Fashion, exhausted

Though I like getting dressed, I don't like to shop; unfortunately, in order to continue with the former I must go shopping from time to time. To that end, between Christmas and New Years I set out for the high street. I didn't buy anything, but I came to realization that, if shared by others, will be bad for designers and retailers: I don't want anything new.

The bottom line is, nothing I found made my heart race. At TopMan I found some nice shoes, which I thought about buying until I realized I only liked them because they look like a pair I already have; at Barney's, I found an intriguing cardigan from Nice Collective which, likewise, I left behind because I already have a cardigan I like (at a quarter of the price and, to my eye, of superior quality).

One of the few items I would have considered was a white formal shirt with a ruffled bib (it sounds infantalizing, but it wasn't). At $600, it was a bit steep; unfortunately, I have a pretty realistic idea of what it costs to manufacture clothing and when it comes to designer duds, it doesn't seem worth the price. The only way a shirt in white cotton - even a nice-looking one - should cost that amount is if it were hand-stitched by expatriate Russian princesses, which this certainly was not.

So I have shopper's malaise; who cares? If it were the case only for me, it wouldn't matter, but judging from recent economic indicators it's a feeling shared by a lot of people. New things just don't seem very exciting. We're happy with what we have. Unfortunately, this could be a serious problem for everyone who makes his living selling or manufacturing clothes.

Fashion has been on an exhausting merry-go-round since the 1990s, when new ideas essentially stopped appearing. The way people dressed changed a lot during the last century: Poiret did away with the corset, Chanel formalized the vocabulary of modern womens' clothing, Balenciaga obsessed over the set of his sleeves and most every other original thought belonged to Yves Saint Laurent. Yet for all the upheaval of the decades that separate us from those designers, many of their designs continue to be relevant - with a modern touch.

The shirt I described above was from a Belgian company called Martin Margiela, which made its reputation copying and deconstructing old clothes from years gone by; this shirt in particular was copied from one made in London in 1945. London after World War II might seem terribly distant, but, strangely enough, the menswear still looks dapper. For all the tumult and change of the 20th century, sometimes we prefer stasis - but where does that leave creativity?