motor oil Prada, originally uploaded by Marc Johns.

Surfing along, I discovered illustrator Marc Johns though Sarah L.

He does a lot of brief, serious drawings. A series done on post-it notes is particularly charming, but this is the one that made me laugh out loud.

I imagined a Prada gas station. A place where the price of gas that day is not listed on the sign. Where the attendants are dressed all chic and won’t help you. Or maybe they are robots.

I bet that is where this lady fills up.

Maybe it would look something like Prada Marfa. But with pumps. Maybe the pumps are shaped like pumps! Or not.

Photo by Chacal la Chaise

Maybe if Prada sold gasoline, drivers would be bragging about paying top dollar for gas.

Every season is a little bit different – and of course, I am not talking about the clothes.

1.

Cathy Horyn sees an industry transitioning between old ways and new values, when she reflects on the real importance of fashion shows. No, she is not talking about the clothes – “…is the show and our almost compulsory attendance really about something else, about preserving distinct power bases in the face of their rapid erosion?”

There is a reason why Horyn is the reigning voice of reason in the voyeuristic void of fashion journalism. She cuts right to the bone.

In the tent, we don’t just watch the models and the clothes; we watch the faces across from us, picking up clues from who is sitting where and what their faces betray. In the media lounge, we don’t just focus on reviewing the runway – we study eachother, we see who is working and what they are working on, who is talking to who, and always keeping an ear cocked for anything worth overhearing.

In a small tent like the one in Nathan Philips Square, the clues of change are laying in the open for everyone to notice – and if you need confirmation, check Google. The big news? The newspaper and magazine writers are blogging harder than the fashion bloggers. NOW Magazine, the National Post, FASHION Magazine, Fashion Television, Flare Magazine, and others were doing it daily – posting that is – if not show-by-blow live-blogging it.

It seems like the past few seasons of blogger infiltration (infestation?) have inspired established sources to step up their game. With more more people, more equipment, more photos, and paycheques, the professional journalists had their chance to show that they can do it faster, shinier, and more extensive than any blogger.

Now that the hurricane has died down and we can count the survivors, we can also see the evidence of what got posted and what did not, and maybe who came out on top, if anyone did.

I think L’Oreal Fashion Week itself was a clear winner; a hot frenzy of coverage connected designers of all levels to the attention of everyone who reads the news and checks the magazines.

The readers and watchers receive a mixed bag of benefits and bombardment. Fashion mediaphiles like myself were treated to more stories in their feeds than we had time to read – and some were exceptional – I found myself glancing through a lot of information with less interest than usual. It wasn’t just because I was attending – I didn’t see all of it and I was curious for other perspectives – it was a combination of time, duplication of information, and a certain unsatisfying lack of insight that happens when the post button gets pressed too quickly.

The quality of blogging fashion week is not measured just by stopwatch and quantity. I love to read a considered point of view, a level of observation that transcends a recording, a soundbite, an immediate reaction. A story from someone who experienced it.

So I am trying little media projects, striving for something a little different. Like the Haiku Review and Rags and Mags.

For Final Fashion, I try to post only when I have something to say or show. I am not here on the internet to compete with anyone, only to offer what talents I have towards this thing called fashion.

2.

At the Fashion Week Drake Salon, a few fashion week survivors were treated to something fascinating – a panel of insiders candidly discussing the week with eachother and an intimate audience. There were many empty seats in a very small space – apparently fashion week is fatal for most people. Still, this was a moment that I thought many of the designers who showed this week should have been listening, taking notes and asking questions. There were very few.

Many of the panel’s most fascinating moments were the contributions of Barbara Atkin, Marlene Schiff, and David Livingstone.

The most strong impression on me was left by Barbara Atkin. She rejects all the usual excuses from the Canadian Fashion contingent. She is so right – merit speaks for itself. Being Canadian is not an alibi. Canada is a small country in the world, and yet we have produced a few world class fashion designers; and it wasn’t because the designers were Canadian, it was because they were talented, persistent, and borderless.

Bitching is so over. Complaining does nothing. If the scene sucks, its our responsibility to learn from our mistakes and our choice to make it amazing. It is possible to create a scene we are proud of. I see a lot of smart people around me who are striving towards something amazing, and every time I see them they get closer and closer.

These are not the only thoughts that I am processing right now. L’Oreal Fashion Week for Fall 2008 was an inspirational one for me. It is going to change how I approach the months leading up to the Spring 2009 collections.

I want to bring more new ideas to every season. I love to see fashion move forward.

I have an abiding curiousity on how good design gets defined. We all think we know it when we see it, but really, what is a good fashion design and who has the authority to decide?

Having watched far too many seasons of Project Runway lately, I find the plight of the judges an interesting one, not to mention the online judging of the judging. Things can get heated and seem a little ridiculous. Both the Biddell-boosters and the Lucian-lovers accuse eachother of a lack of knowledge and taste. The odd angel of peace might suggest that it is different strokes for different folks, but is it really?

Being immersed within to the idea of fashion, I can not help but look at every outfit I see and get a visceral sense that what I am seeing is either right or not right. I seem have to developed this peculiar instinct a great deal and I am obviously not the only one. They call it taste – but what is it?

Paul Graham’s essay Taste for Makers expressed something I had struggled to articulate for a while.

Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it’s not true. You feel this when you start to design things.

As in any job, as you continue to design things, you’ll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you’ll know you’re getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can’t be wrong.

Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself, that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you can start to study good design in detail.

It is interesting that he says that relativism is fashionable, because there are certain aspects of good fashion that have nothing to do with good design. Graham goes on to list the attributes of good design that are easy to define and hard to disagree with.

One tenet, “Good design is timeless”, shows where good fashion diverges from good design, which Graham describes this way:

Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition change with time, so if you can make something that will still look good far into the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion.

Recently I linked industrial designer Philip Starck’s talk at TED, where he discusses the purpose of design.

Because there is different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the ’50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, La Laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just a weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more, it’s shit, it’s obsolete, it’s ridiculous. I call that the cynical design.

After, there is the narcissistic design; it’s a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. [laughs]

After there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it.

Watching Starck talk through the lens of fashion makes me laugh. Certainly good fashion can be both cynical and narcissistic, and not even useful. I think it is valuable to view fashion through the lens of other types of design, because at a basic level all great design has to serve the needs of human beings – but as the black sheep of human design disciplines, fashion’s first responsibility has nothing to do with deserving to exist. I think it has to do with timing.

When it comes to fashion, I think most people develop and exercise their taste on a garment-by-garment basis. It is up to those who have developed a credibility for their sense of taste – usually professional editors or designers – to evaluate entire collections and by extension the designers, though some of us like to stretch our taste muscle by trying. The spread of street-style has encouraged people to evaluate fashion by the composition of an outfit.

Still, I think there is a lot to be said for isolating a single garment as a taste test. After all, garments are the basic component of all fashion, and most people purchase their clothing one garment at a time. I am no math genius, but I am certain that the combination of every choice of garment, whether to wear or buy, with each choice weighted by the relative level of taste of the chooser, could probably be assembled into a reasonable equation that would make some sense of whatever good fashion is at the time.

Having had the privilege to work with designers as they develop and edit their collections, I often have the opportunity to discuss what makes a garment work or not. I have a little theory which I use to help me evaluate a garment which I think is both measurable and an indicator of taste. It is sort of an inverted triangle.

1. The most basic and important attribute of a good design is feel. This means the fabric, and also to a certain extent the fit. No matter how beautiful or ingenious a design is, if the fabric is rough, stiff, or cheap-feeling, if the garment feels too heavy, awkward or challenging, it will most likely never make it out of the closet and will have failed as a fashion. I think the idea of “quality” is inherent in the feel of a garment. In a store, I always touch before I look. I think this is something that most people do reflexively. The amount of awful-feeling clothes out there shows how many designers ignore the basic senses of their customers.
2. The next most important value is colour. The right or wrong colour can make or break a design – even if the garment feels terrific, the wrong colour will still keep it from being worn. Owning these first two attributes are enough to build a very successful company on – i.e. American Apparel or J.C. Penneys.
3. Timing is the third most important value and the one aspect that is most dependent on taste to be properly identified. It is hard to really be able to tell definitively if a design looks “now” or not unless you have trained your eye and your sense of taste for a long period of time. Being able to design garments that have these first three attributes is a recipe for success. If a designer is a household name, you can be sure that they understand the power of feel, colour, and timing.
4. The last item on my little checklist is the design of the garment. To me, it does not matter how clever or innovative a particular choice of seams and trims might be, unless it addresses the first three items on the list it is narcissism of limited value as either fashion or design. There are very few designers in the world who manage to master feel, colour, timing, and design, and the ones who do become legends.

How do you judge the value of a fashion design?  Is good fashion subjective?

The fashion industry’s fourth wall is collapsing.  Marc Jacobs left a comment addressing a post on Cathy Horyn’s blog about an incident of facial expression at the Louis Vuitton show (scroll down to number 40).   Could this be the beginning of the end of the designer mystique?

Horyn’s next post responded to Jacob’s comment and amended her previous statement.

It might not seem remarkable, but that little exchange makes public relations the monkey in the middle and has implications for how the fashion industry, and really, every industry, is changing.

I noticed the other day that Kanye West has a blog now.  Whether it is him or his staff hitting the post button is not important – West has figured out that on the internet, getting your version or vision out there is your prerogative.

Especially if you are a celebrity.

Or a fashion designer.

Or a journalist.

Or…

I expect to see a lot more participation on the internet from some perceptive, talented, and even famous people out there.

The internet is an extension of your nervous system that connects you to other people’s nervous systems.  It is both personal and universal.  It collapses time and space.

It is incredible!

Now is a good time to invest.

It was good to get away from the keyboard for a couple days. I enjoyed everything about my trip to Ottawa, with the major highlight being a terrific brunch with one of my all time favourite readers, Wendy of Of(f) the Deep End. Despite sadly having to say goodbye to her animal friends very recently, she granted me the pleasure of meeting up to chat about all the many things we are both interested in. I felt like we found a certain harmony when sharing our perspectives. Thank you Wendy!

Even the long, pastoral bus ride there and back was enjoyable. My reading matter over those trips is currently percolating in my brain, as all of it caused me to reflect on Final Fashion the blog, what it is, what it is not, and the way it changes.

All this thinking has resulted in a fat two-part post which you can read after the jump…

(more…)

At the Fashion-Incubator, Kathleen asks What Will Become of Us? Great comments, and gets me thinking about me and my generation…

This is one of many outstanding comic strips at xkcd.

These days I am thinking a lot about fashion illustration, entrepreneurship, information, personality, networks, entertainment, minimalism to the point of survivalism… and truth. What will become of us, indeed… well I have an idea of what I am going to do… actually many small ideas.

The Toronto Fashion Incubator has to move to make way for condos. By chance I spoke with Susan Langdon, who reassured me that the TFI is dealing well with the inconvenient situation – taking the opportunity to move up. Currently there are only 4 resident designers, and I notice all of them seem ready to move up to the next level in terms of getting their own spaces, so the TFI will have the chance to turn the situation to advantage. I look forward to seeing the TFI continue doing the good work they do for the next generation of fashion designers in Toronto, and I hope to help too, in some way…

Last time I looked at Threadless the cheque they gave their artists was a lot smaller than $1500. I am going to be doing this and I already have an idea, I mean it this time I am really going to do it!

Cute incoming linkers – Patterns, Fabric and Thread, Oh My! – Clichés á la Mode – Fashion Graduate.

Here comes the backlash – cheap chic and celebrity designers have peaked and are officially on their way out. The end of these trends will create millions of refugee fashion victims…

See what families around the world eat every week. I am fascinated by visual representations of consumption. Look at images of real life in the past, I try not to forget how unprecedented our present is.

In the fashion industry, we are at the cusp of something. Luxury houses are going public, which strikes me as a strange stumble that will make fashion’s veteran players a lot less relevant. I am reading Joseph Abboud’s wonderful biography Threads right now. He talks about how buyers once relied on independent instinct, and now crunch the numbers of the past in a vain attempt to predict the future (or else they are fired). The culture of fear and greed and boards of investors kills fashion leadership. (Or does it?)

Designers like Gianni Versace made fashion alive, and interesting, even if the appeal was narrow. Now, Versace the corporation, without genuine human personality, hedges its bets. Compare the old pictures of Linda and Naomi laughing and leaping in exhuberant, loudly extravagant but enjoyable Versace clothing with modern images of a waxwork-worthy Madonna frozen in luxurious yet unwholesome Versace environments.

Why does it seem to me like even the the legacy of the superstars of fashion is on the verge of victimhood, and fashion’s history nothing but relics without relevance? 1994 might as well be 1904, but I still look back, trying to tease out patterns from the past, trying to answer the question what will become of us.

The possibilities are endless. Time to get back to cutting and sewing.

From the Fashion-Incubator, Kathleen asks us:

What would the effect on our industry be if gas prices doubled over the next ten years? What if they tripled or quadrupled over twenty to twenty five years? Any prognosticators in the crowd?

The consensus at F-I is that increased energy costs would favour local producers but would severely affect the availability of raw and therefore processed materials. The most significant obstacle noted by Kevin Carson:

The how-to information is out there, and the building blocks of local production are already widely distributed. The question is whether people can get over the learning curves, and put the building blocks together, faster enough to cope with the dislocation.

We live in an affluent but dependent world (those of us with internet connections), rich with education but poor in applicable skills when it comes to producing things. There will be a leap of ingenuity required and it seems that many will be unprepared for. The quality of things produced availably can be expected to be less and of poorer quality than the cheap abundance we are used to.

Still, I am not sure that widescale chaos will erupt as a result of soaring energy costs. Things will be different, for sure. Humans are very adaptable. For what it is worth, here is some prognostication, though I have pushed the date of my prognostication to a lovely round numbered year.

The most affordable materials will be the ones produced closest to you. In the case of most cities, this will be garbage. Garbage economies will spring up to reap the rewards of another generation’s refuse.

The most fashionable materials will be the most unavailable. For people in Toronto, that would be virgin cotton or silk, or as Canada produces hardly any fibers or fabrics, practically any virgin fiber.

Since there are no weaving factories left in Canada, most new fabric will likely be knit either by machine or by hand. Fur will become more common. New woven garments will be an exotic rarity.

There will be a larger divide between rich and poor than there is now, although quality of life will decrease somewhat for everyone. The rich will be more likely to have their clothing tailored and updated to reflect the trends – yes fashion will go on with the usual variations. The poor will wear a previous generation’s castoffs. There will be a slightly more defined difference between the dress of the rich and the poor than there is now.

With less energy, buildings will be heated less in the winter and cooled less in the summer. Clothing will reflect this – winter clothing will be insulated and layered and summer clothing will be loose and light. The strength of the UV rays will be much stronger with less particulate matter in the air – clothing worn outside will often be sun-protective. Outer clothing will be washed less often.

Rising inflation suggests that wealth will be more likely to be worn as jewelry than saved in the bank. This is one of the factors that creates starker differences between the dress of the rich and the poor.

Clothing that takes more skill to make will become hyper-valuable, as will anyone with any skills in this regards. Shoes will certainly be affected by this – cobblers are rare here in North America, most of the ones I am aware of will be dead in 2050. Good shoes in the most common sizes will be extremely dear. Improvised substitutions for shoes are more common. There will be more shortages of things, and less variety available in everything. Local cuisines will develop; and so will more extreme regional variations in dress.

Wages will be generally depressed, bringing greater world parity when it comes to the cost of labour, but also much less consumer spending. There will probably be a lower level of employment as the economy is in the process of shrinking. There will be less productivity, so fashions will also change more slowly. People will be thinner on average than they are now, meaning that the idealized fashionable body will become more voluptuous.

There will be a decrease in productive fertility too, by necessity. It is hard to tell if this will result in more or less equality for the sexes, which historically is a major determining factor for how people dress. Unfortunately if major social trends in the modern Western world are taken to their logical conclusions, it may be a far more religious and conservative society in 2050 than we have now. There may still be access to information but it may be protected by elite gatekeepers. Clothing reflecting a greater power divide between the sexes means that men’s and women’s clothing will be less similar, more defined and restrictive.

Just a guess. Whatever actually happens will probably be way more interesting. So, what do you think you’ll be wearing in 2050?

I just noticed that Fashion Television did a piece on fashion blogs for the April 28th show.

If you’ve been reading Final Fashion for a while, you may be aware that deep down, I really want to like Jeanne Beker’s show but my appreciation keeps getting thwarted by bits like this one.

First of all, fashion bloggers are represented by solely by Perez Hilton (ick), despite Perez’ attempts to explain that he is not a fashion blogger at all. You would think that fashion blogging’s best, like The Sartorialist and Susie Bubble would merit a mention, but nothing. (edit: thank you Aurora for pointing out that FT did a feature of the Sartorialist in the same show.) Fashion Television is Canadian-produced, but no effort was made to acknowledge any of the excellent Canadian fashion bloggers. Any of us could have expressed the zeitgeist better than poor old Perez. Did Fashion Television not consider featuring an actual fashion blogger in this piece?

Instead we are treated to some expert commentary from people who appear to have never been near a fashion blog. This clip’s most hilarious moment is Patrick McCarthy of Fairchild who gives us this short soundbite with apparent lack of irony – “…blogging has changed everything. Most of it is gibberish because there’s no real thought to it, because it takes, you know, one second doesn’t have… gives… very few people time to think about anything, so there’s not any real thought going into the blog. It’s just stream of consciousness stuff, most of it worthless.”

Thank goodness for a few choice words from fashion media’s best (Cathy Horyn and Colin McDowell) who both recognize that blogs offer some unique opportunities for those with something to say, and comment on the differences between writing for print and writing for the internet.

I have been thinking about the new/old media divide as events around town (like the upcoming Week of Style) are becoming more inclusive towards local fashion bloggers. Now we share the press lounge with established journalists, broadcasters and media personalities, and no one seems to be able to put their finger on what this change means. Yet. Here are my thoughts.

Blogs are not in direct opposition to magazines, newspapers, radio or television. One cannot pit one media against another – video did not kill the radio star, nor did mp3s. Blogs are just a media like any other, one more format through which human beings absorb information. If blogs someday supersede newspapers, for instance, it won’t be the blogs that are “responsible” for rendering newspapers obsolete. It will be the human beings who are the ones that chose that vehicle for relaying their information needs.

Writers can adapt to digital just as photographers adapt to digital. And bloggers, like many journalists, diarists, and authors, are writers with their own unique format. This is why I believe we are more united by our subject than we are divided by our media. I share much more in common with Jeanne Beker than I do with, say, Perez Hilton.

Where the big difference lies is the mediation of the media. Simply put, bloggers are responsible for their own editing, and the content they publish is at their sole discretion rather than being filtered through the publishing process. With no professional assessing who writes what and who reads what, the responsibility for mediation is shared between the writer and the reader.

This brings the writer and the reader within earshot of eachother. The benefit of blogging is the conversation and the relationships, something no other media offers. Believe me, I write Jeanne Beker every once in a while and she does not reply. I do not want to be Jeanne Beker. She does not have the privilege of being able to have real conversations with her audience.

I don’t care if my audience never gets bigger than 50 people. The fact is the 50 people I write for are awesome people who I admire and whose company I enjoy. I do not have to please an editor who has to worry about pleasing 50 advertisers who worry about pleasing 50 million consumers. I just please myself, and I am lucky enough to have met some wonderful readers who are into the same things.

I have no intention of burying Toronto’s fashion media establishment. I have a lot of respect for the work that they do – they are my peers and colleagues and they are curious about the same things I am. I imagine them as part of my ideal audience, and I write as if they are reading, even if they ignore me.

If you are in the media in Toronto, I invite you to delurk. Come to Brunch. If you plan on doing a story on Fashion Blogging any time in the near future, get the story from the source.

She does it with a felt hat (possibly only one) and scarf, wool Bay blanket, bohemian black, snow in unruly hair, and an enigmatic smile.

Her smile keeps getting bigger the older she gets.

This is an idea I’ve been thinking about lately. My own design “style” has been on a steady track towards simpler, archetypal ideas… stripping the fashion away from clothing and trying to eliminate the temporal obsolescence traditionally built into fashion.

Now, I love fashion and love hanging out with fashion people but they don’t necessarily “get” my silly ideas. “People are looking for something new, something different,” I get told, despite the fact I am surrounded on the street with people wearing dull, expected clothing, or occasionally, bright and interesting clothing rehashed from some other decade.

Here’s a thought. The fashion-forward woman already has plenty of choice. She doesn’t need another designer competing for her jaded eye.

It seems to me that most people are overwhelmed by too much choice – and they don’t get served. I am constantly seeking clothing that will last me for many years, be versatile, simple, easy to care for, and above all functional. The criteria “new” and “different” are nowhere on my list of desirable attributes and I believe I am not the only one. I don’t need to be presented with a zillion different options because I’ve already made my choice, it is singular, it is obvious, and it ought to be available.

“The fashion business runs on novelty,” I am told and I won’t dispute that. The ebb and flow of (relative) novelty produces the trends that live and die in such fascinating succession. As I said earlier the designs I am envisioning are not fashion.

“Will people buy it?” is the hundred thousand dollar question. The very idea of a line of timeless archetypes suggests the opposite kind of sales pattern than the fast fashion we have become used to. Instead of constant, implusive consumption, the choice to purchase archetypal designs would be extremely deliberate and infrequent, as my own shopping patterns are.

In fact, if I was to produce such a line I would want to discourage overconsumption. I would limit the availability, focus entirely on fit and quality so purchases could be staggered by five or ten years instead of a few weeks.

I don’t blame fashion people for finding my ideas mystifying because I am purposefully slaughtering some of fashion’s sacred cows. The seasonal treadmill fashion runs on demands consumption, obsolescence, novelty, change, and always progress and growth.

…

How did I become interested in these ideas?

When I try to look into the future as a fashionophile, I don’t see this treadmill leading anywhere. In fact, I can’t help but feel as technology complexifies, turnover times shrink, and trends become tired before they even hit the shop windows, that we are about to enter the unthinkable – a regressive age.

In the near future it is apparent that we will have less resources, less mobility, less productivity and less choice. No one wants to admit that we are entering an age of regression. We want this amazing golden age to continue along its path of exponential growth and we ignore the ceiling of limitation – namely the finite resources of the Earth.

Some well-meaning activists suggest that if we make “better” choices in aggregate the eventuality of reversed progress can be slowed or even avoided but these exhortations don’t fill me with hope. They still rely on the idea of improved technology whose development is deceptively resource heavy, or the green consumer movement, a contradiction of terms which only gets more complicated the closer it gets examined.

As I ride my train of thought into darkness I find myself becoming comfortable with belonging to a generation that will see the age of regression finally arrive. I am divesting myself of the cultural assumptions that progress and improvement are desireable.

The late Kurt Vonnegut said “don’t spoil the party” and I live by those words. I savour the freedom I have, the incredible abundance of choices available to me, and the joy I derive from technology as the accidental privileges of birth that they are. But in my mind I am preparing myself for the next step.

Part of that is embracing the ideas of regression, scarcity and simplification.

It is only natural that I would adapt these ideas to my fascination with trends in fashion or clothing. Whether these ideas apply while the party is ongoing is open for debate.