CREATING FUTURE – ACTION TO TAKE NEXT, The Next Landscape of Mode as Seen from the Non-Western World for Harper’s BAZAAR

Originally written in Japanese for the CREATING FUTURE section of Harper’s BAZAAR, March 2021 issue. This text is an English translation and republication of the original essay.

Trump and COVID-19: What to Think About Before the Storm Has Passed

Diversity and Sustainability: Trump, and the Post-Trump Era

In November 2020, the United States held a presidential election. For anyone trying to read the future of fashion, this was not merely a political event in another country, conveniently staged on the far side of the Pacific. Fashion has never had the luxury of pretending to be innocent of America. Its mainstream currents are pulled, with almost embarrassing fidelity, by the movements of the United States: a nation that has managed to dominate Western society from entertainment to finance while preserving the self-image of a gifted adolescent unfairly asked to clean its room. And we should not forget another stubborn fact: the larger movements in fashion are often born from counterculture.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” Counterculture, too, becomes legible through what it opposes. It is not born in a vacuum; a vacuum is too polite. It appears when something large, vulgar, or simply overconfident provides the wall against which an outline can finally be drawn.

The Trump administration raised the slogan “America First,” proposed a wall along the Mexican border, imposed tariffs on countries around the world, and called for a return to domestic production. Yet the slogan, with the elegance of a boomerang thrown by a man who has never seen one return, encouraged liberal media to consolidate under the banner of anti-Trumpism. As a result, race, nationality, religion, and gender became more charged keywords, awareness of diversity sharpened, and interest in what was not identifiably American intensified.

In fashion, attention turned toward creators from outside the Western center: Demna Gvasalia and Gosha Rubchinskiy, both emerging from the post-Soviet sphere; K-pop, represented globally by BLACKPINK; and 88rising, which brought Asian artists such as Higher Brothers into a new international frame. From Brexit to the Mexican wall, the great political gestures of the period tried to close borders, as though history were a nightclub with an anxious door policy. At the same time, media voices warned of division with the solemnity of physicians diagnosing a disease in which they themselves were already implicated. Yet beneath these official anxieties, cross-border communication through social media became more active, and grassroots connections among ordinary people grew stronger.

When speaking about this political turn, it is impossible to ignore sustainability, which rose almost as rapidly as diversity into a major social current. Many will remember Greta Thunberg’s furious address at the United Nations, where she demanded, “How dare you!” The scene spread across media not only because of the sentence itself, but because its target appeared to be a cast of global leaders, beginning with President Trump, who were, to put it gently, not exactly engineered for sympathetic close-ups. Had the addressee been Joe Biden or Barack Obama, the scene might not have acquired quite the same symbolic force. Drama requires a villain; politics, when exhausted, often outsources its moral clarity to children.

In fashion, the first figure who comes to mind in relation to sustainability is Stella McCartney, who has pursued environmental advocacy for nearly two decades. Once, the position of being “a designer committed to environmental protection” was almost eccentric, a little like bringing a conscience to a champagne reception. But LVMH, a group unusually sensitive to the movement of the age whenever sensitivity and market opportunity happen to wear the same coat, invested in her and appointed her as an adviser for its sustainability projects. This showed that the topic had become impossible to ignore in corporate social responsibility. At the same time, although ambitious numerical targets are now announced in the name of sustainability, it remains uncertain whether these goals will take root in any truly sustainable way. A target number, after all, is a remarkably elegant object: it looks like action while requiring only the future to prove it wrong.

Light Falling on Asia Through the Cracks of an Unfree Reality

Looking back on fashion during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the Spring/Summer 2021 season was discussed less for what the collections contained than for the methods by which collections could be presented under restricted conditions. The question was not simply what clothes were being shown, but how fashion could continue to stage itself when reality had become inhospitable to staging. Fashion, like monarchy, suffers when no one is allowed to gather and look impressed.

As events were cancelled around the world and digital presentations proceeded by trial and error, Hedi Slimane’s Celine used drone footage to present films for both menswear and womenswear that were sharply tuned to the moment. For the men’s collection, he cast TikTok influencer Noen Eubanks and used music by Tiagz, also popular on TikTok. These details did not become major topics in Japan, but the locations, a racetrack and a stadium in Monaco, were familiar environments for Europe’s wealthy classes. They formed an interesting counterpoint to the casual image of the collection. One could say it was youth culture filmed from the altitude of capital, where even rebellion enjoys a very good view.

Brands that took risks and staged physical shows head-on also left a strong impression. Jacquemus held a show in a wheat field in the Parc naturel regional du Vexin francais, about an hour northwest of Paris, and it became a subject of intense discussion among industry people who had been starved for information, images, and perhaps even weather. The Comme des Garcons show in Tokyo seemed to demonstrate that, when one wants to send a message from outside Paris, the runway format is, after all, still the most effective. The runway survives because fashion, despite everything it says about the future, remains deeply attached to the ancient force of bodies moving in a line, which is also, inconveniently, the structure of both ritual and retail.

The most direct answer to the question “for whom is a show staged?” was perhaps the Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring/Summer 2021 show by Virgil Abloh, held in Shanghai, a city in China, which had emerged from the pandemic earlier than much of the rest of the world. Before the show, during Paris Digital Fashion Week, Louis Vuitton released a film in which the collection appeared to be transported by container from Paris to somewhere else. A month later, the Shanghai show unfolded as the container ship arrived at the port and the collection was presented. The metaphor was not shy: fashion had become cargo with a soundtrack.

Opinions about the content of the show were divided, but considering the scale of investment required for the event, it clearly demonstrated the simple fact that China had become the most important market for brand business. In the womenswear fashion weeks that followed, many brands presented products visibly conscious of the Chinese market. Fashion, which has always enjoyed speaking in the abstract language of dreams, was at that moment speaking with unusual fluency in the concrete language of logistics. The dream, it turned out, came with a shipping route.

For many years, fashion brands around the world located their production bases in China and Southeast Asia. Asian factories, once treated as symbols of mass production, now possess advanced technologies, improved quality, and the capacity to produce everything from cutting-edge smartphones to luxury brand products. Cities that achieved rapid economic growth have become new markets. This is not an exotic reversal; it is the bill finally being read aloud at the end of a very long dinner. The products of BIÉDE, a brand I produce and distribute through KLEINSTEIN, are also made with the involvement of a production team in Guangzhou, China, a team that has supplied products to European and American brands.

The fact that one of the largest fashion shows of the season took place not in Paris, supposedly the center of fashion, nor in London, Milan, or New York, but in Asia, in the Far East long treated as peripheral, forces us to confront a much larger theme: the relationship between fashion and politics, between West and East. Asia was once a site of production and consumption, a backstage large enough to be mistaken for the world and yet rarely invited to speak onstage. Can it now become something more than a follower and consumer of Western culture? Can it become a site from which culture is newly generated and transmitted? For those of us in Asia, including Japan, a vast possibility is opening in front of us.

When we speak about fashion, we tend to speak only about trends, perhaps because trends are easier to photograph than structures. But if we follow both its actual function and the origin of the word, fashion is intimately related to the condition, the mode, the very appearance of human society. It is not only clothes. The music one listens to, the films one watches, the writers one reads, the newspapers and magazines one subscribes to, the city one lives in, the political party or influencer one supports, one’s thought, and almost everything surrounding one’s life can now be discussed within the context of fashion.

The strong wind that blew as politics lost its liberal character had the opposite effect of bringing diversity and sustainability to the surface. Now, as we move into the post-Trump era, the question is how we can prove that these themes were not merely trends born from that wind. The attention gathered around Asia must also be made into something more than a passing weather pattern. All of this depends on the sustainability of our own thinking and action. Fashion loves storms, because storms make silhouettes dramatic. But after the storm, someone still has to build a house that does not immediately collapse, preferably without issuing a press release about its ethical foundations before checking the roof.

This article is republished here as an English translation of the original Japanese text written for Harper’s BAZAAR.