Is Fashion Too Obsessed With TikTok?
Theyll try anything: crop tops, skirts, high-heel boots. Were living through a revolutionary moment in personal style, and much of it is happening, or at least starting, online. This past weekend, the New York Times reported on how the fashion world, especially retailers and trend forecasters for department stores and mall brands, have been determining what to sell. The pandemic threw a wrench in the old models for predicting whats coolfor one thing, it made surveying runway shows and working up quick copies obsoleteand trendspotting is now an obsessive study in web traffic and reviews, Instagram and TikTok posts, bridal registry data and restaurant and hotel bookings. This was always a piece of the puzzle for many chains, but it became central to their survival in the past year. If you go into a department store, or a fast fashion retailer, youll see a bunch of seemingly unconnected items that are nonetheless tied together under the umbrella of TikTok style: fruit-print camp shirts, Grateful Dead sweatshorts, Chelsea boots (yes, in mid-June! ), and lace button-ups. Its like walking into your iPhone. But the trend has bled out far beyond the confines of your local mall. This past weekend, Milan Fashion Week featured two Spring 2022 collections that seemed to confirm that fashion is getting extremely onlineand that TikToks hold on fashion extends to brands that used to look down their noses at bottom-up trends from social media. First was a crop top-stuffed collection from Silvia Venturini Fendi, who designs the Italian leather brands menswear. (Kim Jones, following in the late Karl Lagerfelds footsteps, has handled womenswear since last year.) And then on Sunday came a surprisingly webby second menswear outing from Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada, who have been co-creative directors since early 2020. Both shows raised new questions about whos doing the influencing here. Whereas brands once created products that found their way to TikTok influencers (either organically and through media partnerships and gifting), it now seems that TikToks trend machine is setting the runway agenda. Courtesy of Prada. Courtesy of Prada. Courtesy of Prada. At Prada, the concept was simple: the models meandered through a deep red tunnel, designed by starchitect Rem Koolhaass firm OMAwhich, a few minutes into the video, suddenly opened onto a pristine beach in Sardinia, where models splashed and danced in the water. As the press release read (in its entirety), the show was about the TUNNEL TO JOY; URGENCY OF FEELINGS; and UTOPIA OF NORMALITY. (This is another new wave: the press release, once a place for frolicking prose, has been reduced in many cases to a handful of vibey words.) Which is to say: simple pleasures. Nothing big to explain or mull over here! Just some young guys on the beach. There were short-shorts, bucket hats, thin knits, fisherman rompers, and even some skortsbut, strangely, none of the instant-classics weve come to expect from Prada, like the nappa leather bombers from last season. You know the ones that Im still thinking about, and that Drake has somehow already managed to get his hands on, despite the fact that they wont be in stores for months. Basically, though it lacked the joie of, say, Jacquemus, which has turned a relatively simple cocktail of floral shirts, tan skin, and broad smiles into a worldwide phenomenon. In a quote distributed after the show, Miuccia Prada said that the collection was meant to communicate a simple and straightforward message in a too-complicated world. But the idea on offer felt a little too obviousespecially for Prada, which is beloved precisely because how frequently it chooses to take the intellectual high road. Courtesy of Fendi. Courtesy of Fendi. Courtesy of Fendi. Maybe its the early-summer heat. A day earlier, Fendi had its own thats hot moment, showing cropped, short-sleeve blazers with short shorts and washed-out pastels. It felt a little too of the momentnot like a dripping ice cream cone or a biting Negroni or a sloppy kiss. More like an unsatisfying peck.