Think of your reflection in the mirror.
Do you want to be told what you must look at?
Do you want to be told how to look at yourself?
Do you even know who you are nevertheless being told how to look at yourself?

When the self is the main focus of everyone, does anybody question how that kind of thinking got normalized? In the age of simulacrum, everything that is defined as new is a copy of something old. The cultural value of fashion is defined through the prism of past times, rather than the actual. What it thus gets to represent is the institutions itself which guard fashion and do not allow it to evolve and to genuinely reflect the times.

Fashion has a very peculiar relationship with time – by default it must represent today’s attitude. Pink is the new black and the new It bag is basically a PVC bag decorated for extreme grotesque pleasure which aims to poke fun at fashion while still very much staying in it. Fashion is a continual lie – it hides its own faults in order to regain its relevance. There is nothing wrong with dictatorship as long as the dictator is sane.

Institutions which run the fashion business have long since lost its cultural power and are now desperately seeking its own reflections.

All is fair play in an age when a reality star can become president of a country. As we are surrounded by pop art we crave nostalgia, 90s supermodels dipped in gold walking the runway hand in hand. That is where we feel safe and that is where the true power of fashion lies – in its genuine ability to reflect the mood of the time. Yet the question remains – are we alert enough to know how to read into it? Are we smart enough to not fall in the allure of the past to recognize we are sacrificing the new?

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Text: Denis Pucelj