Fashion Rewind: Why We’re Taking Stock of the 2010s and Where We’re Headed Next
When we began brainstorming pieces for this project—an evaluation of the 2010s on the cusp of a new decade—that dusty old aphorism, that fashion is a mirror of the times, proved true. The industry is a much more inclusive, welcoming place than it was a decade ago, even if, as Janelle Okwodu points out, there’s still a long way to go. And collectively we took far too long to realize the role that the manufacturing and shipping of fashion plays in global warming, though sustainability and circular systems, as Emily Farra illustrates, are now being prioritized in all parts of the market. It’s a start.
We’ve come at the 2010s from every angle: Laird Borrelli-Persson makes a case against fashion’s fixation on the past, and Steff Yotka charts the ways in which social media has changed fashion for the worse and for the better. Sarah Mower argues that this was London’s decade, and Chioma Nnadi champions the gender-bending of hip-hop. And we’ve also included some good old-fashioned lists: the top collections, the best collaborations, the most in-demand faces, and the It-est of It items, plus an examination of the evolving look of street style through the eyes of Mr. Street Peeper Phil Oh.
It’s in these photos that the decade takes shape. In 2011, Oh’s first year with Vogue, fashion was still shaking off the hyper-sexy look of the decade before in favor of Phoebe Philo’s contemporary strain of minimalism. The Céline sensibility dominated the early part of the decade, until Gucci’s Alessandro Michele ushered in a period of magpie maximalism and Demna Gvasalia and Virgil Abloh made logos cool again. And now at decade’s end, we’re sort of back where we started—in suits. One other quick take: Sneakers are still the new stilettos. Which leads me to Maya Singer’s examination of the athleisure movement, in which she christens leggings “the look” of our era.
Any attempt to define a moment before it’s over is ambitious at best and risky at worse. So why take stock now? Our notoriously fast-moving industry has already catapulted itself into a new decade. As I write this, womenswear designers are hard at work on their Spring 2020 collections, and designers Kim Jones at Dior Men and Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, who’ve electrified the menswear arena, had their crack at them last month. Luke Leitch finds reason to be buoyant about fashion’s future in the recent round of men’s shows and the “meeting point and melting pot of cultures, aesthetics, and sexual orientations” he witnessed there. In fact, he posits that the 2010s set up the 2020s to be the “golden age of menswear.” We’ll be watching.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
