When celebrities have already showcased the highlights of the AW collections, do we still want to wear them?
Rihanna’s stylist (one Mel Ottenberg) recently declared that, for him (and his erstwhile pop companion), AW14 is ‘over.’
Now, sure, this is a pretty nice First World kind of a problem to have, and if you will let your client start parading around in new season Prada before the end of show season (back during Paris Fashion Week, Lady R rocked up to Miu Miu wearing Mrs Prada’s sheepskin creation unveiled a whole week earlier in Milan), then frankly what can you expect?
But given the proliferation of images of the likes of Rihanna and her celebrity peers – does this mean that we’re ‘over’ the season before it’s even hit the shop floor?
Months before the collections will hit, we’ve already seen Elle Fanning in Alexander McQueen, Rosamund Pike in Louis Vuitton and Blake Lively in a full Gucci look.
For the celebrity and their stylist there is a huge cachet in being the one to get to wear ‘the look’ first – even just getting to wear the look – the politics and hierarchy involved in which girl gets which dress is insane. The halo affect from the synergy between the right celebrity in the right label is huge for both – but given the onslaught of red carpet images we are now bombarded with through Twitter, Instagram, our favourite blogs, newspapers and magazines – it can feel a little like overkill. I wonder that this dampens the allure a little.
Do we really want the dress/coat/shoe that we’ve been seeing celebrities wearing for the last six months before we’re even able to think about buying it? Does it feel like the season has already happened before it’s started?
One thing this overexposure does do is help the high street homage machine to keep turning.They can gauge our response to these high profile outfits and whip up their own version in plenty of time for it to hit the shop floor at the prescient moment. But if we’re already a bit bored of seeing the collections before we get to wear them – do we want them at all? Wouldn’t it be nice to walk into a shop and be surprised by what was on offer?
The democratization and exposed nature of the new fashion world has many advantages, but it has perhaps killed a little bit of the mystery and thrill of the chase, which is kinda, what makes the whole game fun.
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