The Year In Fashion: Down With The Elites!

The past year will go down in history as a time of radical regime change, not least (well, probably least) in the fashion world. The populist revolution didn’t happen overnight—the first salvo may have been fired during New York Fashion Week, in February of 2001, with the advent of a trend that Simon Doonan, the “Creative Ambassador at Large” for Barneys, who was then still designing the shop’s windows, called haute sauvagerie. In addition to the hip-hop swagger of an early Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs runway collection, it featured camouflage, military hardware, camp-follower deshabille, and jihadi chic. In retrospect, its message seems prescient: 9/11 was seven months away. This year in fashion not only saw Kanye West, another performer turned designer (in his case, of “athleisure” wear), taking a meeting with the President-elect—a reality-TV summit. Vogue subscribers also opened the April issue to find a fifty-two-page supplement rapturously devoted to the E! star, model, and Kardashian sister Kendall Jenner. I’m not nostalgic (well, perhaps a little) about the demise of fashion’s Old Guard and its proprieties, but social media have given the verb “to follow” a new meaning. One no longer follows fashion; one follows Kendall and her B.F.F.s. If Google’s trending metrics are to be believed, the top ten designers of 2016 include two Jenners, Kanye, Beyoncé, Zendaya, and Ivanka, who ranked ninth, just below the great Sonia Rykiel, who died in August. Read more at The New Yorker.