Are we firmly in the era of fashion’o’taiment?

The morning after Pharrell Williams’ much talked about Louis Vuitton debut last week, I placed a call to a friend of mine: “Do you recall the conversation we had about 10 years ago? Where I said I think fashion will be over in a few years? And it would be replaced by pop-culture with zero appreciation for design?”

“Of course,” he said. “Is that what you think of the Louis Vuitton show?”

The short answer is probably “yes”. The longer one? I believe it cemented a long-gestating era of the very definition of fashion changing, in much the same way that a lot of things have changed quite dramatically in the last decade or so. At the time of this conversation with my friend, we attended fashion shows as scribes, looking out for what is new on the runways, what the shapes, colours, textures, etc, were going to be for the next season. The fashion critic’s voice was critical in making or breaking careers, and it was possible to separate the “brilliant” from the “mediocre” based on design, innovation and what the fashion statement of a given show was.

I’ve loved Pharrell Williams from the day I first discovered his band N.E.R.D as a teenager, but, as I explained in a previous column, his appointment at Louis Vuitton is not something I found exciting. As I had predicted, what his appointment signalled is a shift from an appreciation of fashion as design. I don’t find that particularly inspiring or exciting.

As the livestream from the celebrity-filled event rolled out, reading social media statements of how fantastic the collection was made me realise most people were not viewing it from the same perspective I was. They were loving the spectacle, and because it was indeed so beautifully executed as an entertainment event, to them, this meant the collection itself was also as “iconic”. It wasn’t.

What was fascinating about LV men under the late Virgil Abloh is that his intention — creating “a new vocabulary”, per his own words — was quite clearly discernible. There was a reimagining of silhouettes, and a measure of the youthfulness and playfulness he injected into LV. This is to say, the change and innovation he stood for is something one could pick up simply by looking at the clothes.

The difference with Williams is that it seems he was building on the pop culture credentials LV had accumulated under Abloh, but the clothes did not present any new ideas. Everything else — Beyonce, Rihanna, ASAP Rocky, Zendaya and most major pop culture icons in the audience, and that performance with Jay Z — perhaps demonstrated a shift to a more hype-driven era in fashion. Or the cementing of this, at the very least.

Fashion is most successful when it is able to meet the moment, and in many ways, Pharrell’s LV debut does meet the moment. It occurs at a time when the fashion world has been completely disrupted by a borderline psychotic trend cycle and a time when hype certainly seems to matter far more than substance does. It occurs in an era where content is king, and it gave us all the content.

Vanessa Friedman at the New York Times called it “fashion-o-tainment”, and noted that it was the opposite of the much-discussed stealth wealth trend, and “it doesn’t matter that the clothes (heavy on logos, checks, camouflage and pixilation) looked pretty derivative” because it dovetails with Louis Vuitton’s parent company, LVMH’s, stated intention to “not sell fashion, or jewellery, but culture”.

To quote Friedman once again: “It seemed that Mr Williams didn’t bend his knee to fashion, but that fashion bent to him”.

I agree. What I’m not yet sure of is how I feel about it all. While I’m not one to hold on to old ways, refusing to acknowledge change, a bit too much of what I find makes fashion fun for me is missing. I don’t know if being entertained by the hype alone cuts it. Sure, I don’t mind a Jay-Z show, but in addition to it, I’d love a fashion statement I can appreciate.