In Fashion, the Auteur Is Dead
Part of what made Jonathan Anderson's Dior debut so good is that it was borderline anonymous. Sure, if you're familiar with Anderson's oeuvre or personal style, you could easily pick up on stylistic easter eggs that betray his hand, like the schoolboy sweaters and washed jeans.
But the real beauty of Anderson's excellent Dior collection was that quite literally anyone could tell that these were just darn good clothes.
This is the current state of luxury: as far as fashion is concerned, the author is dead. This is a tad ironic given the number of literary references that peppered Anderson's Dior line. But it's a vital pivot.
Demna's final bow at Balenciaga, which capped the most recent fashion season, wasn't merely the end of a single, glorious, decade-long run.
It's actually the finale of the auteur fashion designers, an informal movement that crystalized around the time of Demna's 2015 Balenciaga appointment.
The auteurs lead the epoch-shaping tenures that began or ended within subsequent years, between 2015 and 2019 or so: Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton, Kim Jones's Dior, Jonathan Anderson's LOEWE, Matthieu Blazy's Bottega Veneta, Phoebe Philo's (and then Hedi Slimane's) Céline, Alessandro Michele's Gucci, Riccardo Tisci's Givenchy, and, yes, Demna's Balenciaga.
At these houses, these designers individually dictated greater trends and tastes so plainly that they could each be easily identified (and thanked or blamed, depending) as the originator. Thus, auteur designers.
One can quibble over the specifics — does Daniel Lee deserve credit for birthing #NewBottega before Blazy made it his own? — but these are the obvious examples that'll continue to be gestured at as proof of singularly traceable influence in fashion. And in their own time, they were crucial.
Demna is the last of the great auteur designers to exit the house that he made (and made him) famous. He'll still be plenty active at Gucci but Demna left his XXXL-sized footprint many years ago.
In place of the designer auteur, luxury has developed a newfound yen for grounded garments. No more DHL T-shirts or furry Gucci slides — it's all about classic shirts and killer jeans.
Fashion isn't suffering from a lack of POV, mind you. There are ample distinctions between Anderson's Dior, Julian Klausner's Dries Van Noten, and Michael Rider's Celine, which all debuted just prior to Demna's departure. But they uniformly eschew the heavy-handed signature flourishes once inherent to designer collections. True believers can pick out subtle cues. The rest can bask in laudably wearable creations.
The era of the auteur fashion designer is over. The era of good clothes has begun.
Continuing attempts to sell consumers personality — remember Gucci's short-lived Sabato De Sarno non-era? — helped land luxury in a slump. The solution is to offer both substance and style.
Because no longer does anyone need designers to tell them how to dress.
Instead, it's up to designers to create garments worthy of being worn at all. Selling the dream? No, just selling clothes.
SHOP OUR FAVORITE PRODUCTS
Highsnobiety has affiliate marketing partnerships, which means we may receive a commission from your purchase.
