Last year—one of the weirdest in all of fashion history—I undertook a bizarre exercise: I ranked the 15 most important fashion shows. It was, like all rankings, a childish exercise: how
can you say that one Celine show is better than a Collina Strada show, especially with so many brands working with different resources and for audiences of all sizes? But putting that list together helped make sense of a year that had seemed to have very little reason from moment to moment. 2020, as it turned out, was defined by a group of extraordinarily thoughtful designers who saw the pandemic as a chance to communicate in new ways, pivoting away from customers and towards fanatics.
But if 2020 was a sensitive, thoughtful year for fashion, 2021 delivered a seismic shift, particularly if you work in or follow menswear. Punctuated by constant moments of cynicism or sadness, this was a turning point for our corner of the industry. Kim Jones, Dior’s collab-happy artistic director, made a collection with Travis Scott that felt unusually cynical (but actually resulted in some relatively compelling silhouettes), and then Scott’s own fashion-adjacent Astroworld festival became a tragedy. The sweet dandy Alber Elbaz passed away. Kanye West perfected the puffer, and Mickey Drexler threw deranged shade on it. Daniel Lee staged an unsteady show in Detroit, then abruptly left Bottega Veneta. Brands couldn’t stop staging meaningless collaborations. And then, in late November, we lost Virgil Abloh, who was as responsible as anyone for menswear’s contemporary sensibility.
What do we make of all these changes to a culture that often encourages blind consumerism? Is it the end of hypebeasts? The beginning of the tailoring revolution we keep hearing about? Probably neither. Several people compared the Astroworld tragedy to Altamont, but what scared me about that was—at least if you’ve seen the documentary Gimme Shelter—Altamont was the end of the ‘60s, but the beginning of the Rolling Stones becoming the biggest band in the world.
More designers than ever bristled to me privately at the term streetwear over the past twelve months, which means that in the coming year or so, the practitioners who grew up with FUBU and Stussy and Bape will want to reclaim the term. What that will bring is a stronger, at times divine connection between the clothes and the cultures from which they emerge. And maybe a greater respect for a designer’s personal passions, rather than congratulating a creative for understanding the zeitgeist. This was something championed by Jonathan Anderson, with his great Loewe collection built around the painter Florian Krewer, and it was the attitude encouraged by designers like Raul Lopez and Eckhaus Latta, who are in intensively symbiotic relationships with their communities. But it was also the final and ultimately defining project of Virgil Abloh, whose two Louis Vuitton collections this year saw him running through that company’s archives, and the history of streetwear, with the fresh enthusiasm of his teenage mind.