Do we even need new ideas?

Thoughts on Peter Do's debut at Helmut Lang

Welcome back! After last week’s announcement post, this is my first “proper” newsletter — thanks for being here. I said it a few times already, but September’s newsletters will all be free, and from October onwards I’ll be posting a 50-50 mix of paid and free content. So if you want to get my writing every week, now’s your time to become a paid subscriber.

Fashion month is kicking off in New York right now, and today I’m looking at one of the most talked-about shows of the week — Peter Do’s debut at Helmut Lang — and questioning what the real role of designers and critics should be in our age of crisis.

I’ll be finishing up with some interesting reading material, so make sure to stick around to the end.

Do we even need new ideas?

On Friday, Peter Do showed his debut collection for Helmut Lang, the ’90s legend whose work is still to this day worshipped and imitated across the industry. Helmut Lang (the brand) has had a bumpy ride since Helmut Lang (the person) quit fashion altogether in 2005. Lang initially sold his label to the Prada Group in 1999, but now it’s owned by Fast Retailing (the same guys who own Uniqlo), and as teams came and went, the brand slipped into obscurity.

Peter Do, the brand’s new designer, has been building a sizeable audience with his own label — which, much like Lang, trades in subversive minimalism — and so expectations were high for his debut. Do’s collection reworked familiar Lang-isms like smart tailoring, straps and poetry, but the critics weren’t exactly blown away — The New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman called it “Lang lite”, while The Cut’s Cathy Horyn snarked that “we might as well go to Uniqlo” (ouch). The Washington Post’s Rachel Tashjian made the point that the kind of minimalism Lang practiced just doesn’t feel as compelling when the world is full of Everlane, Muji and yes, Uniqlo.

These are all totally valid arguments — Do’s reworking of Lang’s legacy wasn’t exactly groundbreaking — but in my opinion, that’s not really the point. I’m not convinced that we even need designers to be giving us new ideas anymore.

Traditionally, the role of critics and the reviews they write is to help everyone else make sense of a designer’s new ideas. Every six months, a designer launches a new collection with a new runway show, and the critics tell us what to make of it. Reviews might have been an important part of the fashion ecosystem back in the glory days of McQueen, Westwood and Gaulthier (and Lang!) but from my experience, nobody cares. I wrote hundreds of show reviews in my time at Highsnobiety, and only a handful of people outside of the brand’s PR team ever bothered to read them.

The thing is, nothing’s really new anymore. In the decade I’ve spent working in fashion, the role of a designer has shifted from someone proposing new aesthetics and silhouettes into a cultural curator, merchandiser and marketer. Brands don’t sell new ideas anymore, they sell remixed versions of old ones. The designer’s role is much less artistic, more about making things to feed into the machine, and in that same stretch of time, the machine has gotten a lot bigger. When I started my Highsnob job in 2014, the net worth of the Arnault family at the top of LVMH was $33.5 billion, now just Bernard is worth $230 billion.

Clearly, a totally original idea doesn’t count for much anymore. And while that’s sad for everyone wishing we could just get back to the high fashion glory days, the industry has much bigger problems to worry about now — namely, its contribution to the climate emergency threatening all life on earth.

Which brings us back to the designers. How do they make sense of their work in the midst of this crisis? And how might we, as an industry, change our relationship to that work?

I found the answer in an anecdote from Vanessa Friedman’s critique of the show, about a Helmut Lang pantsuit she owned in the early 00s:

It made me feel like both the coolest and the most grown-up versions of myself, as if I were a person who could talk to anyone, could go into any room… I wore it until I wore it out, and have been in mourning for it ever since.

That completely captures the essence of what we need from designers. Overconsumption and throwaway novelties are what’s driving fashion’s enormous impact on the planet, and to fight against them, we need clothes that we’ll adore wearing until they literally can’t be worn anymore. We need them to come at realistic prices, so people can trade up from fast fashion and into investment pieces, and we need them to come in a broad range of sizes, so more people can invest in them.

This new perspective might not as theatrical or sexy as the glory days of high fashion, but it is a lot more impactful — and this is where Helmut Lang’s original work, and Peter Do’s reimagining of it, suddenly become extremely relevant.

As Do explained in an interview with BoF ahead of his debut, “there’s a need for honest value clothing that doesn’t cost you a mortgage”. He added that his work will be about “building a foundation that you can look back on and use every season”. Lang’s work was conceptually groundbreaking but it was also realistic — people could wear it a lot, it didn’t cost a fortune, and he reworked the same idea again and again. That’s another important element Do picked up on, telling BoF that “when you look at his body of work, you’ll see the same shirt done 10 different ways, season after season”. It looks like Do’s Helmut Lang will sit at around $300-400 for most pieces, which is not cheap by any stretch, but it’s not much more than a couple of pairs of Nikes or a few months of throwaway stuff from Weekday.

When I looked through the looks from Do’s debut, the first thing I thought was that I might finally have found a great black suit — because nobody makes a great black suit right now, not one that works for me anyway. I don’t care how original the idea is, I just need a strong shoulder, a nice fabric, a loose leg and a price that works for me.

And that’s kinda it, if you ask me. We don’t need non-stop newness from designers, because their clothes are meant to be worn. And when it comes to the critics, the reviews and the discourse online, we need to primarily evaluate fashion not on its concept, but on its longevity. And by that I don’t just mean a product’s physical durability, but its emotional and cultural staying power. It’s not enough for clothes to simply last a long time — we need them to be loved for a long time, to be seen as important for a long time.

Everything Else

Dussmann, the iconic (and absolutely massive) bookshop in Berlin, recently picked up my book, as well as. A.P., a gorgeous space up in Wedding. Dussmann and A.P. are very different bookstores, but I’m super happy to be there. Go pay them a visit if you’re in the area, and get in touch if you’re interested in selling my book at your own store!

I adore Nick Cave’s newsletter, The Red Hand Files. This response to a despondent 20 year old with no hope for the future is poignant and beautifully written. Quick extract: “the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things”. Chef’s kiss!
— The Red Hand Files

NYU has divested from fossil fuels, after years of pressure from students and activists. The university’s endowment (basically, the investment fund financing the institution) is estimated to be over $5 billion — and now not a single cent of that will be financing fossil fuels. Activism works!
— The Guardian

It turns out that Jun Takahashi, founder and designer of Undercover, is a very good painter. Somehow I am not surprised!
— Instagram

I really want to read Geoff Rickly’s Someone Who Isn’t Me. I was a huge Thursday fan as a kid — hearing Full Collapse aged 14 was a truly pivotal moment — so I’m dying to get into this semi-fictional account of his experience and recovery from heroin.
— Huck Magazine