If a designer wardrobe is not in your budget, is the runway still a worthwhile spectator sport?
In recent years, the high fashion establishment has adopted streetwear, workwear, and athleisure trends to present luxury clothing as an accessible commodity for the every-person, bringing its brands to a larger middle-income market. This strategy has been incredibly successful, as ready-to-wear designer goods now stand as an integrated fixture in the wardrobes of sneakerheads, street style buffs, and hypebeasts alike. Designers like Virgil Abloh, Raf Simons, and Stella McCartney have become cult figures followed closely by masses fascinated by their aesthetic visions.
With the increasing popularity of designer ready-to-wear has come a growing audience for the runway collections of the same brands. Runway fashion and its media have been carving out a larger place in the cultural zeitgeist as a derivative of popular designer streetwear. This has led me to ask: even if a designer wardrobe isn’t in your budget, is there value in runway fashion as a spectator sport? People’s thoughts on runway fashion usually sit strongly in the binary of either fascination or disdain—I’m interested in what drives us to land in either camp, and what exists in the space between.
What even is runway fashion?
The runway can generally be broken down into the categories of haute couture and ready-to-wear. Haute couture designs usually don’t make it to a larger consumer market and are created with the intention of experimentation, not paying any mind to price tag or the practicalities of everyday dress. These styles can be purchased in very limited runs, but each piece comes with an extra-hefty price tag.
Ready-to-wear styles are typically mass-produced in set sizes and can be bought directly from an online or physical retailer, like those on Bloor Street just north of The Strand’s office (if you’ve never stepped foot in these hyper-bougie establishments, I’d recommend it—both to witness the oddity of their radical luxury, and for the free champagne). Brands can create both haute couture and ready-to-wear collections, often displaying each in separate runway collections.
Why the fascination?
Clothing is communication: of cultural background, personal history, sexuality, subcultures we align ourselves with, socioeconomic status, and taste. The body is a canvas on which we have the chance to display a stylized inference of who we are. If we are dressing intentionally, we are displaying ourselves as we want to be perceived. Dress is the external representation of self-image and attitude, or a cleverly constructed costume to mask insecurity.
Ideally, the runway is the space where a designer can expand on the terms of expression of everyday clothing. Here, they compose impressionistic dreamworlds to explore their aesthetic curiosities. The runway is a holistic experience, with extravagant props, sets, and performances coming together to construct the designer’s newly imagined decorative universe. These spaces are built to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to wear—expressing the identities, questions, and inspirations held by their designers. Here, they explore cultural niches and push trends that trickle down to the street. And like all other art forms, runway fashion responds to and critiques greater societal trends.
Each era of counter-culture is synonymous with fashion trends that mirror its messaging and are often subsequently appropriated on the runway. Industrial colour palettes and baggy fits of 90s grunge mirrored the movement’s theme of alienation and its anti-establishment message. In the late 80s, North American economic recovery and the introduction of the Canada-US free trade agreement ignited a wave of excess, inspiring the glam, big hair, and shoulder pads seen in our parents’ yearbook photos. In the current era, the internet has brought a democratization of “cool,” causing a larger breadth of influences to spill onto the runway. Formerly underground dress codes donned by hip-hop, skateboarding, and surf subcultures have conglomerated into the general trend of streetwear. Simultaneously, newly accessible online archives of historic photos and the popularity of thrift and vintage have inspired nostalgic trends referencing the turn of the 20th century and earlier.
Fashion does not operate in a vacuum. Like all other art forms, it interacts with social, economic, and cultural events in the world outside the industry.
Why the disdain?
The creative conditions of the runway described thus far have been an incredibly idealist perspective on the art form. The runway is a medium of expression, but it’s also a means of advertisement. It is innately muddied by the corporate context through which it is displayed.
The runway is a space of judgement—a scale where designs are weighed in the metric of potential sales. Established fashion houses use their shows to attract the eye of the press to further elevate their retail sales, while the income of small-scale designers can be largely dependent on buyers purchasing clothing displayed at their shows. These pressures can lead designers to appeal to populous designs in the need for commercial viability and cause chronic theft of ideas already proven in the consumer market. This makes some see the runway as purely a stage for branded hype where artistic vision is diluted with the drive to appeal to infamously narrow and exclusionary target audiences.
The runway is a known host to all forms of inequity. The industry is built on a foundation of inherent classism. The hefty price tag of luxury goods makes them only accessible to the economic elite, making any designer logo an icon of socioeconomic exclusion. The industry can be seen as a grand example of the self-interest and material excess that has led to a growing wealth gap. And the exclusion is not just in the price tag.
Historically, the runway lacks diverse representation. Models of colour, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and body types beyond the ideal model silhouette have been commonly left off the runway. Though steps have been taken to correct these discriminatory practices in recent years, incidents like Stefano Gabbana’s racist Instagram rant in tandem with Dolce & Gabbana’s racist ad campaign, Victoria’s Secret’s discriminatory casting practices against plus-size and transgender models, and Vogue’s misidentification of Noor Tagouri show that the industry has a long way to go.
Where do you land?
Should we care about runway fashion? Well, maybe. There is no one right answer. If you explore and are driven to be more intentional with your personal expression and ask more questions about the history and significance of the clothing you wear, amazing! If it’s not your speed, that’s good too. If you are able to spend the big bucks on your clothes and want to side-step the moral ambiguity that accompanies many high fashion labels, try to invest in products made ethically by small-scale designers or local artisans who pay their rent through their art. Being able to interact with the artists responsible for the designs we wear can lead to a greater knowledge of the reasoning behind the design, deepening personal understanding and pride for what we wear.
Barriers limiting access to the industry based on economic class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender commonly turn people off from being interested in the runway. However, no artistic medium goes without instances of injustice. Though we should not let injustice be excused or normalized, it shows that to express our humanity, we must fight to create a space of personal justice within whichever medium we choose. If we are inspired by the potential for personal expression in fashion, we shouldn’t reject the medium for the flaws of its participants, but rather be a conscious consumer within it.
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