The end of modernity

By Luke Leitch

Fashion is often shocking – bloomers! the miniskirt! punk! – but it is only rarely the subject of a shock. Indeed, for a business that trades in the novelty of disruption, fashion has long been remarkably stable. Until now. Fashion shows first became popular in the 1950s. Since then they have not been comprehensively cancelled, as they were in June. Neither have the factories that produce most of the world’s wearable luxury goods shut down production, as happened this spring in Italy and beyond. Even when the twin towers fell on 9/11, and fashion editors of foreign newspapers were redeployed to cover the attacks, some shows continued at New York Fashion Week.

The shock now is different. Chic luxury designers are seeking emergency funding. Department stores are filing for bankruptcy. The red carpet lies bare. Is this the end of fashion as we knew it? Back in the distant, antediluvian days of February, one of my final pre-lockdown appointments was a breakfast-time launch at Paris Fashion Week for a (since postponed) exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “About Time: Fashion and Duration”.

Lost in the moment, we blithely clustered shoulder-to-shoulder and angled for coffee and croissants from a shared bar (the good old days!). Andrew Bolton, the show’s curator, gave us the low-down. He explained that the Met’s decision to trace recurring fashion trends over a 150-year period was inspired by “The Painter of Modern Life”, an essay written by Charles Baudelaire in 1863. In that essay Baudelaire used the term “modernity”, which he defined, said Bolton, as “the ephemeral, the fugitive and the contingent...For Baudelaire fashion was a hallmark of modernity because of its endless iteration of the new.”

Modernity is even older than that, in fact. The word “modern” has meant “the latest thing” since the late 16th century (and actually goes back to Middle English). Modernity, like fashion, is an enduring notion that masquerades as forever young. So when is “modernity” eclipsed and updated?

Using fashion as a guide – as Baudelaire did – we can see that crises often usher in great change. After the first world war and, of course, Spanish flu, there was a brief vogue for veils before the rise of America as a world power, the advent of the Jazz Age and the shocking emergence of the Flapper dress and Oxford bags (loose-fitting trousers that had rather less staying power in fashion circles).

No pandemic followed the next great war, blessedly, but from that great disruption fashion re-emerged in a new guise, with Christian Dior’s “New Look”, a highly contoured and pointed snub to the shapelessness of the once-radical 1920s and 1930s silhouettes. Dior effectively defined wearable beauty (often drawing on costume designs by Edith Head) until Yves Saint Laurent took up the baton of “modernity” in the late 1960s, when, not at all by coincidence, the world was lurching towards another moment of upheaval. History suggests that when emergency recedes and emergence begins, tastes are significantly altered. What was until recently le dernier cri suddenly seems old hat.

The very last thing I bought before lockdown was a pair of OTT ponyskin leopard-print trainers from America. At the moment I pressed “buy”, they seemed the perfectly modern thing for a wild summer ahead. By the time they arrived at my flat two weeks later (the courier was the first person in days to ping my doorbell) they still seemed wild, but also wildly inappropriate. Maybe they’ll work in the next Jazz Age. Until then they’ll stay in their box. Shock lays waste to old tastes by destroying the old world and building a new modernity from the rubble. When fashion catches up, it should be very different.■

Illustration Ewelina Karpowiak