fashionlanguage

The new categorising

A human need or an empty extremization?

The new categorising, or the need to assign labels in which a specific group should fit, is growing hugely. Genderless, sustainable, recycled, upcycled, inclusive – these are some of the labels popular in fashion.
We see pretty, or less pretty, boxes clearly labelled, but they seem so fake.

Categorising: a marketing byproduct

Why are brands obsessed with putting labels on their work? And, in parallel, why do people need labels? To identify themselves? or to be represented?

Jean-Paul Gaultier created the majority of the fashion topics that are trending now. But there was no label to claim during the ’80s and ’90s in the fashion field. Indeed, it was a work of freedom, both from the designer’s viewpoint and those who used to wear his clothes.
Jump to 2022, and the need for labelling exploded. Genderless and sustainable are the most popular ones. Every brand is genderless now! But also, recycled or upcycled are on top.

Obviously, it’s a trend.
Coming from a family of seamstresses, disassembling a pair of trousers to make a skirt, or transforming a shirt into a blouse was a daily matter. Which is the point of upcycling and recycling.
Moreover, in our boutique, we always proposed men’s items for women, as we sold female items to men, but we never felt the need to categorise. Which is the point for genderless, inclusion, diversity.

Even though about five years ago, we started focusing more on genderless or recycled as valuable concepts, now brands overuse them. Indeed they became so mainstream that they are abused. Intentionally misleading, as in the case of sustainability.

We are not happy to be classified. So we wonder, what happened recently?

We think the less we find meaning in brands and their products, the more they need to place labels in order to make stuff easy to market.

The supply is way bigger than the people in the world who can purchase products (who represent the demand). So, to reach the masses, brands lowered the bar. And the more they lower the bar, the less value they offer. Here comes the need for marketing and labelling.

Labelling is an attempt to legitimise and promote an empty system. They legitimise instead of offering what really matters, the content.

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Redefine the lexicon

How can fashion evolve if the lexicon is always the same?
Pre-collections. Still? For real? Selling campaigns, seasons, gender categories, budgets, and, above all, discounts and sales. Real or fake, who cares.
The only intention is to push people to buy whatever product, keeping the business exactly as it was before the pandemic.

Can’t you see how all that is disconnected from the new reality?
All those words lost their meaning because we are in a different place now, an unknown territory, where those concepts do not apply anymore.

We expected something more. We envisioned brave designers or brands coming up with new ideas, guiding us to innovate an outdated system. But other than a lot of greenwashing, nothing has happened. Or worse, everyone’s hoping to go back to normal. Completely forgetting that normal was the problem.

So we take an active posture. We decide what is good and what is not for us and our audience. We don’t believe in a supermarket model. Preserving the value of creativity, we want to decide the quantities and quality we need to buy, based on the real needs of our community, not only to grow large companies’ pockets.
We must understand that good design and quality do not have an expiry date. We do not believe anymore in discounts as a drive to boost sales.
Sales are just another element of the status quo, a short term illusion of joy.

We believe in conscious buying, so we are educating ourselves and our community to buy less but better.

Redefining the lexicon is the first step and expression of a change in the fashion system.

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