The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by individualfrog:

I've actually gotten a chance to check out some of the New Look pieces up close, and I'm certainly the last person who's going to say they are comfortable. I just meant that it's not always easy to see our contemporaries the same way we see our predecessors.

As for runway fashions, really, 80-90% is pretty easy to grasp--go to style.com and you can see, the vast majority is, even if you don't like it, at least recognizably "wearable" in the "not made of bones and wood, no bags on heads, less than three arms" sense. In my opinion, to do the kind of commentary you see on that site, you need to make a conscious effort to find the weird and wacky stuff, and a conscious decision not to try to understand the designers' intentions.

Of course a runway show is all about publicity, it's like saying a TV commercial is all about publicity. For the kind of designers targeted here, it's more of a presentation of a world-view than a series of suggestions for what to wear. And to me at least it's usually pretty easy to understand, and to get ideas for what to wear myself (though I could never afford the designers I like, anyway.)

But it was generally stranger fashion than not that got me interested in clothes in the first place, so it might just be a matter of taste.

The last thing I'd like to say is, I live in Tokyo right now, and there is just no telling what people will wear.

Dave Bell:
"Yet it used to be that people like Coco Chanel could show, and sell, wearable fashion.

Or is it just that we don't remember the craziness of their fashion, and only what see what succeeded?"

I think it's more that you are looking backwards from a post-Chanel world. From here it is easy to say Chanel's creations are wearable. But consider: at the time when Poiret, Vionnet, and Chanel were getting started, fashionable women had worn corsets for hundreds of years. The unstructured pieces those guys were making looked more or less like being naked to a lot of women. Compared to that huge change, today's wackiest fashions are pretty tame.

Christian Dior's 1947 New Look was also decried as unwearable costume and misogynist besides. These days it's hard to see why, just like it's hard to imagine the Beatles were considered "noise" and the Impressionists were morally offensive to civilization and beauty. Of course we can have different ideas about what's desirable in fashion, but I don't know if this nostalgia, or whatever you'd like to call it, is based on reality.

It's always weird to come upon fashion commentary in a blog I read for other reasons. It's like finding a political essay at Craftster--not exactly unexpected, because it's something everyone has an opinion on, but a little depressing, because I hate to disagree strongly with someone about something I care a lot about, when I agree with them so strongly about other things.

I assume "bad trees" refers to "ye shall know them by their fruits"

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