The packages started
arriving at my door in September: thick cardboard invitations to digital shows
packed in tissue inside boxes inside shopping bags, sometimes nestled next to
extra gewgaws like candy or buttons or candles, sometimes layered atop books. They
were care packages from across the ocean and the city, Proustian madeleines
meant to jog the memory and senses so that, sitting at our desks or beds or
kitchen tables, wherever we “attended” the virtual fashion shows, we could
imagine ourselves sitting on benches runway-side, as we once did.
اضافة اعلان
One day my doorbell
rang, and a messenger handed over a brown paper bag containing two more brown
bags, each of which contained a single croissant, from a brand theoretically
committed to sustainability.
Another time a giant
shopping bag arrived containing a smaller shopping bag, containing an
invitation printed on a scrap of silk.
This is the last
straw, I said to my husband. What a waste. A waste of money and a literal
waste, all that packaging and promotional material destined straight for the
recycling bin. (Admittedly, we happily ate the candy.)
But then the
show-in-a-box, from JW Anderson, arrived: a do-it-yourself construction set of
paper dolls (models photographed in the collection and then shrunk down), backgrounds
and accessories, to create your very own diorama.
And then came a book
that memorialized an empty New York, with models silhouetted against the
echoing skyline and street scenes, from Proenza Schouler. And then I started to
think about all the ... stuff ... in a slightly different
light.
Two seasons and many
months in, it is no longer actually just stuff. It’s more like a memorial of a
sad, lost year; a year marked by absence — of people, places, experiences —
captured by random physical things.
“When everything has
gone virtual, the object becomes the repository of a moment,” said Steven
Lubar, a professor of American studies at Brown University and author of
“Inside the Lost Museum.” Even if it’s a doohickey without any particular
monetary value.
Such items are, said
Clara Berg, the curator of collections at the Museum of History & Industry
in Seattle, “witnesses to history.”
“This year we all
collectively understood we were living through something important,” she said.
“We will want to remember it and preserve items for the future to tell people
what it was like.”
After all, if fashion
teaches us anything, it is how easy it is to forget, even with a physical
object left behind as an aide-mémoire. As each season arrives on the runway,
each new designer at a house, out goes the old and in comes the new.
But it also reveals
just how much of a personal narrative can be contained in a dress or a blouse
or a bag; how simply seeing it can bring back, viscerally, a moment in time.
Like the moment when we were forced to live largely online.
Virtual fashion shows,
it turns out, are even more ephemeral than actual ephemera. Seen for a moment,
they disappear into the digital maw even faster, everything blending together
into a sea of pixels. Very little of it lingers in the mind (even less than
what used to linger from the crazed cycle of physical shows). When everything
is on Zoom, it’s all equal, meaning it’s almost impossible for anything to
stand out.
Unless, that is, it
can actually stand.
Questions surrounding
the meaning of artifacts go all the way back to Aristotle, who wrestled with
them in his “Metaphysics,” and our understanding of their importance has waxed
and waned over the centuries. During the last great pandemic — the flu of 1918
— “almost nobody saved anything,” Lubar said. “The country was desperate to
forget.”
After 9/11, he said,
that changed. Now we are at another such point, when everyone is “thinking
about history,” he said. “There’s a large collection of masks in almost every
museum right now.”
The designer who
understood this most intrinsically was unquestionably Jonathan Anderson, who
treated each of the shows he created for the three brands he works with (JW
Anderson, Loewe and Moncler) as a potential future archaeological find.
What began with a
show-in-a-box evolved into a gallery-in-a-book, a show-on-a-wall (complete with
DIY wallpaper and a glue brush), a show-on-a-shirt (a giant T-shirt plastered
with looks), an artist collaboration in poster form and a broadsheet newspaper
delivered within the daily newspapers of thousands of people around the world.
All of it an experiment in corporeality.
“I just didn’t see how
you could build an emotional connection with a moving image on a screen if
that’s all there is,” Anderson said during a conversation via, yes, Zoom before
the newspaper was delivered.
“Netflix, email, Zoom
— it’s all in one place, so no matter what you do, it never stands out,” he
said. “I felt at least with an object, it occupies space and a moment in time.
You interact with it physically. It becomes part of the record.”
I was never a
collector of fashion season memorabilia like some of my peers; I used to shed
show invitations and news releases as soon as the lights went down on a runway,
as if crossing them off a to-do list. As my bag got lighter, so did my psyche.
But like so much else
this inverted year, my practice has changed. I’ve barely bought anything, but
I’ve begun to amass these vessels of memory. Think of them as amphorae, the
fashion version.
Gradually, I started
to pick and choose: a copy of “Dune” from Joseph Altuzarra, annotated with
swatches and notes that reflect the relationship between fiction and fashion.
Packets of fabric from Gabriela Hearst’s debut at Chloé that seemed like
tactile snippets from the future.
The kitschy faux fur
boxes from Prada, covered in the same bright polyester fluff as the sets, that
looked like little Pokémon pets. A flip book from Thom Browne that pictured an
old-fashioned skier shooting downhill. A toy bus from Carolina Herrera, and a
balsa wood DIY airplane complete with airsickness bag from Louis Vuitton that
seemed to symbolize a time when we were free to travel without thought. Tarot
cards from Dior to predict what is to come. A mock TV Guide from Coach that
added some levity to the fact that we are all living vicariously through our
televisions (or what passes for that now).
There’s no financial
value attached to any of it — it wasn’t made for sale, the materials aren’t
precious — but together they form a sort of reliquary. I see them and see the
human desire to create and the stubbornness of hope. Neither is, in the end, a
disposable idea.
