In the flurry of NYTimes /NYMag activity I have decided to launch the first series of Designer Essence:
Vivienne Westwood A/W 2010
Victor & Rolf Spring 2010 RTW
DSquared A/W 2010
Designer Essence tries to make sense of rampant consumerist culture. How fashion designers can be so detached from their labels that they can continue after their death (Alexander McQueen being a case in point). Where designers create a brand from themselves that is propagated around the world, then creating collections that are meant to be embodiments of those brands. At some point in the consumerist frenzy that connection is lost.
It aims to cast the viewers eye on an intellectual life-cycle, where designers create images of themselves, mass produce collections of those images and are then made to be accountable for those collections through superimposing them once again onto themselves
