Friday, August 17, 2012



"The retro trend is present on all the runways. From the roaring twenties to the seventies, references of the past inspire the designers!"

Revival simultaneity -- Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Twenties -- all being ransacked by today's leading designers. But no one retro era dominating the contemporary runway or streets.

In The Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud talks about how fashion in the modern era is no longer about waves but about wavelets: you don’t have big fashion looks that everybody follows but instead an array of looks coexisting, all kinds of subcultural styles and vintage chics.  There is no uniformity, but there is also never a moment of definitive supercession, when a styles becomes démodé. The image I got from Bourriaud’s trope of waves versus wavelets was that childhood game when you’re in the swimming pool and you all cling to the side and move your bodies in synch. That creates a tsunami effect. As soon as you stop, though, the pool reverts to its normal omnidirectional chaos of ripples. That is a potent visual image for me of hyperstasis.  The analogy shows how unity and synchrony create a more dynamic and shapely cultural field.

Fashion was the first to get to this state (hyperstasis)...  it pioneered what later transpired in music.

 One of the defining attributes of hyperstasis is endless recursion...  the fact that the Sixties have already been revisited countless times in fashion before (starting when? in the Eighties? or even earlier?) doesn't prevent a designer from revisiting them again....   you just have to wait a reasonable interval, and then the archival resource is ripe for swiping again

C.f. the endless returns and re-runs of sixties garage within underground rock

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