Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s Special Edition March 2024: Celebrating Sabato De Sarno’s Gucci Debut
Dressed in Marina Chain earrings and necklace, model Duckie Thot brings the Italian creative director’s Spring 2024 collection, titled Ancora, to life. May the next chapter of the legacy begin…
As humans, we’re conditioned to yearn for long-gone moments; whether we were there the first time round or not, we want to fetishize the past to escape the present, to revel in the imperfection of memory and magnify its meaning – and it’s not hard to understand why. Wasn’t it all so much more thrilling during the Youthquake of the sixties? Oh, to be a fly on the wall at Studio 54 or a witness to Birkin’s seventies peasant blouses and laid-back louche! And what about eighties London and the city’s politically fuelled punk rebellion? Westwood tartan, safety pins and skinheads and music made by young musicians wanting to ignite the world with noise and attitude. Now that was a time to be alive!
Looking back to perceived moments of freedom, experimentation, innovation, hedonism and anarchy – transformative times when the grass seemed, and in some cases was so much greener, no thanks to global warming – will always fuel designers’ imaginations.
Mining the archives of a house for inspiration is all part of the process. But living too much in the past can overshadow the potential for greatness in the here and now: so just how much nostalgia is enough to move the needle?
Turns out it’s all about perception and timing. Take the nineties for example: for anyone who came-of-age in the decade you might cringe at the memory of chunky highlights, strappy tops and low-slung denim but chances are you will also be grateful that you had the space and anonymity to make mistakes.
“It was irreverent – no-one was trying to please anybody,” Sienna Miller tells Bruce Bozzi, the restaurant scion who courts A-listers for his Table for Two podcast (May 16th 2023). “It was honest and very authentic and just so fun.” Confronted with today’s tsunami of social media – Instagram, Snapchat and so on – and an increasingly hyper-critical cancel culture, is it any wonder we’re inspired by tales of liberation and spontaneity? Fashion is, undoubtedly, a reactionary business.
The aesthetics of any given moment are a response to a complex series of economic realities, social norms, the moral dilemmas of the day and various technological and cultural occurrences – conventional wisdom being that a global pandemic or environmental crises will see us all reaching for protective outerwear and creature comforts. But what many landmark fashion moments also have in common is the desire to consciously reject established paradigms in search of something new.
Any designer at the helm of an established house has a lot to wade through before finding their feet and their own voice – it’s just a shame that many aren’t afforded the time to do so. Blame the merry-go-round of collections or the see-now-buy-now demand, but it feels like fashion is getting ahead of itself. A tenure’s evolution is fast-tracked at the first sign of a slump in sales.
Idiosyncrasy is crucial. Extensive archival research is useless if those celebrated signatures and house classics aren’t reimagined by a confident mind and carefully reintroduced when the world is ready for them: combining pieces from different seasons, foraging for fragments that can be picked apart before being put back together in the context of today in a way that feels fresh without being derivative – celebrating history but not sugar-coating it. A fifties silhouette cut in today’s technical fabrics, a signature colour revived in a rich new shade, a classic bag re-made with multi-wear functionality – designs delivered with nuance that delve into the past to create something beautiful in the present.
Now feels like the right moment to ditch the labels: rather than a collective season of ‘Normcore’ or Wall Street suiting or underwear-as-outerwear, how about we simply embrace a mood and inclusive clothing made to enrich everyday life regardless of how you choose to spend it? Looks less geared toward social media memes than alleviating the weight of getting dressed in the morning. Because ultimately fashion is a collaboration, an open dialogue, and that exchange can take place among people, places and generations. Perhaps it’s finally time to #liveinthemoment, only with one eye on the past, of course.
Acting Editor: Natasha Faruque. Creative Direction: Dane Stojanovic. Photographer: Vladimir Martí. Styling: Nour Bou Ezz. Model: Duckie Thot. Hairstylist: Jean-Luc Amarin. Make-Up Artist: Manuel Losada. Senior Producer: Steff Hawker. Communications Manager: Johana V. Dana. Casting Director: Jean-Marc Mondelet. Styling Assistant: Janhvi Kohli
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s March 2024 issue.