ISABEL MARANT ABOUT FASHION & SPEED

... in an interview with Isabel Marant published by the Austrian daily Die Presse in its supplement to the Friday March 19 edition (an interview I had the pleasure of doing) there are some passages that I would like to quote in this blog - in their original version.

When I asked Isabel (I met her on March 5, right before her show, and wasn't aware of the quotes that Grazia UK had put online two days before) about fashion and speed and the risk for smaller brands to be copied by fast-working giant retailers, this is what she told me:

"C'est très dommage [that copies are on sale before originals, sometimes] et moi, cela m'épuise énormément. Et c'est vrai qu'il y a une véritable accéleration dans la mode, et du coup c'est vrai qu'on peut être blasé de quelque chose avant même que ce soit sorti dans les magasins. On a tellement d'images à la minute même qu'on n'a plus le temps de savourer les choses. Mais c'est notre époque, et voilà."

Indeed, sometimes you can't help noticing how absurd it is that, in blogs and online magazines, we start using images from collections the minute they are shown on the runway, while the same clothes will start being sold six months later (and will only appear in print magazines at that point). There seems to be a "système à deux vitesses" at work.

Besides that, Isabel made it very clear that in fashion "c'est parti" - we're not going to get out of this new kind of logics very easily.

"Je pense qu'à partir du moment où on fait les shows pour qu'il y ait des photos, pour qu'il y ait le retour médiatique, on ne peut pas prêcher quelque chose et vouloir le contraire. C'est le paradoxe de notre business."

How right she is, i.m.h.o., Isabel. And at the same time, maybe the omnipresence of live streams and shows popping up on the internet will relegate this image-distribution aspect to the virtual world, while the real life shows will once again belong to a self-proclaimed fashion elite? With bloggers sitting at home, producing one screenshot after the other and duly feeding them into their blogs? That wouldn't take the speed out of fashion. But it would transform fashion shows into something else again - an exclusive event like the one that shows used to be in the past.

Another one of those fashion clouts indeed...