When I was at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York a dozen years ago, I used to hear my major class teachers exclaim, “It’s not like the old days.” They shook their heads and sighed, as if they felt sorry for us for entering the business at this point in time. Many of our teachers returned from the front lines of the fashion industry to the back of the school, and the reasons for their return, according to them, were mostly due to their attachment to the past and their inability to adapt to the current industrial situation; and the past, probably only on the campus, the “pure land” to feel the traces of it. I would occasionally ask, “How far back did you say “back in the day”? Most of them don’t think twice about it, but they say at least ten or twenty years ago, when we were your age, when we were young, when we were apprentices; up to the 1940s or 1950s, or even earlier.
Our main class at that time, when we reached the one-month cycle, was always interspersed with a “look back at the masters” lesson on the history of fashion. The class was set up in the school’s archives, and everyone sat around a large, high table, waiting for the teacher to pull out a wire rack full of decades-old “antiques” from storage. Most of the vintage clothing was donated by famous people and was wrapped in a high-quality cotton cover. Balenciaga appeared most often, and the teacher always carefully opened every fold in the seams of his clothes to show us his meticulous craftsmanship, and then said, “Look, Balenciaga has cultivated the taste of generations of women with such decent tailoring and elegant lines – from Ingrid Bergman to Grace B. Bergman.
Balenciaga is a company that has developed the tastes of generations of women with such tailored, elegant lines – from Ingrid Bergman to Grace Kelly, from Mrs. Kennedy to Tina Chow.
This history lesson often leaves us with the impression that the only thing the masters had to think about was “to be beautiful or not to be beautiful”. Balenciaga said, “The woman who wears my clothes doesn’t have to be perfect, or even beautiful, my clothes will make it so” – and that became almost immediately a lesson for all our students. This became the belief of all our students almost immediately. On campus, teachers never spoke of cost, pricing, or basic order quantities, and my class notes never even included the fabric code number “yardage”; in short, anything other than fashion design itself seemed to be completely absent or unnecessary to consider. “Create, I want to see your creativity!” Our teachers often asked us, “If you don’t enjoy your creativity in school and the ecstasy that the freedom of creativity can bring you, most of you will find that such opportunities are no longer available when you enter the company.” Creativity! We only hated it then for not being enough, for not being able to give us a constant flow of energy every moment in every creative class, never imagining that one day it would be tied up, or even become a straitjacket.
Our teachers were right to be “on the front lines” and, as it turned out, when we got into the company, the days of the wilderness were immediately over.
I still remember the first day I joined the company, my design director immediately gave me a big stack of design files from the company. I’d like to draw from this, the same length, the same fat, the same thin, or, if you prefer, a pad of transparent drawing paper to trace on. Is this the designer life I dreamed of? I swallowed several times at that time. Our big boss occasionally demanded creativity, but he was trying to knock on Wal-Mart’s door by asking us to swap out seven cents per yard of English lace for a cheaper alternative of one and a half cents per yard; to reduce an embroidery pattern that had been five by five square inches in size to two by two inches; and to see if we could find another supplier for ninety cents after we found a supplier for silk at two dollars per meter. If we met all his requirements and helped him get the order, we would be the “genius” he talked about, and in addition to being bragged about, he would be in a good mood, generous, and would get a big bonus for “cutting back on creativity”.
Over time, “what is best” stopped being our concern, and more and more definite words were added before “best” so that eventually the six words became one long sentence: “What is the best we can do given the conditions.” “The best” was never a topic of discussion across the company, either, and the only thing that seemed to matter from supplier to manufacturer to seller was what was best to sell.
Designers are always compromising with creativity; if you don’t compromise, it’s either your brand is gone, like Andrea Gabrielle, or you’re gone, like many of my designer colleagues.
In fact, the doubts about the times are not new today. In 1968, Balenciaga closed his Paris-based company and retired from the business because he did not see the “Shooting Star” article in the book as a compromise to a fashion era that he could no longer respect. For the designer, is today’s era even worse than the one he quit?