It’s everywhere. Niche ways of perceiving and talking about fashion, taking it out of its context, ridiculing the collection without knowing the concept. Buy any tabloid magazine that is not managed by Conde Nast and as thin as a mug mat, which you can’t use in that sense because of the bad paper quality, and here it is: ultimate misunderstanding of the concepts, ridiculing the collections, and the same “groundbreaking” florals for Spring and dark blue/dark green/burgundy for Autumn.

Of course, such mindset goes further, planting a seed into the readers’ minds. Memes, pictures about how fashion has “come too far”, “designers have gone mad” and so on revolves around taking the runway looks literally, adding own standard ideals of beauty, and not understanding the fashion industry and its artistic side completely. To generalize, there are several ways of wrong perception of fashion, that should be avoided in order to understand it better.

1. Separating fashion to “ugly” and “beautiful”

“I think there is beauty in everything. What ‘normal’ people would perceive as ugly, I can usually see something of beauty in it” - as once said by Alexander McQueen, it remains the same in the fashion industry. Not only him and the brand he left as his heritage, but also so many designers today bring out more beauty there is about “ugliness”. 

The reason for that lies in the fact that the beauty standards start to evaporate. Instead, here come the endless variety of beauty the world is learning to accept without comparing. If this is possible to work for beauty standards for people, maybe we should start to question what forms can beauty take in the fashion world? Of course, there will be canonically “beautiful” collections and looks, but their position would be not of the ideal, but of the possibility.

Behind every “ugly” look, item, or collection there is always an idea. It isn’t always about positive things or imageries of life - the ideas can also bring out the society’s taboos, and what is a better way of doing it, if it’s not in the same ugly form the society portrays these topics in? There is no need to immediately jump on the collection or a designer, without even looking on the collection’s title, or what have inspired the designer to create it.

                                        Photo: @areanyc

2. Taking the runway looks literally.

Honestly, the designers don’t mean it, when they are letting out a model with unnaturally pale face and large dark red lips, or a woman with a dress covered in bubbles. On a special occasion like the Academy Awards, such outfits could be worn in their original form, but they are unsuitable for everyday life.

By letting out “bizarre”, “crazy”, and other synonyms for “insane” collections on the runway, the designers perform two acts. First being “unwearable fashion” serving the purpose of art and carrying out a message. The second, and the most important one, is portraying general tendencies for the season in a grotesque way. It can serve as a useful feature: by emphasizing a certain shape, colour, print, detail, it is easier for the viewer to perceive a trend and use it in the future, picking out the daily outfit. The most important part in this process is not to forget that nobody wants you to wear your bed blanket, but a blanket coat.

                                          Photo: @typicalfreaks

3. Not questioning the concept.

This stands pretty close to the second point on the list. Without being able to understand an idea behind look or collection, the viewer fails to understand it at all, which leads to ridiculing contemporary fashion industry and not understanding the trends. Fashion, especially its “unwearable” part, is a form of art. No matter how much contemporary art is laughed at be the public with the notion of “I could do that”, it has to be admitted it can’t exist without an initial idea. The perception heavily depends on the form this idea takes as a result, because this is where things get tricky.

If the idea takes the form of easily wearable on a daily basis or on the special occasions clothes, it is most likely to be seen at the first sight or not questioned at all. However, if it comes to “unwearable” fashion, which is mostly created for the runway, understanding of a concept can vary from easy to hard. Nevertheless, whether it is a golden embodied dress or a strangely shaped white shirt with ankle-length sleeves, the idea of these items should always be asked in order to understand not only the season’s flow, but the artistic value of fashion.

                                     Photo: @jessiaml_