Usher’s Sleeve and the Death of Craft
Making clothes is engineering
For over a month, I have pondered whether I should write about the Met Gala because I didn’t have anything nice to write. I don’t want to be negative in this newsletter, I prefer writing about positive examples and possibilities within the fashion industry. So, I’m not going to be negative in today’s entry. But I want to straighten a few misconceptions. Let’s ignore the fact I’m a month late to the party and dig into it.
Met Gala is a huge fashion event with an enormous online audience. How enormous? This year’s Met Gala had more viewers than the Super Bowl and the Oscars. Per Condé Nast, 74 million people saw the live stream on the first Monday of May which is 19 times bigger than the population of Croatia. 19 Croatias watching celebrities walking up a flight of stairs (because that’s pretty much all you get from the live stream).
The live stream was broadcast across different websites and social media platforms. Celebrities posted about it, stylists bragged about sensational vintage finds they pulled, and social media critics spent the whole night commenting on styling and red-carpet gimmicks. Together they helped the Met Gala earn a media-impact value (MIV) of $1.4 billion. MIV is an algorithm created in 2022 by a data company Launchmetrics which allows brands to assign monetary value to online posts, interactions or articles. This helps them decide which media or influencers could be the best fit to help them sell their product.
So, naturally, the Met Gala brings a lot of money to brands that support it. It brings them enormous online visibility and they’re willing to pay good money for it. I’m opening this newsletter with numbers to challenge your perception of the Met Gala being a celebration of the textile craft. In its beginnings maybe it really was. I wasn’t around to witness it. But today it’s basically just an expensive ad.
I’m bad with numbers. So, let’s dig into this issue through popular culture or, more accurately, the movie (specifically the movie and not the book) that still explains the fashion industry so very well.
The cerulean sweater chooses you
I’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada numerous times. I know many lines from the script by heart, but the part that comes up in my head the most is Miranda Priestly’s monologue about the cerulean sweater. It so effortlessly captures our tendency to trivialize fashion. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about or have, god forbid, never seen the movie, watch the clip here and then return to reading.
What Meryl Streep is saying is that what we wear is not our choice. It’s often not even the thing we want to wear. And today that’s more true than it ever was. We are so bombarded with images that it’s impossible to know if you genuinely like something or if you’ve been influenced by someone whose perfect online image you admire. Or by what that piece of clothing or a logo might say about you to others. Or a celebrity you’ve seen walking up the stairs to the Met on the first Monday in May.
Like many other fashion events today, the Met Gala is often reduced to an aesthetically pleasing image published online. (Does anyone even remember what the exhibition is about?) But as the MIV and the cerulean sweater parable demonstrate, it’s so much more than that. It attracts substantial amounts of money from brands who want to use its impact to increase sales. And guess what? That’s exactly what they get from it.
Making clothes is engineering
I have an engineering master's degree from the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb where I studied fashion design. Whether it’s justifiable to get an engineering degree after studying fashion design at that particular faculty (or if I myself deserve one for that matter) I might try to answer some other time. However, it is a technical faculty so, apart from drawing it and thinking about its meaning, you need to learn how to construct and sew a garment. It’s engineering.
Encyclopedia Britannica defines engineering as the application of science to the optimum conversion of the resources of nature to the uses of humankind. That is exactly what our ancestors had in mind when they fashioned a needle out of animal bones to sew together two pieces of animal skin 30,000 years ago.
Those fundamental rules of making clothes haven’t changed until this day. We learned to grow, harvest, and weave natural fibres. We experimented with garment construction to make the most functional garments and learned how to automate the process to make clothes faster. But, much like a bicycle or a hot water bottle, clothes haven’t changed that much since they were first made. We still construct them out of different pieces of fabric or leather which we then sew together.
The craft is dead long live the craft
Fashion, on the other hand, is defined by change. It’s addicted to novelty which needs to be incorporated faster than ever. But in the 20th century, it hit a wall. Few designers have since then managed to create novelty and, in most cases, did it only on a philosophical level. Others have turned to gimmicks. And gimmicks can be great. Alexander McQueen loved them. He used robots on his runway, put women in heels impossible to walk in, hired the first amputee to ever be featured on the catwalk, and asked models to display their buttcheeks in now very famous bumster trousers.
His shows were wonderful pieces of performance art, but not once in the process of working on them did he forget that before he was an artist he was an engineer. He started his career as a tailor on Savile Row, the famous Mayfair street known for traditional bespoke men’s tailoring. There he learned everything there is to know about pattern cutting and sewing. And that was well before he even went to university. Consequently, every dress he made later in his career was perfectly cut every single time.
After his death, Sarah Burton carried that legacy on with much respect and dedication. And the biggest proof of that is her menswear. Usually deprived of gimmicks, men's suits are where the masks fall. And she had nothing to hide. Every lapel, every pocket, every seam was perfection. (Think Eddie Redmayne at last year’s Met Gala or Timmy in Venice in 2022.)
Her successor, Sean McGirr, failed that test. For this year’s Met Gala he dressed Usher who appeared on the red carpet in a suit that wasn’t fitted properly, the seams were crooked, and the pants too long. McGirr himself arrived with Lana del Rey dressed in something that was supposed to be an hommage to the late McQueen’s autumn/winter 2006 collection, The Widows of Culloden. He succeded in attracting the public’s attention especially because Sarah Burton very rarely referenced her predecessor in such a direct way. However, Del Rey’s dress was a mere shadow of the original, with an abundance of tulle hiding the lack of craftsmanship that McQueen’s original pieces exuded.
McGirr used a gimmick to hide the lack of an engineer’s skill. Olivier Rousteing of Balmain used the same tool. The dress he made for singer Tyla was also one of the viral ones. Its base was a polymer moulded around Tyla’s body. The polymer was then covered with silk organza that extended into a skirt all the way to the ground. Finally, the whole base was sprayed with sand using a new technique developed just days before the Met Gala by the artist Flory Brisset. The technique wasn’t perfected though, so the result was a very stiff dress that kept shedding sand and in which Tyla could barely move.
Her and Balmain’s teams were ready for a disaster so they hired four men to carry her up the stairs, and, according to Vanity Fair, arranged people who would wait for her with a hotel robe inside the Met in case the dress fell apart. (At this point, I’m reluctant to call the piece a dress because it doesn’t have much in common with what we call a dress.) Once she was dropped off at the top of the stairs, it was apparent that she couldn’t walk or sit, so Rousteing decided to do something that his and Tyla’s teams hadn’t planned on before.
He took a pair of stationery store scissors that Instagram’s partnerships director, Eva Chen, found for him in the vast halls of the Met, and cut the piece into a mini dress. To see a designer butcher his own dress (whether you consider it a work of art or an engineer’s invention), broke my heart (regardless of the fact I consider that dress neither of the above, it was a sand sprayed canvas and a not very well executed one). The craft is dead, I knew that. But wasn’t this event supposed to be about delicate pieces of clothing so finely made, so rare and precious they could never be worn again?
I guess, in a way, that dress was exactly that but the exhibition’s curators had something else entirely in mind when they thought of dresses that can never be worn again. They thought of delicate pieces of clothing so meticulously made, mostly made even without a sewing machine, with a needle and thread held in one’s hand.
It’s clear why Balmain made this dress just as it’s obvious why Sean McGirr recreated one of McQueen’s most famous dresses. According to Launchmetrics, Balmain earned $39.3 million in MIV and Alexander McQueen $35.9 million which makes them the second and third best-performing brands at the Met Gala this year (Maison Margiela was the only brand topping them with $40.8 million earned in MIV).
And once again, fashion was reduced to a gimmick, a pretty image that generates sales. And that’s totally fine. But my goal with this newsletter is to share awareness of what’s behind the pretty image. And assuming you want to know what it is, I invite you to dig deeper. Making clothes is an engineer’s job and, just like an H&M T-shirt can’t be compared to a Merz B. Schwannen one, it’s not always good because it’s presented via a pretty image.
In this part of the newsletter, I usually recommend some stuff.
What I’m watching
On theme with today’s newsletter, I encourage you to watch the Balenciaga series on Disney+. It might shed more light on what I’m trying to say here.
What I’m doing
In an unexpected turn of events, I’m holding a newsletter writing workshop on Thursday in Zagreb. Here’s a link where you’ll find out all the details on how to apply.
What I’m writing
The new issue of Kàko magazine which I edit and write for is out. Its theme is the street and I wrote three pieces on street fashion photography, fruit ladies of Hanoi and one autograph collector from 100 years ago. Order it here. In other news, I wrote a piece on print magazines for the summer issue of Elle Croatia. It’ll be out on Friday.
Thank you, I’ve learnt a lot !