Raf Simons, Jil Sander and postmodern criticism

i.
I did a thing yesterday where I sat on twitter and looked at a load of people livetweeting the Jil Sander menswear show in Milan.

But I didn't make any attempt to actually look at images until this morning. So I already knew what to expect: Patrick Bateman, lots of black, leather, some whales and stuff. Cool. This is weird. I mean, no. This is standard practice now, isn't it? Read live tweets of show notes and blurry twitpics of models on the runway a good few hours before proper pictures show up on style.com etc. I can't imagine experiencing fashion week without twitter at this stage, let alone without style.com and vogue.com's show reports. It's accessibility pushed to the edge of all real limits. And so it's interesting to view Raf's work through this prism - he's the designer I think who inspires some of the best and most intelligent writing over the past ten years (the obvious one here is Cathy Horyn's 'Raf', from 2005, but Tim Blanks's show report this morning also kind of floored me.)

via style.com

ii.
Why is this? Why does the 'minimal' in general seem to attract more intellectual thought than other segments of fashion? I mean, there are books on everything, on every designer you can imagine. But there's something about Raf, about Rei, and Yohji and Helmut Lang and Ann Demeulemeester that separates their overall perception from others'. It often appeals to people who have no other interest in fashion, too. But overall it's like a marker of difference - it shows that you take it maybe a little more seriously than general label lust (cf. this, that.) So if Raf does a menswear collection inspired by American Psycho, it's not just Inspired by American Psycho, like a million other men's collections that try to push 1980s power suits and slicked-back hair and suspenders. It's instead a cacophony of troubled masculinity, violence and pain and sex and money* emerging overall as a collection of 'serial killer chic'**, and the collection and the criticism of it work together essentially to prove a bigger point. I have no idea if Raf purposefully tries to funnel this much into each collection, or if it's just usual show-notes babble - 'I went on holiday to Africa and it inspired me loads here is my 'tribal' themed collection also check out the shoes cool thanks, signed, Head Designer' - I mean, what's the point in trying to tell the difference? It's already been written up in glossy, smart language by some of the industry's best and most 'serious' critics. It's doubtlessly going to sell well and even further cement the designer's position as genius of our time, the dude who 'gets' what we (me, you, Kanye West) want to wear in the modern world and can formulate it in the clearest, most minimal terms. Don't go to Dior, Raf. Keep doing what you're doing - it's important work.

iii.

I finally went to the Postmodernism exhibition at the V&A on Friday, which ends today. It was absolutely amazing, thankfully, because £8 is a lot to pay into an exhibition if it's not going to be so good you're worn out by it. I left it physically drained from so much information so well-presented - including a Rei Kawakubo-designed outfit from 1982 (the 'post-Holocaust fashion' years) on a weeping cowering mannequin. Again, the minimal fits in better in an intellectual, academic (but still accessible) format than any other style of fashion from the past 40 years, I think. Anyway, the exhibition ends with this video (spoiler alert!) and these words:

"As with all postmodern design, there is no one right way to react to it. Read theory, buy things, style yourself, be subversive. Or just get up and dance."

I thought that was really good, a fundamental and significant note to end an exhibition like that on. And it's applicable to what we do when we engage with fashion, too - it's easy to overthink it, if you're into that. And there's so much constant information available to us through Twitter and style.com and the NYT and a thousand blogettes like me who think they are qualified to give an opinion on it. But submerging yourself in it isn't necessarily the proper way to deal with it. Just enjoy it. Like what you like and forget what the rest of us have to say.



* from Tim Blanks's review
** from SHOWstudio