Dress by Pierre Cardin for Maya Plisetskaya, 1969.
Photo: collection of Alexandre Vassiliev
Fashion depends on many external factors including: policies, the economy, weather, religion, music, and art.
No one has ever done long-term forecasting of fashion trends successfully. Fashion is not a designer’s whim, but a mirror of life. Fashion depends on the events occurring within the country. Who could have known that the World War I would result in women shortening their skirts, cutting their hair, and starting to acquire jobs and working in industries? Who could have guessed that the launch of the first astronauts into outer space would result in people wanting to wear items that imitated space clothing? Items such as turtlenecks, tights, helmets, and metallized fabrics. The hippie movement which pervaded the entire world, and result in the trend of ripped jeans, long hair, flowers and Indian jewelry. This is the true definition of fashion, and it cannot be forbidden. None of these trends were created by designers, they were simply encaptured and presented by them.
The biggest enemy of fashion and style is boredom.
Fashion victim. Photo: Rijksmuseum
The love for fashion came from France. Not fashion itself, but the love for it.
There is no need to chase fashion – you won’t be able to keep up with it, either way. Fashion was created in order to allow something or someone to go out of fashion. Fashion is meant for rich idlers, and it is destined for oblivion. Style is infinite! It is always better to be in style than in fashion.
The selflessness of fashion is that it must overthrow all former idols, colours and silhouettes that it praised in the previous season. I wish for all fashionistas to be selfless with their own wardrobes and give away things that they no longer use, never regret parting with unwanted or outmoded shoes and stop cluttering your wardrobes with lots of old things in the hopes that fashion trend for them will soon return. Although it is true, fashion is cyclic and fashion trends do repeat, but they do so only partially, in replicas.
Fashion show of Slava Zaitsev. Photo: fashion house «Slava Zaitsev» in Moscow (CC BY-SA 3.0)
We will always find some fragments of Egyptian fashion in clothing, or be it fragments of Gothic or Rocaille, of Empire or Art-Deco fashion, or, say, even some elements of the bohemian hippie style. And it will always be that way. After all, the human body does not change as rapidly as clothing styles do. It is impossible to come up with an absolutely unique idea, because people have been coming up with similar ideas for the past six thousand years – since the time when fabrics were invented.
Surely fashion will never go away. As long as there are two poles, two sexes – male and female, – fashion will not disappear. So long as there will be class differentiation – and that will always be at play (“all are equal, but some are more equal than others”) – fashion will persist. Even if we start walking around in space suits, there will be a fashion for these suits, because they too, can be modified, they can be different. Someone will always want a blue suit, while someone else will want a silver one...