SC103 Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

vogue runway link

Trend title from past decade of young deskilled designers: Scrap. Deskilling to upend clothing’s trad construct of both patternmaker and draper. Scrap designers function as ragpickers: The Golden Dustman turning trash into treasure. Like the punk detritus of Judy Blame or sentimental tchotchkes of Cianciolo. Scrap’s political posies against the industrial churn of modernity’s dark mills. But also no coincidence is Scrap’s recent ascension correlated to the deskilling of fashion schooling itself. Curriculum jettisoned tradeskills, the labor of the hand, offshoring factories, collections reduced to few items. Anyone can aver as tailor now fitting and fabrication are exposed false idols. But post mid2010s, the sheer sum of bedroom designer-artist-stylists taken to deskilling seemingly ridiculed its own tenet of scarcity and alterity. Women’s History Museum, Nasir’s Fantastic Toiles, Café Forgot etc etc…

SC103S/S2023 is Scrap evolved. A 39 look maximalism that begins to separate itself from the molasses, more a convincing CSM grad collection baby Galliano or Romani Matty Bovan. Overstyled’n’overstitched trafficking looks unable to be broken to its constitutive parts. Everything fights gravity. Knotting, tying, layering, patching—no piece to hang or reveal its own matter. A medieval magic lantern play of mercurial charm replete with lucky bracelets, ThreeAsFour metallic p/leather splendor, faded prints of lace smocks. Damaged yarn and unbridled topstitching confer vitality, proof the retail racks of High Street hasn’t sanitized us completely. But this crude construction is double-edged in threatening its own enchantment. That the naive zigzagging of lycra to lace (look 34)—which unevenly puckers like a handheld Brother XM2701 doing too much with too little—can draw us back to a reality where things fall apart and where this might be undesirable.