggers are already a part of the established scene, designer pieces are accessible to the crowd all over the world and are everyday passing into popular culture, which is beside everything else playing with shapes and style of previous fashion eras,… may we say now, that we live in period of “postmodernism” in fashion?
In the world of fashion theorists, who are painfully hard to find, these appearances are called “democratization of fashion”. Democratization in that sense, that fashion is now accessible to the wide majority of people, and it’s not hermetically closed as in the past, when time and place of fashion shows were the biggest secret and trends for next seasons were known just between small, well informed circles.
Today everything is on the silver tray. Big companies of “instant fashion” are hiring young scouts with sense of style to visit fashion and lifestyle metropolises as London, Stockholm, Tokyo, New York and try to find ideas for the next seasons in the personal styles of creative and daring individuals (when they are not publicly collaborating with known names, who are in “crises” times more than ever ready to design cheaper collections for the crowd).
What are we going to wear next season we know at least a year before, mostly thankfully to an excellent media and cyber covering of fashion weeks, where first rows are taken by yesterday’s unknown individuals, who today write and photograph for their web pages.
And as in postmodernism literature, where high and popular literature unite and where works an imitate past or trivial ways of writing, that’s how fashion copies cuts, colors, materials and stylistic combinations of previous eras.
But is fashion taking it without critics and totally naive? Of course not. Even if it’s momentary, as we like to say, “IN” 50’s, 70’s or 80’s styles, we can do the biggest mistake, when we are wearing this kind of clothes too honestly and experience it without distance. This way we can became a victim of fashion or a relic of the past, who doesn’t understand, what is a good style.
If is a basic knowledge of a postmodernism literature already a part of high school education and if we really can’t expect that somebody, who has at least a little bit of common knowledge, can naively read Eco, Fowles or Robbe-Grillet, is the awareness in fashion much smaller.
To educated people is fashion flat, dull and redundant, to average people is fashion too expensive and unworthy, to business people is again too crazy and moody. There’s a few people, who enjoy game of fashion, who can and have energy to think how to wear something and what message they share to the world. We need good fashion theorists, who will with their expert and scientific accession research contemporary fashion phenomenons, who will put them on the map of social sciences and write about fashion with good theoretical base.
If it’s ever time for that, it’s now.