The Word of Fashion Shows

The very real and the very unreal, the absolutely material and the immaterial in the Balenciaga and Prada runways.

DS.WRITER:

Τάσος Γιαννακόπουλος

Image: Balenciaga Fashion Show Winter 2022 | dezeen.com

“Since society in the sense of “good society” comprehended those parts of the population which disposed not only of wealth but of leisure time, that is, of time to be devoted to “culture,” mass society does indeed indicate a new state of affairs in which the mass of the population has been so far liberated from the burden of physically exhausting labor that it too disposes of enough leisure for “culture.”

Hannah Arendt

Fashion shows for the winter collections of 2022 have come and gone, we watched them and enjoyed them and spring is over. However, in the world of social media, where current affairs constitute the absolute metronome of our existence, with the day before yesterday becoming old and obsolete, two shows had enough power to be still lodged in my mind as images and sounds - which constitutes a measure of their quality. So, we will use this distance to focus on their significance many days after their presentation took place.

Balenciaga Fashion Show Winter 2022 | dezeen.com

The show most intensely alive in our memories is, very unfortunately, Balenciaga’s show by Denma. The moment this article is being written ninety-two days have passed since the war in Ukraine started and it’s still going on unabated. Consequently, the revealing artificial landscape with Balenciaga’s models walking with difficulty against the wind achieves interesting resonance. The enactment of an artificial winter that also seems eternal brings to mind the imminent climate disaster, which is the great fear of our century, or ideas of a nuclear holocaust. With the way the present decade has started, it’s not only one disastrous threat that we are called to mentally manage but fortunately many. Denma presents our concerns through the safety of spectacle and transforms trash bags into fashionable purses, huge or suffocating clothes, like the clothes one hastily packs when they have to urgently leave, not caring for size, turning them into fashion pieces and a relentless march within an artistic spectacle accompanied by the sounds of BFNRD. The background music starts off nostalgic and lyrical, almost pained, and develops into energetic, lonesome, powerful techno music. Almost directly corresponding to the sounds that constitute the show, Denma, considering the environment that would surround the show, initially thought to cancel it and remain in shock with the feelings of the circumstance. In the end, being a refugee himself, he decides to vigorously continue his project and to remind us that you can keep walking against the snow even in high heels. On the other hand, the impact of his poetic imagery on the people who enjoyed this show in the flesh, behind the safety of the circumferential glass, is not something one can measure.

Balenciaga Fashion Show Winter 2022 | glossy.co

The second show that remains fresh in our minds is that of Prada. This is because Prada starts a productive dialogue with the spatial and audiovisual narrative that unfolds on the catwalk out of the imagination of AMO together with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simmons. The whole story begins with the models coming out of a space with bright lights, rhythmically placed, with special references to the sci-fi genre and specifically to the film-set of Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Prada Fashion Show Winter 2022 | prada.com

Prada Fashion Show Winter 2022 | prada.com

The show for Prada’s collection was opened by actor Kyle MacLachlan, who is closely linked with David Lynch’s movies and even more with the Twin Peaks series where, as pointed out multiple times, the director handles ideas relating to reality, the imagined, the imaginary, memory and fantasies and everything in between. Consequently, I can’t help but think that these iconic, oversized overcoats as well as the rest of the clothing with the highly plastic, vivacious, colourful, leather wrappings, correspond to the same areas. You also begin to wonder if the actors -among them Asa Butterfield, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Jeff Goldblum with his characteristic over-acting- pretend to be models or if the models pretend to be models or any other possible combination of the words actor, model and pretend in different forms. Then, these questions are combined with the lyrics from You've Lost That Loving Feeling, the Human League version, that plays during the show and the plot clears up and thickens at the same time. “I will always be stuck in this small little room with a view” and “bring back that loving feeling” plays in the background and the models, astronauts of the space-time continuum with their hands always hidden in gloves or pockets, pine for contact or hug the imaginary and the digital, zigzagging under the harsh, otherworldly and almost divine yellow light. Certain images evoke the pandemic -which, personally, I still feel as if it were lived by someone else and not myself- or images again from Kubrick or other stories, merging the real with the representation into a charming grip, brimmed with meanings and references. The digital is always present and the tangible has taken a seat in the back.

Prada Fashion Show Winter 2022 | prada.com

The very real with the very imaginary, the absolutely material with the intangible and the emotional with the mental construct correspondingly the starting points of these two collections and then with a lot of skill they are left to exist on the catwalk to fill our minds and our audiovisual field with colours, black, thoughts and contradictions. All this assures us that fashion is definitely a spectacle, but it can also be poetry.