What's Wrong With Your Supreme Sweatshirt
The “avant–garde” and fashion have often converged—so much so that they are generally confused. Throughout history, fashion has played an integral role in reorienting public opinion and challenging the status quo. But fashion's arrived at an impasse. Recent runway shows have been chastised for recycling trends of the last century and failing to be inventive. The risk is more than mundanity: fashion’s failure to be experimental is, as trend–forecaster Li Edelkoort concluded in her 2016 “Anti–Fashion Manifesto,” problematic. Fashion is an ethos—one that, without innovation, becomes dangerously regressive. Edelkoort stresses that this doesn’t just leave us bare of exciting new art, but socially stagnated. As she lamented in a provocative lecture last fall in Oxfordshire, UK: “Fashion is old–fashioned.”