千匹，万褂，一律
作者：杨荣彪
服装设计一直面对着一个难题：畅销的设计并非有创意的设计，而有创意的设计卖不出去。这是误解还是服装文化本质的缺陷？Rouge Fashionbook请到了时尚教育女魔头Shelley Fox聊聊潮流带来的创意危机，以及她知道的答案。
她是纽约Parsons School of Design的研究生项目总监，她在伦敦圣马丁毕业后开始做自己的服装品牌，并同时兼职服装设计的教学，08年她在设计师及赞助人DONNA KARAN的邀请下来到纽约启动Parsons MFA。Shelley承认，她不怎么擅长画画，正因为如此，她走上了适合自己的路。对她来说，服装设计自八十年代开始走下坡路。她自己的作品中也有浓重的怀旧情结：她的灵感来自八十年代的音乐、Do It Yourself（DIY）的手工热潮、以及当时刚出道的川久保玲和Vivienne Westwood。八十年代，那是冷战后西方民主自信的时候，那是中国改革开放的时候，那更是服装的鼎盛时期。
“那是个振奋人心的时代，当时可没有快时尚，”她感叹道。并非纯属巧合，快时尚这个词源自于八十年代的美国，当时“快”一字首先出现在汽车生产业界人士的字典内，快马加鞭将六个月的生产工序缩短成仅仅两周。快时尚的巨头是Zara和H&M这一类高街品牌，它们将刚刚谢幕的T台上最炙手可热的设计加入水分，如子弹般一周内在全球上架。
抄袭只是冰山的一角。设计师迎合从众心态以带来销量，以及消费者妥协于对潮流的痴迷，导致实穿与创意的界限越画越深。“既然时尚品牌那么需要独特的想法，为什么他们不用呢？”没错，当大多数趋于一致时，特立独行被大众的意见绑架。设计师束缚了双手，深怕自己的想法危及品牌的存亡，没意识到他捆绑着双脚在走路，这种内在的冲突成了新的游戏规则。
这些Shelley培养的学生，她称其为“ideas-people”，经历了十八般武艺的学习后硕果累累。在全球潮流与创意的磨合中，他们成为了产业马拉松中承担最大阻力的领跑者。什么是“ideas-people？”看看Shelley设计的这个课程，叫做“Hole in the Map”。
课程是这样的，教授给班级里十八位同学各一份纽约地图， 她蒙着眼睛在每幅图上随机戳出一个洞眼，然后课程开始：学生必须前往那个地址，然后对所见所闻展开深入的思考与开放性的创意实验。这一切与服装完全无关，但它的目的是让学生在平凡枯燥间看出不平凡的东西。Shelley是这样解释的：“They look but do they see?”
通过两个完全一样的字“看”，Shelley也许想表达它们截然不同的意义：第一个看是指感官上的视觉，第二个是指意识上的洞察力。感官与意识的区别是问题所在。穿着是感官，也是消费者主要的能力，而设计考虑的是脑部意识活动。这是设计师最关心的问题：如何让消费者感受到设计师的想法？Shelley是这么回答的：“设计师不应该直白地把概念直接告诉消费者。”直白有两个极端，比如直接在衬衫上印刷口号，表达得太直白，又比如必须要解释一番才能理解的过于抽象的服装，则又事倍功半。
怎样的设计才能融合创意于畅销？Shelley说两者间的导体是“desirability”，这个词形容的是一种肺腑之言，可以定义其为“触动”，因为它缩短了触觉与哲学之间的距离，让人能够通过感官体验到衣服的创意给人的感动。这种感觉是抽象的。因此在Shelley之后我们接下来单独采访了Shelley带的一个女生，结合着她的毕业作品和感悟，看她“看”到的角度。
说白了，消费者不必明确地知道设计师的思想，但是设计师自己必须看到那个被忽视的创意，并且知道从世界地图的哪个漏洞中寻找它。 这种何去何从的概念是“点子人”的秘诀：来到博物馆，重新观察一直轻视的藏品；去旅游，用不同的角度思考当地文化；走入地窖，挖掘被封藏的童年日记。这些都是点子和市场诞生的地方：“设计师自己需要明晰：是什么给予他们动力来到想法存在的地方。”
设计师先要触动自己。Shelley一直在培养有胆魄的设计师，他们能从混乱中找到秩序、从沙中找到珍珠、从浪潮中筛到金子。这样思辨的生活方式是她的招生指南：“我们对完美的结果毫无兴趣。我们要看的是你在设计的过程中经历了些什么，那一连串从想法到最终产品间的过程。实话来说，我们真的不太关心成品长什么样。”
服装设计的教育，正如那节课“Hole in the Map”，其实与服装无关。一件简单的羊毛衫上的每一寸是设计师思考的痕迹，设计师的绣花针像是一把指挥棒，他的乐团是庞大的时装产业和全球经济。Shelley听出了产业的不和谐音：“当下服装产业进入了自身蚕食的过程，因为它走太远了。这有点像现在世界的状态。也许这是件好事，这样就有人跳出来提出改变。”一件简单的羊毛衫上的一针一线，是一个个供人解读的音符，戳出我们经常忽视的字眼。
正如市场经济的供求定理，服装产业紊乱的根本在于它善变和妥协的本性，时尚作为文化的媒介海纳百川，收下所有人们抛向它的东西，并满足人们对物质的欲望。它每天换一种姿态出现在我们的眼前，包裹我们对文化的理解，包装我们对创意的误解。确实，不是每一个人都关心服装的创意，但是创意缩水背后的因果关系意味深长：快时尚公司的出现，以及LVMH这种大时尚集团最近吞并年轻品牌的潮流，造成管理层面声音过于一致的现象；时尚媒体的数字化下大众对图片信息巨大的胃口，以及等式另一边东方廉价的劳动力，让潮流成了规模经济下的一道大众审美的门槛。服装产业走疲了，因为路上不可抗的经济因素磨破了鞋底。
Shelley处于时尚教育的最前沿，她知道有一群像她一样的领导力在抵抗着这些阻力，这个队伍会越来越强大，如她所说：“很多聪明的公司在不断寻找着有想法有创意的设计师。我与他们经常有联系，包括来自我母校（圣马丁）的毕业生，我知道他们需要会为创意冒险的人，他们需要拥有不同视角的人，这些也是我们（帕森斯研究生项目）能够培养的，我们的课程也是按照这个理念设计的。”Shelley培养的学生时刻准备着颠覆时尚界的机遇。MFA约9%的录取率已经直接提高了学生的起跑线：“去年我们收到两百多封申请，面试了56个，最终我们只录取了18个。”
Shelley以及她的搭档，副总监Joff Moolhuizen，正忙着构思一本说真话的书，把捏着到底什么是能触动人的设计，什么是服装设计师？品牌陷入滚雪球般互相抄袭的漏洞中，全球化下成本的唯一化让“创意”一词成了另类。设计师则成了热锅上的蚂蚁，他们的头衔一律被大众影视挂上“肤浅”和“物质主义”的标签。
Shelley很直白务实地说：“没人知道建筑设计师怎样工作的，他们获得了应有的尊敬，却没人瞧得起服装设计师的职务。”Shelley的调研对象是MFA引以为豪的五届宝贵的设计师资源、成就、和人脉，他们代表的是全球化下创意危机的解决方案。
不像童话故事，这本新书也许并不预示着时尚产业的Happy Ending，而是问与答无限更迭的状态，它的中心，那个空缺的地方，是Shelley和Joff领导的MFA服装设计教育：“一个不断冒险、跌倒、爬起来的实验基地。最后说白了，如果在MFA坚持不下去，我不清楚这些学生在哪能够真正立足。”时尚关乎系统性的问题，它并没有标准答案，但总得有人站出来，然后一切都开始发生改变。
“They look but do they see?”
by Rongbiao Max Yang
New York — Forget about how Hollywood portrays fashion designers. Editor Rongbiao Yang joins Prof. Fox, who has witnessed the fashion industry’s transformation from the 1980s to now, to talk about how business is slowly distorting the meaning of creativity in fashion.
Shelley Fox, the director of the MFA Fashion Design and Society program at Parsons School of Design, was hand-picked to head the program by the renowned fashion designer and funder of the program Donna Karan. Fox’s decades of experience in running her own namesake label while teaching fashion design situates her at a position where industry and creativity intersect. Fox wasn't confident with drawing, but it might have led her to encounter the area “in-between creativity and business.”
This phraseology sure sounds like the title “Art of the In-Between” of the Comme des Garçons July exhibition, if you are a Metropolitan Museum enthusiast. In fact, Fox has been invited to do a one-day workshop as a part of the event to illuminate the fashion process, which now has become the center of inquiry for our dense discussion in the renowned fashion school, Parsons.
Fox points to the 1980s: the music, the DIY culture, the emerging independent fashion brands like Comme des Garçons and Vivienne Westwood, who inspired her to pursue fashion. This is the beginning of time for the postmodern fashion after the modern development of America-China relation and consequently their creative-productive relation that quickly changed the face of the fashion industry, and currently furthered by big-data customer research technologies.
Popular culture was on the rise. Cold war had just ended. Fashion in the politically confident America saw a golden age just when designers sought to fashion for emotional and artistic expressions that shook up fashion’s social convention. Simultaneously, China broke through the cocoon of its commodity economy since the feudal society and, in a dual sense of metamorphosis, quickly latched onto the market economy after it opened doors. The comparative advantage between the two nations inevitably accelerated the fashion production, but more personally and viscerally, the development impressed the observing world with memories of fashion as a rebel.
The tide has certainly turned. Emotionally, fashion also went through the boom and now the bust. “[The 1980s] was an exciting period of time where there was no high street.” By high street, Fox means the fast fashion companies like Zara and H&M who are “too busy copying each other.” Instead of using the fashion form to challenge the social form, like it used to, more fashion CEOs find themselves resorting to stylus.com, essentially sidestepping the risk of originality for “reliable” big-data trend research, season after season ad infinitum. Combined with the popular media’s advertising and editorializing of what sells and what doesn’t, where money speaks, the economy finds a way to drive out creativity.
Plunging into an apprehension about what is at stake, Fox utters from an educational stand point that her accomplished students, the “ideas-people,” will still have a financial rough start in the callous fashion system, even though it should make economic sense for the market to capitalize on what these students bring to the table. “People want ideas constantly,” Fox says. “But do they really use them?”
“People want ideas constantly,” Fox says. “But do they really use them?”
Fashion is so pure a medium from which we grasp a sense of urgency, one with the speed of copying, in babbling the truth that is missing to which we are drawn. One should wonder what will “creativity” become, if companies allow market research to replace their very lifeblood which is the rigorous creative process that designers are trained for? On a second note, how will this change the creative education in the long run, if the way original research and design are conducted becomes obsolete? “[The fashion industry is] lost because of so many external situations politically, globally, and economically: the ways we consume, the way that companies are trying to be everything and everybody,” she says. “They're disappearing and they're eating each other up.”
Yet nothing stops the passage of light in a dark time for creativity. One only has to create a “Hole in the Map.”
“Hole in the Map.”
This is the first project for all incoming students as the inspirational and conceptual premise that the students constantly revisit in all the rest of their courses. Eighteen random locations, punctured into the New York City maps, are assigned to eighteen students as destinations for open-ended creative scrutiny.
“They look but do they see?” Fox points out. There’s a saying: to look is sensation, but to see is contemplation. Perhaps, “look” and even “wear” both belong to the perceptual experience, while “see” is the extra attention to the essence of that image or visual memory that transcends the feeble surface, before an attentive designer finds a way to develop it into original designs. “Look” is literal, but “see” is to bring a design to life.
“I think you can't translate literally,” Fox says. She means the conduit in-between business and creativity is the built-in “desirability” that connects the visual perception to our conceptual awareness of the design, not necessarily to the extent that we as customers have to articulate it. “If something is desirable, people don't need to know what the designer was trying to say, but if it’s there you will see and feel it within the clothes,” Fox says. Successful desirability must go beyond what can be seen, using visual aid as a means to an end but not an end in itself.
The designer certainly has to see that missing idea, which can’t be found unless the designer knows where to look. The concept of exhaustion or some would say “creative fatigue” in going to places, where ideas are found and business civilizations initiated, is what might be omitted by today’s fashion. “It’s important for the designers: what feeds them, what makes them get out of bed in the morning, and where their ideas come from.”
In this way, idea-hunting and imperfection are key to desirability. Take your designers’ ideas seriously, prototype their ideas and test them, send designers out on a field trip, cater to and nurture their creative habit…As far as technologies are involved, companies should stop being oversensitive about the cost of creative activities and take into account the progression of technology that already reduced costs for society overall, like transportation. Restore a common faith to a genuine process of design that is at times very messy but rewarding.
Fox is assembling highly selective classes of talents who understand process and mess. In terms of college admissions, only around 9% of applicants are accepted. “Last year we had about over two hundred applications. We interviewed about 56. And we take 18.”
“We're not looking for perfect. We're not really often interested in the final product.”
“We're not looking for perfect. We're looking for all the mess, the ideas, and the process in between the idea and how they've got to their final product. We're not really often interested in the final product, to be honest.” This mindset combined with the global impact and the growing network of the MFA program, is a practical solution of creativity in crisis.
“The fashion industry is cannibalizing itself. It's gone too far.”
“The fashion industry is cannibalizing itself. It's gone too far. It is like the way the world is right now, but maybe that's a good thing. Then someone will want to do something about it.” The courage to push one’s own limit to produce great work, I think, is the realism that sadly becomes anachronistic. In this business, it sometimes means being unpopular in the beginning so that good ideas can be tested in the market.
Market is where trend comes to life. Trend is no one’s creation, but everyone’s creation; not the trend covered by the media, but the trend without it. Trend is by nature capricious, but it is also a barometer of the tides and currents of globalization. Nothing puts fashion in crisis but fashion itself — it is in fashion’s sponge-like nature to absorb everything going on in the globe and tell it as it is.
Exacerbating the homogeneity of trend are the popularity of fast fashion empires and all the mergers and acquisitions, notably those led by LVMH. This process is completed by the booming factories in the developing countries that do better and faster with easier patterns and productions. Trend’s assimilation into the economy of scale marginalizes creativity with the perpetuation by the media of an idea that creative fashion is not wearable. This is a slippery slide to doing great harm to the institution of creativity itself.
The creativity-business dichotomy seems to render the diverse voices of designers unprofitable, but Fox remains positive— she has been in touch with creativity-driven companies and their masterminds, who look for smart people with creative energy. Already a lot of Fox’s students have been hired in influential positions to transform the industry in the long run. “I know what they're looking for,” Fox says.
“They need people that take risks. They need people that think differently and that's who they're looking to hire and that's who we look to produce.”
Fox is planning on crafting a new book to articulate the methods to look and to see, between them an “in-depth way of thinking,” in collaboration with the Associate Director of the MFA program, Joffrey Moolhuizen. Without design thinking’s creative synergy with the global economy, plagiarism plagues the trend-conforming “designers” who don’t bother to cooperate with distant localities to make use of their less-known tribal art while uplifting their economy, but only look to the echo-chamber of Hollywood media culture where a “superficial” and “materialist” image of fashion designer is promoted.
“People don't necessarily know how architects work but they are respected, but no one seems to respect how fashion designers work.” Fox and Moolhuizen are salvaging process through the exemplary MFA alumni, by now a five-year worth of network. After all, the MFA program does what the book can’t do, “a safe place to trip over and fall over, and pick yourself back up again. At the end of the day, if you can't do it on the MFA, I don't know when you will.”
作者：杨荣彪
服装设计一直面对着一个难题：畅销的设计并非有创意的设计，而有创意的设计卖不出去。这是误解还是服装文化本质的缺陷？Rouge Fashionbook请到了时尚教育女魔头Shelley Fox聊聊潮流带来的创意危机，以及她知道的答案。
她是纽约Parsons School of Design的研究生项目总监，她在伦敦圣马丁毕业后开始做自己的服装品牌，并同时兼职服装设计的教学，08年她在设计师及赞助人DONNA KARAN的邀请下来到纽约启动Parsons MFA。Shelley承认，她不怎么擅长画画，正因为如此，她走上了适合自己的路。对她来说，服装设计自八十年代开始走下坡路。她自己的作品中也有浓重的怀旧情结：她的灵感来自八十年代的音乐、Do It Yourself（DIY）的手工热潮、以及当时刚出道的川久保玲和Vivienne Westwood。八十年代，那是冷战后西方民主自信的时候，那是中国改革开放的时候，那更是服装的鼎盛时期。
“那是个振奋人心的时代，当时可没有快时尚，”她感叹道。并非纯属巧合，快时尚这个词源自于八十年代的美国，当时“快”一字首先出现在汽车生产业界人士的字典内，快马加鞭将六个月的生产工序缩短成仅仅两周。快时尚的巨头是Zara和H&M这一类高街品牌，它们将刚刚谢幕的T台上最炙手可热的设计加入水分，如子弹般一周内在全球上架。
抄袭只是冰山的一角。设计师迎合从众心态以带来销量，以及消费者妥协于对潮流的痴迷，导致实穿与创意的界限越画越深。“既然时尚品牌那么需要独特的想法，为什么他们不用呢？”没错，当大多数趋于一致时，特立独行被大众的意见绑架。设计师束缚了双手，深怕自己的想法危及品牌的存亡，没意识到他捆绑着双脚在走路，这种内在的冲突成了新的游戏规则。
这些Shelley培养的学生，她称其为“ideas-people”，经历了十八般武艺的学习后硕果累累。在全球潮流与创意的磨合中，他们成为了产业马拉松中承担最大阻力的领跑者。什么是“ideas-people？”看看Shelley设计的这个课程，叫做“Hole in the Map”。
课程是这样的，教授给班级里十八位同学各一份纽约地图， 她蒙着眼睛在每幅图上随机戳出一个洞眼，然后课程开始：学生必须前往那个地址，然后对所见所闻展开深入的思考与开放性的创意实验。这一切与服装完全无关，但它的目的是让学生在平凡枯燥间看出不平凡的东西。Shelley是这样解释的：“They look but do they see?”
通过两个完全一样的字“看”，Shelley也许想表达它们截然不同的意义：第一个看是指感官上的视觉，第二个是指意识上的洞察力。感官与意识的区别是问题所在。穿着是感官，也是消费者主要的能力，而设计考虑的是脑部意识活动。这是设计师最关心的问题：如何让消费者感受到设计师的想法？Shelley是这么回答的：“设计师不应该直白地把概念直接告诉消费者。”直白有两个极端，比如直接在衬衫上印刷口号，表达得太直白，又比如必须要解释一番才能理解的过于抽象的服装，则又事倍功半。
怎样的设计才能融合创意于畅销？Shelley说两者间的导体是“desirability”，这个词形容的是一种肺腑之言，可以定义其为“触动”，因为它缩短了触觉与哲学之间的距离，让人能够通过感官体验到衣服的创意给人的感动。这种感觉是抽象的。因此在Shelley之后我们接下来单独采访了Shelley带的一个女生，结合着她的毕业作品和感悟，看她“看”到的角度。
说白了，消费者不必明确地知道设计师的思想，但是设计师自己必须看到那个被忽视的创意，并且知道从世界地图的哪个漏洞中寻找它。 这种何去何从的概念是“点子人”的秘诀：来到博物馆，重新观察一直轻视的藏品；去旅游，用不同的角度思考当地文化；走入地窖，挖掘被封藏的童年日记。这些都是点子和市场诞生的地方：“设计师自己需要明晰：是什么给予他们动力来到想法存在的地方。”
设计师先要触动自己。Shelley一直在培养有胆魄的设计师，他们能从混乱中找到秩序、从沙中找到珍珠、从浪潮中筛到金子。这样思辨的生活方式是她的招生指南：“我们对完美的结果毫无兴趣。我们要看的是你在设计的过程中经历了些什么，那一连串从想法到最终产品间的过程。实话来说，我们真的不太关心成品长什么样。”
服装设计的教育，正如那节课“Hole in the Map”，其实与服装无关。一件简单的羊毛衫上的每一寸是设计师思考的痕迹，设计师的绣花针像是一把指挥棒，他的乐团是庞大的时装产业和全球经济。Shelley听出了产业的不和谐音：“当下服装产业进入了自身蚕食的过程，因为它走太远了。这有点像现在世界的状态。也许这是件好事，这样就有人跳出来提出改变。”一件简单的羊毛衫上的一针一线，是一个个供人解读的音符，戳出我们经常忽视的字眼。
正如市场经济的供求定理，服装产业紊乱的根本在于它善变和妥协的本性，时尚作为文化的媒介海纳百川，收下所有人们抛向它的东西，并满足人们对物质的欲望。它每天换一种姿态出现在我们的眼前，包裹我们对文化的理解，包装我们对创意的误解。确实，不是每一个人都关心服装的创意，但是创意缩水背后的因果关系意味深长：快时尚公司的出现，以及LVMH这种大时尚集团最近吞并年轻品牌的潮流，造成管理层面声音过于一致的现象；时尚媒体的数字化下大众对图片信息巨大的胃口，以及等式另一边东方廉价的劳动力，让潮流成了规模经济下的一道大众审美的门槛。服装产业走疲了，因为路上不可抗的经济因素磨破了鞋底。
Shelley处于时尚教育的最前沿，她知道有一群像她一样的领导力在抵抗着这些阻力，这个队伍会越来越强大，如她所说：“很多聪明的公司在不断寻找着有想法有创意的设计师。我与他们经常有联系，包括来自我母校（圣马丁）的毕业生，我知道他们需要会为创意冒险的人，他们需要拥有不同视角的人，这些也是我们（帕森斯研究生项目）能够培养的，我们的课程也是按照这个理念设计的。”Shelley培养的学生时刻准备着颠覆时尚界的机遇。MFA约9%的录取率已经直接提高了学生的起跑线：“去年我们收到两百多封申请，面试了56个，最终我们只录取了18个。”
Shelley以及她的搭档，副总监Joff Moolhuizen，正忙着构思一本说真话的书，把捏着到底什么是能触动人的设计，什么是服装设计师？品牌陷入滚雪球般互相抄袭的漏洞中，全球化下成本的唯一化让“创意”一词成了另类。设计师则成了热锅上的蚂蚁，他们的头衔一律被大众影视挂上“肤浅”和“物质主义”的标签。
Shelley很直白务实地说：“没人知道建筑设计师怎样工作的，他们获得了应有的尊敬，却没人瞧得起服装设计师的职务。”Shelley的调研对象是MFA引以为豪的五届宝贵的设计师资源、成就、和人脉，他们代表的是全球化下创意危机的解决方案。
不像童话故事，这本新书也许并不预示着时尚产业的Happy Ending，而是问与答无限更迭的状态，它的中心，那个空缺的地方，是Shelley和Joff领导的MFA服装设计教育：“一个不断冒险、跌倒、爬起来的实验基地。最后说白了，如果在MFA坚持不下去，我不清楚这些学生在哪能够真正立足。”时尚关乎系统性的问题，它并没有标准答案，但总得有人站出来，然后一切都开始发生改变。
“They look but do they see?”
by Rongbiao Max Yang
New York — Forget about how Hollywood portrays fashion designers. Editor Rongbiao Yang joins Prof. Fox, who has witnessed the fashion industry’s transformation from the 1980s to now, to talk about how business is slowly distorting the meaning of creativity in fashion.
Shelley Fox, the director of the MFA Fashion Design and Society program at Parsons School of Design, was hand-picked to head the program by the renowned fashion designer and funder of the program Donna Karan. Fox’s decades of experience in running her own namesake label while teaching fashion design situates her at a position where industry and creativity intersect. Fox wasn't confident with drawing, but it might have led her to encounter the area “in-between creativity and business.”
This phraseology sure sounds like the title “Art of the In-Between” of the Comme des Garçons July exhibition, if you are a Metropolitan Museum enthusiast. In fact, Fox has been invited to do a one-day workshop as a part of the event to illuminate the fashion process, which now has become the center of inquiry for our dense discussion in the renowned fashion school, Parsons.
Fox points to the 1980s: the music, the DIY culture, the emerging independent fashion brands like Comme des Garçons and Vivienne Westwood, who inspired her to pursue fashion. This is the beginning of time for the postmodern fashion after the modern development of America-China relation and consequently their creative-productive relation that quickly changed the face of the fashion industry, and currently furthered by big-data customer research technologies.
Popular culture was on the rise. Cold war had just ended. Fashion in the politically confident America saw a golden age just when designers sought to fashion for emotional and artistic expressions that shook up fashion’s social convention. Simultaneously, China broke through the cocoon of its commodity economy since the feudal society and, in a dual sense of metamorphosis, quickly latched onto the market economy after it opened doors. The comparative advantage between the two nations inevitably accelerated the fashion production, but more personally and viscerally, the development impressed the observing world with memories of fashion as a rebel.
The tide has certainly turned. Emotionally, fashion also went through the boom and now the bust. “[The 1980s] was an exciting period of time where there was no high street.” By high street, Fox means the fast fashion companies like Zara and H&M who are “too busy copying each other.” Instead of using the fashion form to challenge the social form, like it used to, more fashion CEOs find themselves resorting to stylus.com, essentially sidestepping the risk of originality for “reliable” big-data trend research, season after season ad infinitum. Combined with the popular media’s advertising and editorializing of what sells and what doesn’t, where money speaks, the economy finds a way to drive out creativity.
Plunging into an apprehension about what is at stake, Fox utters from an educational stand point that her accomplished students, the “ideas-people,” will still have a financial rough start in the callous fashion system, even though it should make economic sense for the market to capitalize on what these students bring to the table. “People want ideas constantly,” Fox says. “But do they really use them?”
“People want ideas constantly,” Fox says. “But do they really use them?”
Fashion is so pure a medium from which we grasp a sense of urgency, one with the speed of copying, in babbling the truth that is missing to which we are drawn. One should wonder what will “creativity” become, if companies allow market research to replace their very lifeblood which is the rigorous creative process that designers are trained for? On a second note, how will this change the creative education in the long run, if the way original research and design are conducted becomes obsolete? “[The fashion industry is] lost because of so many external situations politically, globally, and economically: the ways we consume, the way that companies are trying to be everything and everybody,” she says. “They're disappearing and they're eating each other up.”
Yet nothing stops the passage of light in a dark time for creativity. One only has to create a “Hole in the Map.”
“Hole in the Map.”
This is the first project for all incoming students as the inspirational and conceptual premise that the students constantly revisit in all the rest of their courses. Eighteen random locations, punctured into the New York City maps, are assigned to eighteen students as destinations for open-ended creative scrutiny.
“They look but do they see?” Fox points out. There’s a saying: to look is sensation, but to see is contemplation. Perhaps, “look” and even “wear” both belong to the perceptual experience, while “see” is the extra attention to the essence of that image or visual memory that transcends the feeble surface, before an attentive designer finds a way to develop it into original designs. “Look” is literal, but “see” is to bring a design to life.
“I think you can't translate literally,” Fox says. She means the conduit in-between business and creativity is the built-in “desirability” that connects the visual perception to our conceptual awareness of the design, not necessarily to the extent that we as customers have to articulate it. “If something is desirable, people don't need to know what the designer was trying to say, but if it’s there you will see and feel it within the clothes,” Fox says. Successful desirability must go beyond what can be seen, using visual aid as a means to an end but not an end in itself.
The designer certainly has to see that missing idea, which can’t be found unless the designer knows where to look. The concept of exhaustion or some would say “creative fatigue” in going to places, where ideas are found and business civilizations initiated, is what might be omitted by today’s fashion. “It’s important for the designers: what feeds them, what makes them get out of bed in the morning, and where their ideas come from.”
In this way, idea-hunting and imperfection are key to desirability. Take your designers’ ideas seriously, prototype their ideas and test them, send designers out on a field trip, cater to and nurture their creative habit…As far as technologies are involved, companies should stop being oversensitive about the cost of creative activities and take into account the progression of technology that already reduced costs for society overall, like transportation. Restore a common faith to a genuine process of design that is at times very messy but rewarding.
Fox is assembling highly selective classes of talents who understand process and mess. In terms of college admissions, only around 9% of applicants are accepted. “Last year we had about over two hundred applications. We interviewed about 56. And we take 18.”
“We're not looking for perfect. We're not really often interested in the final product.”
“We're not looking for perfect. We're looking for all the mess, the ideas, and the process in between the idea and how they've got to their final product. We're not really often interested in the final product, to be honest.” This mindset combined with the global impact and the growing network of the MFA program, is a practical solution of creativity in crisis.
“The fashion industry is cannibalizing itself. It's gone too far.”
“The fashion industry is cannibalizing itself. It's gone too far. It is like the way the world is right now, but maybe that's a good thing. Then someone will want to do something about it.” The courage to push one’s own limit to produce great work, I think, is the realism that sadly becomes anachronistic. In this business, it sometimes means being unpopular in the beginning so that good ideas can be tested in the market.
Market is where trend comes to life. Trend is no one’s creation, but everyone’s creation; not the trend covered by the media, but the trend without it. Trend is by nature capricious, but it is also a barometer of the tides and currents of globalization. Nothing puts fashion in crisis but fashion itself — it is in fashion’s sponge-like nature to absorb everything going on in the globe and tell it as it is.
Exacerbating the homogeneity of trend are the popularity of fast fashion empires and all the mergers and acquisitions, notably those led by LVMH. This process is completed by the booming factories in the developing countries that do better and faster with easier patterns and productions. Trend’s assimilation into the economy of scale marginalizes creativity with the perpetuation by the media of an idea that creative fashion is not wearable. This is a slippery slide to doing great harm to the institution of creativity itself.
The creativity-business dichotomy seems to render the diverse voices of designers unprofitable, but Fox remains positive— she has been in touch with creativity-driven companies and their masterminds, who look for smart people with creative energy. Already a lot of Fox’s students have been hired in influential positions to transform the industry in the long run. “I know what they're looking for,” Fox says.
“They need people that take risks. They need people that think differently and that's who they're looking to hire and that's who we look to produce.”
Fox is planning on crafting a new book to articulate the methods to look and to see, between them an “in-depth way of thinking,” in collaboration with the Associate Director of the MFA program, Joffrey Moolhuizen. Without design thinking’s creative synergy with the global economy, plagiarism plagues the trend-conforming “designers” who don’t bother to cooperate with distant localities to make use of their less-known tribal art while uplifting their economy, but only look to the echo-chamber of Hollywood media culture where a “superficial” and “materialist” image of fashion designer is promoted.
“People don't necessarily know how architects work but they are respected, but no one seems to respect how fashion designers work.” Fox and Moolhuizen are salvaging process through the exemplary MFA alumni, by now a five-year worth of network. After all, the MFA program does what the book can’t do, “a safe place to trip over and fall over, and pick yourself back up again. At the end of the day, if you can't do it on the MFA, I don't know when you will.”