Utilitarian; functional; classic- the anti-trend for Spring 2010 until who knows.
"If you're never trendy, you're never not trendy,” ADAM designer Adam Lippes once said in an interview with us; at the intersection of avant-garde fashion and economic turmoil, there is the death of the trend.
Fashion Weeks always represent a punctuation of some sort in the larger story of where fashion is headed- from the exclamation mark of Fall 2009 to the blunt period a year later during Fall 2010, the obsession with change in the industry is slowly taking a backseat to the need to successfully market timeless design to cash-strapped customers.
The radical paradigm shift on the runway in the past year has led many to question just how relevant the concept of trend will be in a few years. This is an age where consumers of fashion are investing more in classics and less in trendiness; the disposable income to cycle through entire wardrobes by season is simply not there.
Perhaps the current economic situation has lent a more egalitarian air to the industry; silhouettes have toned down and proper merchandising and accessorizing have taken priority. Designers are pulling the edge and flash out of their aesthetics and instead looking back to their own past work in order to figure out what was successful and how to best tweak those designs into a modern context.
Until the world takes a fiscal turn for the better, market demand for high quality, timeless classics will supersede that for conceptual designs that change radically from season to season. The manifestations of the change that drives the fashion industry in the first place will continue to be demure for the foreseeable future. However, as the situation improves and society extricates itself from its economic mire, customers can expect to see designers once again broach experimental territory.
-Post by Nicolas Sera-Leyva
