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When did fashion stop being fashionable? To paraphrase Hemingway, it happened slowly, and then very quickly. Probably the rot set in around the mid- to late 1980s, provoked by a boom-to-bust economy and the emergence of AIDS as a powerful metaphor for the delayed hangover that followed the 1970s. The effect of the disease was terrifyingly real as it tore through the creative economy, robbing it of some of its brightest emerging stars.
Not that this grim decade was entirely devoid of hope. By now the most interesting thing on the catwalk was definitely in prêt-à-porter, with extraordinary creations from Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and Kenzo. Elsewhere, Karl Lagerfeld was busy revitalizing Chanel –where he was appointed in 1983 – and Christian Lacroix was showing flamboyant dresses inspired by his passion for opera, folklore and the history of costume. This was, after all, the time of the New Romantic. The period also saw the emergence of the Japanese designers, notably Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garçons), whose ethereal black numbers combined minimalist rigour with futuristic interpretations of traditional garb. More costume than dress, they served as inspiration for the monochrome severity that characterized the tail end of the 1980s.

More than anything, though, this was the era of the yuppie, the young upwardly mobile professional, whose clothing signified success. ‘Power dressing’ became a buzz phrase. Giorgio Armani’s unstructured but easily identifiable suits were worn as a badge of success. In the UK, while providing flashy City boys with eccentrically reworked interpretations of the tailored suit – his trademark ‘classics with a twist’ –
Paul Smith also discovered the Filofax, a leather-bound ‘personal organizer’ manufactured by a tiny East End company. By popularizing this combination of address book and diary, which implied that its user had people to see and places to go, Smith handed the yuppies their ultimate accessory.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Ralph Lauren had been steadily building one of the ultimate fashion brands. His rag trade-toriches story has been told many times before, but it’s worth briefly repeating here.

Born Ralph Lifshitz in 1939, America’s most upwardly mobile designer was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants from the Bronx. His father was a house painter, who changed the family name to Lauren when young Ralph was still at school. Ralph was brought up on the Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s, mentally filing away images of Cary Grant and Fred Astaire so that he could recreate their style. He got his start in the fashion business selling suits at Brooks Brothers, and later became a wholesaler of ties and gloves in New York’s garment district. Soon he began designing his own ties, choosing the name ‘Polo’ for its aristocratic associations. The stylish neckwear proved a big hit at Bloomingdale’s, and by 1970 Ralph had taken over a corner of the Manhattan department store with an entire range of upmarket apparel. According to Teri Agins, ‘Lauren will go down in fashion history for introducing the concept of “lifestyle merchandising” in department stores. . . Lauren designed [his] outpost to feel like a gentlemen’s club, with mahogany panelling and brass fixtures.’ She goes on to say that Lauren’s stores ‘stirred all kinds of longings in people, the dream that the upwardly mobile shared for prestige, wealth and exotic adventure’. But Ralph Lauren is important for another reason. European luxury brands frequently dwell on their ‘heritage’ for marketing purposes, using a tradition of craftsmanship as a way of seducing consumers and justifying elevated prices (think of Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Dunhill and Asprey). Almost subconsciously, Lauren realized that, in the USA, history was irrelevant. This was the land of Hollywood, of fantasy for sale.
Lauren created a world of aristocratic good taste, but it was pure invention. In the end, his success rested on the quality of his clothes and his knack for branding. Lauren’s shops were film sets, and his advertising campaigns – shot by Bruce Weber – were stills from movies that had never been made. It’s no surprise to learn that Lauren designed the costumes for the film The Great Gatsby. In many ways, Lauren was Jay Gatsby – the man who created himself.

Ralph Lauren was the perfect brand for the 1980s, when fashion became less important than ‘lifestyle’. In fact, with the rise of the supermodel, the media seemed more interested in how the models lived than in the clothes they wore.
Fashion clutched its chest and keeled over some time in the 1990s. In The End of Fashion, Teri Agins suggests that women lost interest in fashion because they were more concerned about their careers: ‘[They] began to behave more like men in adopting their own uniform: skirts and blazers and pantsuits that gave them an authoritative, polished, power look.’

In addition, the Paris catwalks had lost their relevance in the face of MTV culture and streetwear. Levi’s, Nike and Gap seemed a lot more connected to quotidian reality than some ethereal vision on a runway. Tracksuit-wearing rappers and the chino-clad super-nerds of the dotcom boom were the new icons; ‘casual Friday’ elided into the rest of the week. Stores selling comfortable but unchallenging garments, mostly run up on the cheap in Asia, made dressing down not only affordable, but acceptable. The elitist stance once taken by fashion brands began to look stuffy and – horror of horrors – old-fashioned. Clothing became a commodity, spare and functional. Even supermodels began to look less ‘super’. Kate Moss, in her first incarnation as a grungy teenager, had nothing of the femme fatale about her. Calvin Klein built a phenomenally successful brand around posters featuring Moss and other androgynous youths sporting baggy jeans and nothing else; it was the ‘simple chic’ ethic taken to the nth degree.

Finally, many fashion houses were acquired by or grew into vast corporations, selling clothing, accessories, make-up and furniture. As Teri Agins explains, ‘Such fashion houses just also happen to be publicly traded companies, which must maintain steady, predictable growth for their shareholders. . . Fashion. . . requires a certain degree of risktaking and creativity that is impossible to explain to Wall Street.’ Further, she observes that the utilitarian blandness of Nineties clothing made marketing more important than ever. Branding played a critical role ‘in an era when. . . just about every store in the mall [was] peddling the same styles of clothes’.
Today, while branding remains as crucial as ever, its raison d’être has changed. Six years on from the publication of Agins’ book, fashion has – inevitably – transformed itself again. Style has come out of the closet.

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