Alexander McQueen: Fashion in Ruins

INEVITABLY, the talk of Paris fashion has been less about clothes than about money.

Retailers are worried about sales, and magazines are concerned with the loss of advertising. And most designers, listening to the bean counters, have played it so safe with their fall collections that they run the risk of choking. Fashion is in a fractured state.

Still, few designers are willing to admit that the expectations of fashion are changing, or to honestly question the future for luxury goods if the appetite — largely invented over the last decade with calculated marketing more than innovative design — no longer exists. Alexander McQueen’s exceptional collection shown here on Tuesday night, the most ambitious we have seen this season, was as much a slap in the face to his industry, then, as it was brave statement about the absurdity of the race to build empires in fashion.

With a runway of broken mirrors surrounding a garbage heap made of props from his own past collections, Mr. McQueen created a stage to symbolize the sudden crash of luxury exuberance. The clothes he sent out were a parody of couture designs of the last century, spoofing Dior’s New Look and Givenchy’s little black Audree Hepburn dresses, as well as their reinventions by new designers at those companies in the last decade — himself included. It was a bit of a Marie Antoinette riot, poking fun at all the queens of French fashion.

“This whole situation is such a cliché,” Mr. McQueen said before his show. “The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity.”

Mr. McQueen, in effect, was calling fashion’s bluff when he opened his collection with a suit in a 1940s silhouette, with a nipped waist and flared skirt in houndstooth wool, worn by a model who walked with her hands on her hips and posed with the exaggerated gestures of an Irving Penn photograph. That was followed by a houndstooth print on a mink coat in a Poiret shape and wool jackets that were defaced with embroidery that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.

All the models wore hats by the milliner Philip Treacy that were made of trash-can liners and aluminum cans, or recycled household objects; the makeup, inspired by the mad look of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” gave the models the appearance of plastic faces that were all lips. The music, as well, was a mash-up of songs from his prior shows, with bits of “Vogue” and Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People.”

This was, Mr. McQueen said, an ironic exploration of a designer’s reinvention. The irony is that designers say that fashion is constantly being reinvented, yet they continue to show the same shapes and trends of decades past. (Ergo, this season the collections have been fixated on the 1980s.)

After the triumphs of his recent collections, this was a risky show, entirely uncommercial and intentionally provocative, and it generated extreme reactions. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, was visibly ecstatic watching the show; but another magazine editor, afterward, compared the trash-bin styling to “a collection inspired by Wall-E.” And some questioned whether Mr. McQueen, by including such obvious references to trash, was targeting John Galliano’s version of Dior, which, in January 2000, included a couture collection inspired by hobos and that led to protesters wearing plastic garbage bags outside the Dior ateliers on Avenue Montaigne.

Throughout his career, Mr. McQueen has relished pushing people’s buttons, though maybe less obviously since moving his shows from London, where he had developed the reputation as the enfant terrible, to Paris in 2001 after he sold his company to the Gucci Group. Mr. McQueen turns 40 next week, so he is no longer an enfant, though his work remains challenging and confrontational, especially this season, when it seems like the right moment for a deeper exploration.

While he is mocking the establishment for running circles over fashion history, isn’t Mr. McQueen as guilty as the rest?

From 1997 to 2001, he was the designer for Givenchy, one of the luxury brands owned by LVMH, and his tenure there was frequently marked by conflicts with management and mostly negative critical reviews. Before he showed his first collection, succeeding Mr. Galliano, who had moved to Dior, Mr. McQueen offended many French journalists by declaring that the original work of Hubert de Givenchy was “irrelevant.” Amy M. Spindler, the New York Times fashion critic, wrote of Mr. McQueen’s couture debut in 1997: “This was basically a pretty hostile collection from a gifted designer who seems in conflict about his role in the Givenchy studio. How members of the audience responded to the show depended on whether they were fascinated by that hostility and vulgarity or repelled by it.” The same could be said today.

During his early days in London, Mr. McQueen’s collections were sometimes described as misogynistic. The shows made audiences uncomfortable, and equally fascinated, most controversially in 1995 when he referenced the ravaging of Scotland by England by showing brutalized women in a collection called “Highland Rape.” He later transformed models into animals with horns on their shoulders or wearing leather masks like falcons; and in a 2000 collection, he showed models in a setting that looked like a mental hospital. The historian Caroline Evans, in “Fashion at the Edge,” noted that McQueen’s aesthetic of cruelty was actually culled from historic sources, “the work of 16th- and 17th-century anatomists, in particular that of Andreas Vesalius, the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin from the 1980s and ’90s, and the films of Pasolini, Kubrick, Buñuel and Hitchcock.”

So much informs Mr. McQueen’s collections that things get lost or obscured. In addition to Dior and Givenchy and Pollock, the new fall collection, titled “The Horn of Plenty,” included leather coats and poof dresses with a pattern inspired by Bauhaus and clowns, a magpie print inspired by the drawings of M. C. Escher, and dresses made of duck feathers after Matthew Bourne’s production of “Swan Lake.” The invitation showed an image of a woman with a trash bag on her head by Hendrik Kerstens, photographed in the manner of Dutch portrait artists, which was the starting point for Mr. McQueen’s exploration into recycling. (The image was recreated in a hat by Mr. Treacy.)

Some of the fabrics were made to look like refuse, including a wet-looking black paper nylon that resulted in dresses that resembled Mr. Givenchy’s chic styles, only made of Hefty bags. A charcoal silk cape looked as if it was made of bubble wrap.

“I’ve never been this hard since I’ve been in London,” Mr. McQueen said. “I think it’s dangerous to play it safe because you will just get lost in the midst of cashmere twin sets. People don’t want to see clothes. They want to see something that fuels the imagination.”

It’s an interesting issue that Mr. McQueen raises by challenging the status quo. While he did not exactly propose an obvious solution for the times, he at least suggested a viable alternative to the never-ending recycling of other designers’ fashion, which was to recycle his own. ]

Source: The New York Times

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Paris Fashion Show - Fur-Covered Helmets

Paris, France — Karl Lagerfeld gave fur, the staple of stoles and coats, a new raison d'etre Sunday, sending out fully functional mink-covered motorcycle helmets as part of his winter 2010 ready-to-wear collection.

Fur epaulettes also added a quirky touch to military jackets and dressed up long, lean and clean-lined evening gowns.

"Now everyone is on scooters, even chic women, so we had to do the helmet," said Lagerfeld, who has reached ueber-celebrity status as the designer for Chanel and Fendi. The helmets, made by French brand Ruby, are road ready and outfitted with an iPod connection that pumps music directly in, he said.

The mostly black collection also included short dresses with sharp, square shoulders and built-in caplets worn over skinny pants with a vertical red stripe down the back.

Lagerfeld said the powerful shoulder was the starting point for the collection.

"Unlike the shoulder pads of the 1980s, these shoulders don't jet out horizontally, but rather wrap around the shoulder like a bridge," he told reporters backstage. "It gives the attitude for the whole look without looking like an old truck driver from the 1980s."

One look that definitely did not scream truck driver was an ankle-length black turtleneck gown adorned with thick sparkly ropes like tinsel at the throat and the square shoulders.

Accessories, a cash-cow for many luxury labels, included diminutive square-shaped purses on a ropey strap, fingerless mittens like those Lagerfeld himself often sports and heavy silver earrings that covered the entire ear like a metallic earmuff.

Source: The Canadian Press

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Fashion Secretary

Since Ikram Goldman, owner of the eponymous Chicago boutique, became the unofficial Secretary of Fashion to whom Michelle Obama turns for all her key sartorial decisions, East Coast arbiters of chic have been as twisted up as a braided leather belt. How can a mere retailer, not to mention one from the famously frumpy Midwest, have so much fashion clout? Oscar de la Renta, Arnold Scaasi and others say they don't understand why Mrs. Obama relies on a shopkeeper, when she could - and should - be going directly to them. "I don't think the inaugural gown was flattering in any way. She could have looked much better," sniped Scaasi in the New York Times with the cattiness that comes so naturally to those in the fashion world. He added that it was "strange to think that the wife of" a head of state "would choose clothes from only one store."

Apparently, he's forgotten about Marie Antoinette, the world's first clothes horse, who, like Michelle, relied mostly on one retailer to choose her outfits. Rose Bertin was a fat, porcine-faced seamstress who owned a fancy dress shop in Paris, where the French queen liked to shop. During the eighteenth century in France, dress merchants, called marchands de modes, were the most powerful style arbiters, and Bertin, thanks to her association with Marie Antoinette, grew to international fame, while setting a standard for fashion excess and snobbism that's endured to this day.

As a result of Bertin's power, according to Joan deJean in her book, The Essence of Style, the taste and aspirations of the queen's subjects were greatly elevated. So eager were women to ape Marie Antoinette's look that many were driven to squander family fortunes or accumulate staggering debt. Some of these Emma Bovarys before their time even fell so low as to take lovers to pay their dressmaker bills, thus leading to accusations that Marie Antoinette's fashion passion was destroying the morals of the nation. Could it happen here? In this economic climate, I wonder.

Since it opened in 2001, Ikram has been a favorite of the city's most fashionable women, including Mrs. Obama, who's been shopping here since her husband's books became best sellers several years ago. But now with the Obamas in the White House, and American women eager to emulate Michelle's elegance, Ikram's influence has grown. Suddenly, this pudgy, 41-year-old mother of infant twins, has a Bertinesque power to shape the fashion choices of women across the land.

In 1991, when I moved here with my family from New York, I felt as if I'd been exiled to Style Siberia. About the only good news on the fashion front was that my Bergdorf Goodman credit card worked at Neiman Marcus on Michigan Avenue, where my first year in town I found a black Marc Jacobs dress at half price. I also bought a Prada skirt on sale at Ultimo on Oak Street, the only place in Chicago that sold anything even remotely hip. Thanks to a couple of lively boutiques I'd ferreted out in my neighborhood on the near North Side, I managed to uphold a semblance of Manhattan chic. I'm proud to say I never once succumbed to crewneck sweaters, shapeless parkas, dowdy blazers or galoshes, and, as the years went by, it got easier to dress well. I've watched Chicago's fashion life evolve, and recently, there's been an explosion of design talent and independent boutiques across the city. Only now, though, with the Israeli-born Goldman, has Chicago reached its style apotheosis.

I've walked by Ikram many times, admiring the Lanvins, Yohji Yamamotos, Alaias, and Narcisco Rodriguezs in the window. One Christmas my husband gave me a gorgeous pair of silver drop earrings with green crystals from the store. And once, I actually talked to Ikram herself. I called her about a story I was doing for a magazine, but when I mispronounced Proenza Schouler, the high end brand co-designed by two former students of the Parsons School of Design, she snapped at me officiously: "If you don't know how to say it properly, you shouldn't be asking me about them." Then she hung up.

Remembering that experience, I've been afraid to go in the store -- until last week, when curiosity overwhelmed me, along with a need to buy a cocktail dress for several upcoming spring events. As a buffer against what I expected to be the sales staff's disdain for my mid-priced, cloth-coated person, I took my friend, Monica, a willowy, black-haired beauty who looks as if she knows not only how to pronounce Proenza Schouler but how to wear it well.

We walked over on a gray, blustery morning. I let Monica, dazzling as usual in leather pants and a full length fur, push through the glass doors first. Though the boutique has strong Asian accents - filigreed wood doors hanging on the back wall, exotic ceramics and dark wood display cases that look as if they came from a Chinese museum -- Ikram has the feel of Paris: everything is exquisite and très cher. Immediately, I saw ten things I wanted, including what looked like a zebra fur handbag with a sculptured silver clasp and a pair of diamond earrings by Loree Rodkin.

Ikram Goldman was no where in sight. Several sales associates, dour looking women in black, and one glum man in a white polo shirt, stood around. They didn't appear to have much to do. Besides us, there was only one shopper in the store - a stocky, jeans- clad woman who was shopping for tee-shirts, a strange pursuit in Chicago's temple of style.

"Are you looking for anything special?" a pretty Asian girl in an adorable green print dress by Tracy Feith asked with a bright smile. She said her name was Jun and asked us our first names. When I recovered from the shock that Jun wasn't a snob, I explained to her my need for a basic spring cocktail dress. As Jun set off cheerfully to search the racks, Monica and I inspected the arched nooks holding shoes and scarves, handbags and sweaters.

Eventually, Jun led us to the rear of the store, to a circular fitting area lined with mirrors and fawn velvet covered benches. A beige carpet imparted a boudoir hush, drowning out the sounds from the rest of the boutique. I tried on seven dresses. The least expensive, at $1,250, was the same red and black print silk Thakoon that Michelle Obama wore the night her husband was nominated for president, only cut several inches shorter. The most expensive, at $6,745, was a structured black silk and chiffon column embroidered with white birds by Alexander McQueen.

I modeled each of the dresses for Monica and Jun, enjoying their exclamations of enthusiasm. Jun was really getting into it, finding different shoes to try on with each dress and offering suggestions for alterations (an extra charge). There was one dress, we all agreed, that stood out - a violet silk blend Jason Wu with embroidered black florets. It had a fitted bodice and straight skirt that reached just below the knee and a graceful neckline that draped over the shoulders. It fit perfectly, as if had been made for me. It was the most beautiful dress I'd ever worn, and I understood perfectly why Michelle Obama is so drawn to this young designer. The only problem was the price -- $3,900.

If I put the dress on my credit card, I'd be doing my part to stimulate the economy. But then I'd have to pay for it at the end of the month. I left Ikram empty handed. Emma Bovary I am not.

Source: The Huffington Post

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Paris Warms To YSL's Art Show

CHRISTIE'S three-day auction of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and businessman Pierre Berge's collection, which starts tonight in Paris, has been valued at $400-600 million.

It has been described as one of the most significant private collection sales in art-auction history. It is also becoming a political hot potato.

On Friday, a group of Chinese lawyers filed a motion in a French court to stop Christie's from auctioning off two antique bronze animal sculptures in the collection.

This follows recent comments by the Chinese Government that the Qing dynasty works had been stolen from Beijing's old imperial summer palace during the second Opium War with the French and British armies in 1860.

Christie's maintains Saint Laurent acquired the items legally. The court is expected to make its decision today, hours before the auction is due to start.

Saint Laurent died last June, aged 71. Berge, his long-time business and personal partner, decided to sell the contents of their Rue de Babylon apartment to fund the Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, established in 2002, to preserve 5000 YSL haute couture outfits and 15,000 accessories, sketches and other items.

Berge has said he will also donate money to several charities, including AIDS research.

Several Australian collectors are believed to be interested in certain lots,although the Australian dollar's performance against a strong euro may deter some.

According to Ronan Sulich, Christie's representative in Australia, a number have purchased the boxed set of five catalogues.

"Because this is such a milestone in auction history, it's understandable a number of people in Australia will be interested," Mr Sulich told The Australian yesterday.

This weekend, an estimated 30,000 people braved chilly weather to queue outside Paris's Grand Palais exhibition centre to view the collection.

It was the first time the works had been seen publicly and many visitors waited up to four hours for the chance to view them.

The collection reflects the eclectic tastes of its owners. It includes statues from ancient Rome, 16th- and 17th-century German silverware, 19th-century tapestries, Impressionist oil paintings and early 20th-century decorative arts.

Saint Laurent and Berge were passionate 20th-century art collectors with a particular interest in the late-Impressionist and Modernist movements. Paintings by Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso will also go under the hammer over the next three days.

Berge was always considered the financial brain behind Saint Laurent's fashion genius. But he, too, was a man of exceptional taste. Their collection, built over more than 40 years, is a tribute to both men's connoisseurship.

When he announced the auction last November, Berge, who first met Saint Laurent in 1958, told journalists the collection had come to the end of its life.

"I wanted this sale," Berge, 78, told them. "This collection could only have two destinies - end up in a museum, which would have been too onerous, or on the auction block.

"I chose the sale because I felt the collection would not be truly complete until the hammer fell on the last lot."

He added: "This sale is like a separation. You can continue to love, even after the divorce is final.

Source: The Australian

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NY Fashion Week - George Chakra

After years indulging in high couture, Lebanese designer Georges Chakra has debuted his new line in New York in stunning fashion.

In marked contrast to the vibe at the New York Fashion Week enveloped in a cloud of economic austerity, Chakra -- who dressed British actress Helen Mirren at the Oscars awards last year -- kicked off his show Saturday with a bang.

"It's incredibly beautiful, over the top. This is a red carpet must have," according to hip celebrity fashion commentator Esther Nash.

Always respectful of the feminine silhouette, Chakra's skin-tight, glossy dresses in futuristic colors range from red to jet black and silver to hot pink.

"There was life to the garment. This is very young, something you would wear," commented Nash.

Throwing out the somber mood that was tangible at the show's start Friday, with designers toning down their events to fit the financial pinch, Chakra's line, with its taffeta coat dress and wildly over-the-top neon garb, caught everyone's attention.

The designer received a standing ovation for his show.

"I would buy the little black dress with the plastic butterflies if I could afford it," said Nash.

Just before Chakra, French fashion house Lacoste, which is very active on the American market where it is competing against Ralph Lauren, did not show significant new designs.

But its collection was marked by warmth and soft colors like periwinkle blue and yellow sand.

Very few stripes were displayed this season by the artistic director of the brand, Christophe Lemaire, who wanted to make his mark with a soft hooded duffel coat.

Without revealing many details, officials of Lacoste announced during lunch that they are finalizing a project with the World Bank aimed at preservation of crocodiles threatened with extinction.

Jason Wu, a 26-year-old New York designer of Taiwanese origin, acquired instant celebrity status when First Lady Michelle Obama wore one of his dresses at an inaugural ball, at which she appeared with her husband on January 20.

Crowds gathered to view his presentation, but photographers waited in vain for the appearance of the first lady.

New York's Fashion Week, which opened Friday amid an economic recession, will showcase the collections of some 75 designers and is considered one of the most important fashion shows in the world.

On Saturday, the habitual catwalk displays were accompanied by a tribute to Barbie, the doll that celebrates in 2009 its 50th year.

Source: AFP

Inside Report On Couture

"Cost is not an issue.” I am sitting in the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris, talking to three South American couture customers in the hope that I might uncover some of the mysteries of the world of high fashion. Who buys? How much? Is the credit crunch biting? “You mean you pay whatever?” I ask. The ladies look at each other and smile. “You realise,” the youngest says, “buying couture is not like buying other clothes. You don’t buy, wear for a season, then throw away.”

“Oh, no,” her friend interjects. “At couture, you buy for life. Some seasons you buy a lot, others nothing.” “A lot?” I query. “Maybe three or four evening gowns, say from Lacroix or Elie Saab. A silk undercoat from Chanel. Couture is made to last. I send things back to be altered as the fashion moves and my figure changes.”

“So, how much do you pay?” Laughter. “You are an English gentleman. You cannot ask a lady that!” “Would your husband tell me?” More laughter. “He would hit you on the nose!” And that’s as far as I got. But there are ways of working out probable costs. When, for example, a couture evening dress is sent out to be photographed by a magazine, the insurance is usually about £100,000.

So, what about the customer base — and are more clothes being ordered? I asked Daphne Guinness, one of the few British women who regularly buys at this level. “It depends,” she says. “Last season, I bought nothing. This time, there are some things at Chanel that I like. I always look to fill holes in my wardrobe. I love Dior.” The Dior show cost £2m to put on. “Rich people haven’t all gone into hiding, you know.

W “Anyhow,” Guinness continues, “the big corporations have kept young designers like Gareth Pugh out for far too long. Maybe they can get a look-in now. And of course couture will survive. The world needs to be filled with romance and otherworldly dreams.”

So, who is buying? Chanel’s fashion president, Bruno Pavlovsky, tells me that, since 2007, demand for couture at Chanel has increased so much that a new atelier has opened; they now have 200 couture specialists. “We are putting a lot of resources behind this current collection,” he says. “We sense a great need for couture at this moment. We expect good sales worldwide.”

It’s important to remember, though, that sales of the showstoppers in any house are usually confined to no more than three per continent. The purpose of couture is publicity, which stimulates the market for less stratospherically priced clothes ranges, beauty and make-up, all bearing the company name.

Middle East sales are static. Surprisingly, all houses report keen interest from America. Russia is wobbling. Asian interest is not high. But it is the French who buy couture in serious numbers, often from the smaller couturiers such as Dominique Sirop, Stéphane Rolland and Franck Sorbier, who, along with Elie Saab, have healthy sales because they give sophisticated working women individual clothes at prices their high salaries can cope with, and which fit their lifestyles.

In terms of quality of fashion, it was a better couture week than most. The most dramatic statement was at Dior, where John Galliano continued along his tactful path of using Christian Dior’s thinking as the basis for his own statement. The mood was a continuation of 1950s Dior (though there was a spectacular new take on Bar, the iconic black-and-white suit in Dior’s first collection in 1947), all flouncy full skirts and needle-thin elegance. And, like the maestro, Galliano focused on corsets and the underpinnings of couture.

At Chanel, Lagerfeld gave us refinement, delicacy and a monochrome palette. It was very Chanel, personifying her comment that “as a woman advances in years, she should wear white . . . White smooths out everything”. At Gaultier, things looked up after a few lacklustre seasons. This was high-camp high fashion of the sort Paris does best. Razor-sharp tailoring, straight-cut shoulders and Gaultier’s trademark lingerie looks — very 1980s. More delicate but just as consummate, Christian Lacroix referenced the theatre, circus, corrida and a whore’s parlour in a gloriously colourful collection.

Of the others, Versace Atelier was a virtuoso performance of brilliant cutting and fabulous colour; Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy presented a beautifully feminine parade of brilliant shapes and cutting in a preponderance of beige tones. The same soft shades were clearly up the street of the customers at Elie Saab, which is why it is the only fashion house in Paris with seriously substantial sales at this level.

To quote Chanel from the 1920s: “The poetry of couture was responsible for cocktails, balls, dinner parties. The champagne flowed . . . we walked on a floor strewn with orchids.” Let’s hope couture can pull it off again to brighten these cash-strapped times.

CAN LUXURY SURVIVE THE CREDIT CRUNCH?

In his new book, The Luxury Strategy (Kogan Page £30), the marketing expert Jean-Noël Kapferer says brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Cartier, whose core profits come from their high-end goods, should come through the credit crunch unscathed. Those who rely heavily on sales of handbags, make-up and cheaper accessories will be harder hit.

“The luxury brand is the ordinary of extraordinary people and the extraordinary of ordinary people. Slashing prices makes you more for ordinary people. And that’s the beginning of the end.” Eek. “Luxury is about timelessness,” he goes on, saying it’s no coincidence that some of the most successful brands are family-run. “Cartier will tell you they’ve been through two world wars, one economic depression, three slumps . . . They take the long-term view.”

His advice: don’t panic. And employ counterintuitive strategies. “Raise your prices. Don’t pander to your customers’ wishes. Make it more difficult for your clients to buy. And don’t compare yourself with others. Gauguin did not compare himself with Renoir.”

Then he quotes a high-up executive at Mercedes-Benz: “ ’Our job is to make people dream of new products. As soon as they have money, they will buy. Life goes on.’ ”

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Fashion Style - Austerity Age

If the world's leading designers are to be believed, we now seem to inhabit an Elysian underworld, an earthly paradise where financial concerns are as far from our minds as, say, a desire for anything as obviously user-friendly as a classic, black jacket.

And so, what British Vogue described only months ago as "the new austere" – read play-safe (if beautiful) fashion that strives to be socially responsible and exudes a certain sobriety – has given way to less obviously pragmatic designs.

The new season decrees it is the job of fashion to provide an escape, to let unbridled fantasy and creativity run riot, safe in the knowledge that, with the economy on its knees, it is romance, opulence and individuality which will prevail.

We may not all be able to afford these clothes but we have the ability to dream about wearing them. Moreover, what is the point of a woman investing in a tailored trouser suit when work-wear is becoming increasingly irrelevant because, put bluntly, less people have a workplace to go to?

It would be misguided to draw any conclusions concerning fashion's future from the haute couture collections paraded in Paris this week. The jewel in the French fashion crown, Paris Haute Couture Week is aimed at no more than a few hundred women who have the inclination to part with thousands of pounds for a one-off, hand-made garment fitted to their every curve. This is the preserve of the super-rich and stylists of Hollywood A-listers in search of a grand statement for the Oscars. More significant is the recession's effect on the ready-to-wear collections: it may be cold outside but spring/summer's designs are making their way into stores. "If people are going to invest in fashion now, they need to know it's worth it," says Alexander McQueen. "They're not going to want to buy a cashmere coat they can wear any season, they are looking for something more individual, and from a more individual designer. Fashion is about fantasy as well as being commercial and sometimes people lose sight of that."

From McQueen we can expect impossibly elaborate, highly engineered clothing intended to make its wearer stand out: wood grain-printed all-in-ones, crystal, enamelled flowers in tulle and more.

McQueen is not alone. At Prada, home to ribbed socks, A-line skirts and round-necked sweaters, we find lightweight sweet nothings cut from what looks like gold leaf and trimmed with ribbons and bows.

At Louis Vuitton, it is maribou feathers in tropical colours and the most over-wroughtly high sandals imaginable. For Dolce & Gabbana, never a label aimed at the understated, shoulder pads just became even larger (and circular), embroideries more intricate and accessories more ornate. Then there are polyvinyl dresses that look like deflated footballs (Comme des Garcons) and others that appear to have been made out of high-end tablecloths (Vivienne Westwood, God love her), a "fur" coat of platinum blonde wigs (Maison Martin Margiela) and Elizabethan-style ruffs the size of car wheels (Gareth Pugh).

Fashion has historically flourished amid adversity, creatively if not financially. As with any cultural pursuit, when the going gets tough, the frontrunners rise to the challenge. The most celebrated work of Botticelli, which followed the Medici Bank crash in 1494, through to the Golden Age of Hollywood, the fruit of the worst financial crisis in Western history, have roots in adversity. Fashion, perhaps the most visible symbol of capitalist excess, is no exception.

It is no coincidence then that John Galliano, the creative director of Christian Dior, chose to revisit the most famous creation of the house's namesake: The New Look. Unveiled in February 1947, the New Look was possibly the most potent example of fashion excess alleviating hard times. It wasn't new at all but romantically retrogressive. As a reaction to wartime austerity and fabric rationing, Dior harked back to the Belle Epoque by sending out round-shouldered, wasp-waisted jackets and skirts so voluminous they caused an outrage. But if politicians – including Harold Wilson, then the president of the Board of Trade – criticised the frivolity and "let them eat cake"-type disregard for reality, women the world over sought out the New Look. Then, as now, only a handful would wear the originals but copies spread fast, like wildfire.

In the 1970s, the floral-printed, Edwardian-inspired designs of Laura Ashley were a quaintly British take on bucolic life in better times. More importantly, the three-day week and the winter of discontent spawned first punk and then new romanticism, both of which dictated that mainstream attire was for the middle-aged and out of touch. These were clothes for anarchists and were notable for their over-turning of convention and the fact that even the main protagonists – Westwood and her then partner Malcolm McLaren – were advocating a DIY approach that suggested style need not be bought.

Anyone courageous enough could, and did, rustle up an approximation of the look, customising second-hand finds from Oxfam and cutting up black bin-liners in a manner which makes today's slavish attachment to budget high-street fashion seem unimaginative to the point of banal.

When recession hit at the end of the 1980s, power-dressing Dynasty-style gave way to deconstruction – conceptual fashion was born. Japanese designers Comme des Garcons and Yohji Yamamoto introduced an oversized, dark and distressed aesthetic that undermined our preconceived idea of status to the point where some of their most memorable early work came peppered with holes. The bourgeois fashion establishment was, quite simply, lost for words and it was left to critics of art and architecture to wear and write about this look. Later, the Belgian designer Martin Margiela turned clothes inside out, literally sewing the shoulder pads that had come to represent the brash dress codes of the era on to the outside of clothes.

Fast-forward 20 years and, with the value of hindsight, fashion offers up a dazzling amalgamation of all these things and more, united only in an apparent disregard for convention and what is widely assumed to be the strictures of "wearable" clothing.

"We don't all want to dress like soldiers, in the same uniform, for the same price," says McQueen. "There is a viewpoint that people should play safe because they can't afford to frighten their customers but, in fact, the opposite is true. You have to push forward and realise the power of fantasy and escapism if you want to survive."

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