And at Balenciaga, Thom Browne and Schiaparelli, the focus was on creativity, precision of craft and tailoring. At Jean Paul Gaultier and Viktor&Rolf, the main goal is to drive sales of their popular perfumes. CHANEL, Christian Dior Couture and Elie Saab were squarely focused on serving their ultra-rich clientele rather than making any bold creative statements. This week in Paris, we saw examples of all of the above. So what is the purpose of Haute Couture in 2023? Is it about selling (very expensive) clothes, cultivating clients and building a proper business? Is it about creating a dream through which brands can sell more perfume and accessories? Or is it a place for innovation, like an R&D lab, where designers can flex their creative muscle to develop garments of unusual scale, complexity and creativity which can then inform and inspire an entire Maison, maybe an entire industry? Generative AI Won’t Be the End of Human Fashion Designers It may even create more appreciation for the physical craft of fashion. Just as photography didn’t spell the extinction of painting, generative AI won’t kill off human designers. Some in fashion today are likewise worrying the boom in generative AI portends a time when all fashion will be designed by algorithm and human creators will be out on the street. Their distress is frequently summed up with the tale of French artist Paul Delaroche, who supposedly exclaimed on seeing a Daguerrotype in 1840, “Painting is dead!” The statement might reflect the current fears about generative artificial intelligence in fashion and other industries, but it also describes how many artists and critics felt about the invention of photography in the 19th century. Ī new technology is threatening to upend an entire creative field and automate away human skill and invention, making people all but unnecessary as it cranks out an endless supply of soulless junk. Read the full report on Dries Van Noten and Undercover by Tim Blanks. The music was a memory of joyous teenage for him. We’ve come to expect the obscure/arcane musical reference fully realised for the here and now by Takahashi in minutely observed detail, and so it was with his new collection, which was, not incidentally, titled Enjoy Yourself, after a song by the Specials, ska’s star band. Wednesday’s was wrapped around Two-Tone, the ska-based post-punk pop sensation that swept the UK at the end of the 1970s. Multiple identities, rather than the single symbiosis. Jun Takahashi’s pursuit of preciousness takes an opposite but equally enthralling path. Bless them, because we were the beneficiaries. Though he doesn’t like looking back, there are kids in his studio who weren’t born then and their enthusiasm motivated him to reassess his past. Dries Van Noten practised a kind of kintsugi with clothes on Wednesday, not only because gold was leafed and threaded and woven throughout the collection, but because there were dozens of hidden details that gave a subtle new life to coats, jackets, dresses. It was a beautiful show, with that particular combination of sobriety and opulence that was a distinct signature for the designer in the 1990s. The Japanese put broken pottery back together with gold, celebrating the flaws to make the object even more beautiful. I’m a dreamer, so it’s the life of cherished clothes that makes them precious to me. But what makes clothes precious? Nothing as banal as a price tag, though a beautiful fabric and make clearly help. The best antidote to disposability in fashion is to make clothes precious, so you don’t feel the urge to replace them.
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