terror chic passe

[aleatory]

A Reality Check Banishes Terrorist Chic
Rebecca Voight
Monday, October 8, 2001 Violent Themes and Military Styles Yield to a
Search for New Directions
 
PARIS "Meaningful changes in fashion occur when social life is
changing," said Miuccia Prada in a recent conversation with the artist
Mark Quinn for the English style magazine i-D. "Fashion is always a
reaction to what is happening, but it can't be the origin of changes,"
she concluded.
The last great change, she recalled, was the arrival of the miniskirt,
technology and the avant-garde in the late '60s and '70s. Thirty years
down the line, she wondered why retro had become such an important
influence.
Fashion's holding pattern changed dramatically Sept. 11 with the
terrorist attacks in the United States. The first reactions were to
recall magazines with violent covers, pull fashion sections treating
themes that flirted with terrorist chic, and reject the military and
Middle Eastern influences which, until recently, were prominent
trends. Designers, photographers and fashion editors say they are
searching for a new sense of direction, one more appropriate to this
sad, serious era.
Just how long it will take fashion's creative stable to return to its
former carefree ways is uncertain.
The effect was immediate at Diesel, Italy's jeans and sportswear
giant. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, Diesel's directors
were stranded in New York, where they had planned to celebrate the
opening of a new shop. In Italy, the brand's press department rushed
to notify journalists that its recent launch, a group of striped denim
basics, would no longer be called "Scars and Stripes." The name was
eventually changed to "Stars and Stripes."
Meanwhile in London, the satellite magazine Arena Homme Plus, a
biannual review of men's fashion, recalled its autumn/winter issue
from news stands. The issue's cover featured Justin Timberlake,
current heart throb and boyfriend of Britney Spears. Timberlake is
styled like a skinhead in a star-spangled T-shirt with a giant diamond
cross around his neck; his mouth and nose are bloodied by a punch. The
cover title reads: "Hit Me Baby One More Time, 2002 New Fashion Riot."
Arena's revised issue isn't expected before the middle of this month,
but the fashion industry has already deemed that romanticized violence
is out.
Tyler Brulé, founder and editorial director of the design monthly
Wallpaper*, launched Spruce*, a satellite magazine on fashion this
autumn. Both magazines take a dry, analytical approach to style, far
removed from terrorist chic. But Brulé decided to cut a humor page
from Wallpaper's October issue right before press time at a cost of
about $9,000.
"It was a tongue-in-cheek text piece imagining what the fall
television season line-up would look like in Afghanistan if the
Taliban allowed television," he said. "I think Spruce*, which we began
planning a year and a half ago, was already a reaction to the
nihilistic and negative style of fashion photography fashion brands
have adopted recently. After such cataclysmic events, a taste check is
inevitable."
The Belgian designer Raf Simons, whose past two men's collections have
focused on Middle Eastern dress, with heads wrapped and faces hidden
behind scarves, says they refer to an important culture and weren't
inspired by terrorism.
"You can't delete the social content in fashion," Simons says. "These
collections were my reaction to living in Belgium, where there has
been a great deal of cultural tension due to the alarming rise of the
extremist right-wing Vlaamsblok party and its reaction to immigration.
Not everyone in a head scarf is a terrorist."
Simons believes fashion's current reassessment is positive. "We have
gone deeper to put more meaning behind clothes recently. And at the
moment, there has been a lot of discussion and thinking, which is
never a bad thing."
For the New York-based fashion photographer Alexei Hay, it's not a
question of making careful or correct style choices after the
terrorist attacks. "Your point of view is just not the same after an
event like this," he says. "Our fantasies have touched on war and
destruction recently because everything around us has been so
peaceful. But the hitchhikers I picked up on my last trip to Israel,
where war is a reality, were all bohemian hippies into peace and
love."
Three days after the terror attacks, Hay was scheduled to photograph a
rap star for the U.S. magazine Vibe. "The title of his new album is
'Pain is Love,' and my idea was to pose him like the Passion of Saint
Sebastian covered with arrows. The editor liked the idea at first, but
changed his mind and wanted to do a bondage shoot. The rapper wanted
to have himself photographed against the New York skyline with 'Pain
is Love' written across it, but that was out of the question for me,"
Hay says. "In the end I didn't do the job."
For some, the terrorist attacks have only heightened awareness about
an escalation of violence in fashion imagery that they feel has been
in need of reappraisal for quite some time.
Katia Rahlwes, who styles shoots for the Paris-based indie fashion
magazines Purple and Dutch, is appalled by fashion's appropriation of
bondage themes and S&M style. "My position as a stylist is always
grounded in reality," she says. "I could never style a pirate shoot,
or dress models in a terrorist chic fantasy, because it has nothing to
do with real life."
Perhaps the most significant reaction to the attacks will not be how
fashion chooses to portray itself, but how much, or how little, it
will show itself. Numerous spring 2002 shows in Milan and Paris have
been canceled in favor of more discrete showroom presentations, and a
high percentage of U.S. stores have chosen not to send their buyers to
Europe this season. And so European labels will take their collections
to New York after the shows to collect orders.
REBECCA VOIGHTis executive editor of Dutch magazine.

http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=34888

[Morpheal]

aleatory wrote:

> A Reality Check Banishes Terrorist Chic
> Rebecca Voight
> Monday, October 8, 2001 Violent Themes and Military Styles Yield to a
> Search for New Directions

> Fashion's holding pattern changed dramatically Sept. 11 with the
> terrorist attacks in the United States. The first reactions were to
> recall magazines with violent covers, pull fashion sections treating
> themes that flirted with terrorist chic, and reject the military and
> Middle Eastern influences which, until recently, were prominent
> trends. Designers, photographers and fashion editors say they are
> searching for a new sense of direction, one more appropriate to this
> sad, serious era.

A lot of fashion tends to be reactive, and often remarkably unoriginal
as an art form. The exceptions are always noteworthy and are what fails
to follow the stampede as to where the others are blindly rushing
enmasse, as would a herd of frightened cattle. Often cattle that have
heard a gunshot, and begin to run, pushing each other all in one
direction. It is a good way for anything to end up fallen into the
chasm, having stampeded across the precipice of the very canyon to which
it was so cleverly directed. Freedom of thought, and creative
originality ? Not as often as we might want to think. It is true that
the fetters and the reactivity opposed to freedom of expression of
genuine creativity have increased their hold since the 1960s. Art has
tended to become more and more the bloodied up victim of spin, rather
than the source of any spin. There are moments of exception, and
occassional flourishes of true genius, but even then it tends to have a
reduced life expectancy, and reactivity tends to reassert more of a kind
of reactive collectivization rather, reducing creative multiplicity, as
if in terror that someone might stand out.

Robert Morpheal