Is fashion too obsessed with TikTok?
They will try on anything: crop tops, skirts, high heel boots. Were living a revolutionary moment in personal style, and much of it is happening, or at least starting, online. Last weekend, the New York Times reported about how the fashion world, especially retailers and trend forecasters for department stores and mall brands, determine what to sell. The pandemic threw a wrench into old models for predicting whats cool for one thing, it has made parade surveying and making quick copies obsolete and spotting trends is now an obsessive study of web traffic and reviews, Instagram and TikTok posts, wedding registry data, and restaurants and hotel reservations. It has always been a piece of the puzzle for many chains, but it has become essential to their survival over the past year or so. If you go to a department store or fast fashion retailer, youll see a bunch of seemingly unrelated items that nonetheless tie together under the TikTok style umbrella: fruit print camp shirts, Grateful Dead sweat shorts. , Chelsea boots (yes, in mid-June! ), and lace buttons. Its like stepping into your iPhone. But the trend has bled far beyond the confines of your local mall. Last weekend, Milan Fashion Week presented two spring 2022 collections that seemed to confirm that fashion is becoming extremely onlineand that TikToks clinging to fashion extends to brands that looked from the bottom up to the upward trends of social media. The first was a collection filled with crop tops by Silvia Venturini Fendi, who designs mens clothing for Italian leather brands. (Kim Jones, following in the footsteps of the late Karl Lagerfeld, has been dealing with womenswear since last year.) And then Sunday came a second surprisingly web out of menswear from Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada, who are co  Creative directors since early 2020. Both The shows have raised new questions about the people influencing here. While brands once created products that found their way to TikTok influencers (either organically or through media partnerships and giveaways), it now looks like the TikToks trending machine is setting the order. of the day of the track. Courtesy of Prada. Courtesy of Prada. Courtesy of Prada. At Prada, the concept was simple: the models meandered through a dark red tunnel, designed by starch firm Rem Koolhaass OMA which, minutes after the video started, suddenly opened onto a pristine Sardinian beach, where models splashed and danced in the water. As indicated in the press release (in full), the program was about TUNNEL DE LA JOIE; EMERGENCY OF FEELINGS; and NORMAL UTOPIA. (Its another new wave: the press release, once a place of frolicking prose, has in many cases been reduced to a handful of vigorous words.) That is, simple pleasures. Nothing great to explain or ponder here! Just a few young people on the beach. There were short shorts, bobs, sheer knits, fishermans rompers and even skorts but, strangely, none of the instant classics youd expect from Prada, like last seasons nappa leather bombers. . You know the ones that I still think about, and that Drake has already managed to get his hands on, despite the fact that they will not be in stores for months. Basically, although it lacked the joy of, say, Jacquemus, who turned a relatively simple cocktail of floral shirts, tanned skin, and broad smiles into a global phenomenon. In a quote released after the show, Miuccia Prada said the collection was meant to communicate a simple and straightforward message in an overly complicated world. But the proposed idea seemed a little too obvious, especially for Prada, who is loved precisely because of the frequency with which he chooses to take the intellectual highway. Courtesy of Fendi. Courtesy of Fendi. Courtesy of Fendi. It may be the heat of early summer. A day earlier, Fendi had her own hot moment, showing off cropped, short-sleeved blazers with cropped shorts and faded pastels. It was a bit too much of the moment, not like a dripping ice cream cone or a biting Negroni or a sloppy kiss. More like an unsatisfying kiss.