Brands are starting to have a new kind of dialogue with the customers. Customers and the public in general have a lot more knowledge than they used to. Being a designer now means something different than being a designer in the previous generation. What makes room for larger opportunities is this new space for new dialog between brands and their customers.
There is a new space to be defined in the world of fashion . We have yet to see how substantial and how innovative recent mergers between high fashion and streetwear are.
Bridging the gap between high fashion and streetwear. We need to understand what this new ethos in design can breed new collections, garments and new ways fashion can relate to the public. Obviously, times are different, so instead of what those brands and designers of years past weren’t able to continue, a void was made, picking up the conversation where they left off. Expressing ideas and building a project that is tangible in a way.
We are yet to see what the future of fashion looks like. Now, we are in a generation where we as participants in streetwear culture, can dictate.
We are part of a generation, not just a movement that goes beyond websites and magazines. Essentially, we are assistants to the people that came before us, trying to add to the design that goes forward to the next generation.
Modern streetwear create this idea that “if its been done before, refresh it just enough for it to be engaging and be recognised” . A lot of what is missing from our culture is discourse,whether be critical, whether be instructional, or whether be motivating. It will only be better if this community of streetwear grows and becomes a foundation. Its our barometer if a t-shirt is worthy of being made or not, or if a sneaker is actually adding to the culture.
We want the larger fashion industry and ecosystem to not see Streetwear as “hyper consumer” or temporary trend.We should be seen as a a true culture.
We can use design, trends, brands and good ideas to share information.
You can go to a job interview in a hoodie and kicks, and you shouldn’t be hired whether or not you have the right costume for the right persona. Its all about personal expressions and these clothes are tools to make a collage about yourself so people can understand what you know.
Taking sneakers as an example, saying a shoe can bridge these gaps might be unfounded, but recently they have been found to be interesting, for both a tourist and a purist, someone that is obsessed with sneakers, and someone that literally doesn’t care about what it is, crossing all boundaries whether it is streetwear or high fashion, whether it is for young, or for old, it is a design for the whole ecosystem.
This current era has a lot more freedom. Culture is moving. Its been like that before now.
Streetwear culture is a collective, a community, an idea that there is open space, whether music, fashion, even culinary, its not a specific thing, its a collective consciousness. This is what we are into, this is the trend. Its this international community that never maybe existed in such a cemented way. We communicate through social media and we are a world of young people, no longer just a niche culture in one city. This new era, this new style of design, has given this sort of energy, and refreshed approach to design and culture, and those are inside the most storied brands. We are a niche culture of designers, and we are also a new niche culture of artists, in the sense that we make collectively and we support, that we are going to see great works of art, we are going to see great designs, we are going to see great collections again if that community flourishes, when one designer pushes another, one artist does an amazing show, you get this energy from the others.
Imagine using that same engineering put into T-shirts, imagine in the next few years, that the “Streetwear” way of thinking about cellphones, can give us a different type of cellphone. We’ll realise that streetwear might be an art movement but we just don't know it. We might have just given it the short end of the stick, and called it a skatebrand. We should not necessarily limit ourselves to that way of thinking, and have a dialog with fashion history, and how it can relate, how we can make different products across all realms.
Streetwear is often used as the shorthand terminology for being creative with limited means. Its shouldn’t be limited or degraded by the youth’s obsessing with a box logo T-shirt , its a way of thinking, there are new roles to be played and made in that. We just started. We need confidence in the movement so it can go further.
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