Theme For Past, Present and Future
An introduction to how an overthinker deals with inspiration from films and TV
Can I start yet another newsletter with a Yohji Yamamoto quote? Here we go:
“With my eyes turned to the past, I walk backwards into the future.”
I think I know what Yohji meant by that. Yohji’s clothes have a timeless quality: they seem to exist within a timeframe of their own. Their proportions might borrow heavily from the past, but they can also appear extremely modern and completely new. The quote, I think, is a recognition of the duality of our existence within time. Life is an interplay between the paths taken and not taken, and while the human mind attempts to weave around what once was, looking for both the subtle and the obvious connections to find meaning, it’s not just our future that changes when we try to make sense of things, but also our past.
You know that feeling when you look back and ask yourself “what was I thinking?” You can never replicate exactly what it was that you were thinking. It’s not possible because you are not the same person anymore. You look for the connections anyway, and you reconstruct your past so that it suits your today, or your tomorrow. The past changes ever so slightly as we change and move forward to the future, constantly looking back. I think Yohji’s clothes exist within that constant interaction between what was, what is, and what will come. This is not about nostalgia. The past is always there, looming and changing, as if it has a life of its own.
I haven’t felt much enthusiasm toward the men’s F/W 2024 fashion weeks that are just about the conclude in Paris, not to mention women’s Pre-Fall, or whatever other stupid in-between-seasons-excuse they’ve come up with to sell people more stuff. I find myself, for the lack of a better word, uninspired by new collections and a lot more interested in looking at old ones. I’ve watched a couple of current shows anyway, to try to jolt myself out of this mood I’m in, but so far I haven’t really felt anything but annoyance. What were those ridiculous swimming caps at Prada? Or the silly arm warmers at Dries Van Noten?
It’s a weird coincidence (or is it?) that Dries Van Noten decided to use Simple Minds’ Theme for Great Cities as the soundtrack for his F/W 2024 men’s show. I had listened to it on repeat in early December after I had gone down a peculiar rabbit hole that started from a Stanley Kubrick binge weeks earlier and ended up in me listening to nothing but Theme for Great Cities for a week straight. My husband and I had watched a bunch of Kubrick films, including A Clockwork Orange, which had electrified my style brain. I remembered that Dries had done a men’s collection inspired by the film for spring/summer 2000. I looked it up, and watched the show, which was only available in Dries’ Silent Archives, which is, as the name suggests, silent, without music.
The collection was and is truly fascinating, and to me it felt very raw and original. Some models carried baseball bats, others had kites or techno-wings attached to their backs. The outfits came together from a peculiar mix of heritage fabrics, classic menswear, youth rebellion, kilts, and sportswear. Out of curiosity I did some digging to find out what the show soundtrack was, and yes, you guessed it, it was Theme for Great Cities. I started a draft for a newsletter called ‘A Look Back: A Clockwork Orange and Dries Van Noten’, which I never developed past the title.
And now, here was Theme for Great Cities again, used for the F/W 2024 show. The clothes that walked down the runway to the same tune were completely different, much more polished, refined and commercial than they were over twenty years ago. There is no A Clockwork Orange, no roughness around the edges. I can’t see the link between the two shows, and maybe there isn’t one. I’m just puzzled as to why they would have chosen to use the same music, and my brain can’t make the connection between the past and the present it desperately wants to find.
Another stream of strange coincidences that also sprung out of the Kubrick binge is my current fascination with men’s historical clothing. After having re-watched the magnificent Barry Lyndon (1975) in late November I got curious about the costumes, and it turned out that Milena Canonero, the four-time Academy Award winning costume designer, had also done the costumes for A Clockwork Orange (which was her first costume work).
I spent a good while investigating the Barry Lyndon costumes, and then just a few days later Ryan O’Neil (who stars in the titular role) died. After googling and pinteresting around men’s Georgian and Regency era clothing and costumes for weeks, IG recommended the fabulous Zack Pinsent (pinsent_tailoring on Instagram) to me. Then I saw Ridley Scott’s ridiculously bad Napoleon which at least had beautiful costumes, and here I am, still looking into men’s historical clothing, which I just found out (via Laura Reilly) is apparently heavily trending. I had no idea, and yet strangely I’m on the bandwagon, thinking that I’m following my own rabbit hole, but apparently I’m a part of a much bigger whole that I didn’t even know existed.
To top it all off, remember when I raved about the Comme des Garcons A/W 2009 show back in November? I look at that now and see historical menswear references in it: the shrunken jackets that barely close, the powdered hair… It’s making me think that I’ve been on this path much longer than since I watched Barry Lyndon, but I can’t quite figure out where it all began. Maybe it’s been there since I first saw Mr Darcy dive into the lake as a teenager.
The past few weeks I’ve been binging David Lynch films and Twin Peaks, and as I’ve re-watched them for the gazillionth time (as you do), I’ve come to think that everything in Twin Peaks, just like in life and in clothes, more or less revolves around the questions: “Is it future or is it past?”, and these things have literally been on my mind for months now: what is the relationship between past and present, then and now? How does that translate to fashion, style and clothes, except that trends are, pardon my obvious Twin Peaks pun, happening again? But maybe another Lynchian question is more valid in the context of then and now: “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream… but who is the dreamer?”
You know when you’re dreaming, and how you never remember in the dream how you got there? (This?) Maybe it doesn’t matter that the threshold between the past and the future is ever-changing, but a part of me would still like to know what it’s all about, and if we have any control over it.
This article has given me a lot to think about.
RE: menswear, I always love it when a modern piece references history. I love it in womenswear too, for purely aesthetic reasons, but in menswear it feels different - in part, I think, because hindsight makes a lot of it look feminine to our modern eyes (even though it wouldn't have been seen that way in its time). Whenever a man steps outside of the expected with a nod to the past in his wardrobe, he is - intentionally or not - making a comment about masculinity, and gender performance as a whole.
“what year is this?”