What excites me in fashion now?
This isn’t a moment for ‘exciting fashion.’ There’s too much turmoil in the world for fashion not taking notice. Designers are looking to the everyday, making the ordinary extraordinary, working on wearability and pragmatism –all while keeping the magic. It’s a difficult exercise that puts their creativity to the test.
What is one reason to be optimistic about fashion going forward?
Fashion is a resilient, elastic creature. It adapts and evolves. It will always offer imagination and comfort to even the harshest reality. It has also become a place of convergence for other creative media: art, music, entertainment. Fashion is innately vital.
In what ways do you think AI might benefit fashion?
AI is a great tool to experiment with. Fashion has always been able to absorb innovation, so it will play with AI as long as it serves its purposes of refreshing creativity. Fashion is fickle and fast — and technology, too. In the future, they’ll both move to the next level in some different form.
Who or what will drive the greatest change in fashion this year?
Luckily, I don’t have a crystal ball so I cannot make predictions that most of the time happen to be inaccurate or proven entirely wrong. There are no fixed trajectories in fashion, as fashion is determined by so many external factors that cannot be pinned down in one clairvoyant sentence. Yet the state of today’s world will surely be a driver for change – both in creativity and consumption.
This interview has been lightly edited.
