Do We Fit a Mold?

Stores Featured: H & M Michigan Avenue (see store information at bottom of post)

Last Wednesday, I completed my studies in Fashion Design at IADT (International Academy of Design and Technology). After eighteen months of seam ripping, sketching, and draping, all is said and done, and I am an official graduate!

So it seems that my identity as "Fashion Student" has disappeared, to be replaced by a new identity: "Post-graduate." Or "Style Consultant." Or "Fashion Educator." Or "Wife." Or "Daughter," "Friend," "Sister," "UN Representative," etc.

In other words; one mold was broken, and another is currently being cast.

Perhaps the question to really be asked in this post (the first of 2010: sorry it's late) is this: Do We Fit a Mold? Do we fit into the space, or does the space fit around us? Is a mold meant to be broken with each step?

In fashion, the rules/molds get broken all the time. Look at the changes in trends from one season to the next! Look at the changes in one season alone. Because of the growth in our industry, we can walk down Michigan Avenue on a cold February day and see how one piece differs from the next in H & M's Spring 2010 collection (see below). The color palette may be the same, but the rule of continuity is certainly broken. Each style is geared towards a certain aesthetic (cocktail, bohemian, or gypsy), and certainly breaks the mold when it comes to sticking with a unilateral style line from one garment to the next.

While Menswear tends to stick to the same mold/shape from season to season with subtle variations in colors/fabrics, H & M breaks the rules once again for Spring 2010. With a neutral suit base to work from, two of the offerings below break the classic suit mold by pairing it with sandals (!) and a tie-dye scarf, as well as with a shortened jacket and exposed shirttails. The cardigan over plaid skinny pants seems to represent the preppy aesthetic after it's been kicked about by an alley gang somewhere. It strikes me that menswear can seem very "catalogue" if it's not sexed up a bit, as H & M's stylist did with these looks.
While the women's looks from above could walk off the runway and onto a Chicago street, the menswear looks would likely find their home in one of the fabulous locations The Sartorialist (http://www.thesartorialist.blogspot.com) always seems to uncover. I would personally love to see more Chicago men in suits of any kind, so if H & M can make it kosher for a hip twenty-something to do just that, future generations might wear suits again without hesitation!

Styles in fashion change so quickly nowadays; in many ways, the molds keep getting glued back together, only to be broken once more. As future designs make their way into the world, it will be quite a journey to see where they go and how many molds they can shatter along the way!

H & M Store Information

840 N. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611
312-640-0060
http://www.hm.com