The Year in Fashion

The Valentino couture show, held outdoors on a balmy evening in Rome, with its evocation and resonances of deep history and art reeling back through millennia, was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever witnessed in fashion. Changing formats, breaking away from the rigid, numbing routines of fashion’s standard runway cycle can only be healthy. I don’t think for a minute that access to this new phase demands million-dollar budgets. In fact, I am already seeing that young designers and students still in college are using video, set-building, animation, and performance to communicate in ways the generation before them never could. Something else is coming. The grand fashion tour of 2015 is only a sign of it. It’s as if we’re watching the tired, old skin of fashion being shed and something different about to be born.

One thing’s for sure: 2015 has been like no other year I’ve ever lived through—a year in which we saw the age-old four-city map of the runway universe ripped up and fashion setting off on a nonstop round-the-world trip. The distance we’ve come since May! We’ve been to Seoul with Chanel; Palm Springs with Louis Vuitton; Cannes with Dior; Cambridge, England, with J.W.Anderson; Rome with Valentino; and Portofino with Dolce & Gabbana. Even during the routine marathon of the ready-to-wear shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, designers didn’t always pitch up where you’d normally expect to find them:Riccardo Tisci brought Givenchy to New York, and Anthony Vaccarello’s Versus Versace skipped over to London.