Is Fashion Dead?

If it wasn't so funny, it might be tragic how millions of people around the globe are convinced that we are approaching the world's end. After all, the year 2000 can only mean the Apocalypse. Usually these types of ideas are relegated to specific facets of society: messianic religious movements or anti-technology groups. It's the end of the world, the end of Virtue, the end of the Modern Welfare State and now Teri Agins, a veteran fashion journalist at the Wall Street Journal, has written a book called The End of Fashion.

To be fair, Agins doesn't suggest that mannequins and boutiques, from Rodeo Drive to Newbury Street, are going to start spontaneously combusting in celebration of the new year. Rather, Agins crafts an incredibly selective history of twentieth-century fashion, concluding that haute couture has taken 40 years to die and the final funeral peals only happen to coincide with the end of the world. Escalating operating costs, conglomeration and insidious in-fighting, when coupled with "democratic" trends in the market, sealed fashion's fate.

The history of fashion began in Paris and ended in the United States, though by the time the Americans had entered the scene, the party was mostly over. The "clothes horses" of the '80s "were known to blow $100,000 or more on a couture wardrobe on a single Paris trip." These trans-Atlantic pirates, in the era of fashion news programs like CNN's "Style with Elsa Klensch" became the final guard of a dying industry, and Agins argues that we (you, me and her) looked up to them until our trust was broken. Haute Couture had never resembled the reality of the upper-middle and middle classes; it had been a fantasy. But eventually, the fantasy lost its grip, straying too far into the stratum of Mizrahi-style, wholly unwearable hoopla. This is how fashion died, Agins argues. It choked on its own opulence.

Enter the poseurs: Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Donna Karan.

With fashion dying on the continent, American designers raced to create a moderately high-priced look. It was by no means couture but still retained the notion of a label and so, we assume, a house of fashion. Agins points out that Tommy Hilfiger's designs are largely knock-offs of Ralph Lauren's designs which were the original knock-offs of the American flag--and this is so funny that I wish I could pass it off as my own observation.

Enter the scavengers: The Gap, Banana Republic.

Appealing to a slightly wider audience, these are labels without designers. While The Gap has succeeded in creating a GAP style that rivals any other in the pages of Vogue, Banana Republic has taken the approach of replicating and then mass-producing the couture look, so effectively that the differences become superficially indistinguishable, wooing many among the couture crowd.

The situation grows only worse when the star cast members forget their lines: the wealthy start dressing down, as a sport. Has the image of Jackie Onassis (Our Lady of the Dark Sunglasses) been removed from the canonical cathedral of American fashion only to be permanently replaced with the image of Rosie O'Donnell (Our Lady of the KMart)? May we forgive Agins her generalizations, as we forgive ourselves our errant tastes. And remind her that if she considers fashion to be art, she must allow it to transform. It seems that because the couture pieces don't sell so much anymore (imagine something with big slits and peacock feathers) they are no longer art. All that has happened is that the runway has transformed from an auction block to a museum exhibition. Agins does give excellent portraits of the designers and her extensive experience as a journalist in the fashion industry reveals itself in her sensitive rendering of the large personalities of the industry. Despite the attention to individual detail, though, Agins seems to have only constructed these figures so that they might be situated into a faulty Doomsday scheme of history. Far from the whimpering, feeble creature that Agins suggests, fashion--whether Ungaro, Tommy, or Banana--has become one of few artistic forces to seize upon contemporary American culture with a resounding bang, not a whimper.