Sarah Mower: I agree, Nicole, the reward of being at great fashion shows is the sensation—the being able to feel or see something you couldn’t have guessed at before you went in. It also sunk in this season exactly how much it’s a competition for space in our memories. The battle not to be forgettable is real. When you’re immersed in it, it really stretches the limits of what it is to be human; how much our brains can take on board, what touches us, what will stick in there after the moment? How do we give names to what we felt and why? There have been a lot of conversations and confrontations around those very subjects this past 10 days, and what is already being done to us by the invasion of social media and AI.
Memories can’t always be bought by vast budgets. The shows that stick in my mental hard drive actually bear little correlation to how much was spent on them. Undercover, Loewe, Courrèges, Comme des Garçons, Balenciaga, and Miu Miu are top of my mind, and each for completely different reasons. Equally, it was seeing and speaking to Róisín Pierce, Steve O Smith, Paula Canovas del Vas, and to all the emerging designers who were in the LVMH Prize showroom. Big brands are constantly trying to convince us that they know all about what “ young people want,” but that can’t be done by marketing data and reading the runes of algorithms. Youth points to what age does not yet know or is deaf to.
Human creativity is unquantifiable, uncontrollable, intimately personal, renegade, and out-there. Machines can’t count any of that, but to me, it’s still what makes fashion so exciting, so full of possibility, wonder, and intellectual challenge. Beauty, sexuality, struggle, anger, tenderness, satire, angelic intentions, phenomenal artistry, and raw honesty were tied up in the shows and experiences I found unforgettable. Undercover was shocking because it made every woman there feel, by contrast, how little our daily, interior lives are seen, heard, and respected by fashion. Loewe: in a class of its own for the way Jonathan Anderson brilliantly configures clothes, while settling us a cultural jigsaw-puzzle to solve. Nicolas di Felice at Courrèges for (excuse the filthy pun) fingering something that gives women pleasure, as well as giving great 21st century French design. What Rei Kawakubo had to say about her anger stabbed me to the heart.