It's The End Of The World As We Know It

In uncertain times, fashion has always reflected — and deflected — global unrest. This season, the responses are as extreme as the culture itself.

- Alexander Fury

FROM RICK OWENS’S ragged T-shirts and canvas shifts to the giddy ornamentation of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci, all glitz and blitz and reconstituted Elton John costumes, the spring collections appeared to not have a common thread between them — a seemingly bipolar mix of downtrodden, derelict styles and escapist fantasies. Rei Kawakubo’s Boschean excess at Comme des Garçons — clashing Renaissance paintings and Japanese cartoons as prints and reconstituted pileups of tacky plastic children’s toys as headpieces — was a stark contrast to Miuccia Prada’s comic-book-print warrior women and the tatty gewgaws and currency- war patterns of Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga collection. There, the idea of luxury was debased and devalued with gaudy dresses, blouses and skintight pant-boot hybrids cut in post-Brexit-inspired euro-note and dollar-bill patterns.

So, what is it with fashion at the moment? Designers appear to have assumed a fight-or-flight response to these uncertain times, which, to some — especially those with a flair for the dramatic — look a lot like the end of days. “Fashion is a reflection of the way we live,” said Gvasalia backstage at Balenciaga. “I wanted to create a feeling that something dangerous was going to happen.” He was talking, specifically, about the sturm-und-drang mood at his show, which took place in a blacked-out venue filled with smoke and the boom of ominous trip hop music. The message was less “apocalypse now” and more “apocalypse soon”.