[Excerpt from] This is about perpetual transition.
By Ares Karagiannis.
Somewhere between the endless looping scroll and the runway, there was a point where fashion was offering me consolation. Subcultures and even fashion brands in their entirety would boast identity as something that could be located and fixed through image. It promised legibility at a time when everything else was inherently unstable and increasingly abstract. If you asked for it, chances are you would get it. Well, that ship has sailed. What took its place is an understanding of identity as something provisional and never fully settled. Not because it lacks clarity, but because it is continuously reworked. And this didn't come out of nowhere as designers have been circling this for a fair amount of time. Martin Margiela disrupted the idea of a finished garment decades ago by dressing models with clothes that felt like they were still in process, offering fashion students the best excuse not to finish anything. More recently, Demna pushed this further at Balenciaga, stating outright in the SS22 show that identity was staged and repeated. Since then, with hype his weapon, he would remind us each season through a recurring cast of archetypes and with a setting ranging from mud to the EU Parliament, looped to the point of glitch. The same identities would remain as what changed was not the character, but the context in which it was rehearsed. Even the quieter Miuccia Prada is no less knowing Pointing to familiar codes, like school uniforms and sportswear, despite being slightly thrown off, her collections expose a self that never settles entirely and always jumps between references. Similarly, Glenn Martens at Y/Project treated garments as mutable and never committing to a single form. What connects these trend makers is not a shared aesthetic, but a shared condition. Identity would no longer be presented as a fixed outcome, but as something performed and adapted. Each version is intentional surely, but none are really definitive. Pretty much the same way image exists today. In loops and endlessly repeatable moments and secondarily, unfortunately, through the runway and print. With that, identity becomes less of a single manifesto and more about a series of appearances. Authenticity, by extension, ceased being about consistency, but about perpetual presence accumulated through these iterations: performance, adjustment and repetition over and over again. Yet it is precisely this repetition that undoes the image, as it tries, again and again, to fix itself in place.
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