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How ethnic styles of dress influence fashion designers

November 22nd, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

Where are you going on holiday? It sounds an innocent enough question, but it assumes a loaded significance when put to a fashion designer because the chances are that the next holiday destination will also be the source of inspiration for the next collection.

Designers are travelling more than ever, coming back from Africa, from India, from the Far East, thoroughly excited by what they have seen. Hear them enthuse about those `gorgeous oranges’, those `wonderful terracottas’, and those `so-so-so pretty prints’, and then prepare to witness a similar set of colours and prints served up on the catwalks of Paris, Milan, London and New York.

Indonesia is hot favourite with the fashion pack this year, but, as our map shows, designers are visiting several countries and continents in one season: from West Africa, India and China to Morocco, Peru and Jamaica.

Yves Saint Laurent was probably the first designer to regularly focus a collection around one country. Now designers think nothing of throwing several countries at once into the creative brew.

Some might find this cultural plundering of the Third World a touch distasteful, but the designers believe that their pick’n'mix collections simply reflect the times. The multi-ethnic feel of many fashion collections mirrors the multi-ethnic nature of contemporary Western society.

Women’s Wear Daily, the American trade paper, once called it `international ethno-chic’. A less pretentious term is cross-cultural fashion: the deliberate fusing of styles and traditions, exemplified by designers such as Romeo Gigli, Rifat Ozbek and Dolce e Gabbana, and pioneered in the high street by Benetton. And at street level, we are witnessing the development of what might be called global grunge – the workwear of half-a-dozen nations whisked together.

It gets very confusing for fashion editors (overheard sotto voce at a fashion show: `Is it Mexican or Guatemalan?’). Not that designers themselves are too concerned about authenticity – they have never been sticklers for accuracy, either from a geographic or historical point of view. Nor should they be, or fashion would degenerate into pastiche.

In truth, cross-cultural fashion deserves applause, for, at its best, it injects new energy into the clothes we wear and conjures up an optimistic sense of the world as a global village.

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  1. pam
    March 9th, 2012 at 09:20 | #1
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    do you know who designed the pink dress? the dress thats right beside dita?

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