Best Fashion of 2012

What really stood out in 2012? I’m trying to think of anything that really grabbed my attention this year and I’m struggling. I don’t know if I have anything other than a gut-feeling to back this up but I believe there is too much fashion right now. And I don’t know where it can go other than down, like, it needs to nose-dive.

 I put most of the blame on the pre-collections which I can’t even be bothered looking at because most of them are garbage, watered down clothes that don’t deserve magazine coverage but do. There’s just so much pressure in the fashion industry now that’s being driven by money and it filters into every facet. The designers have to produce, what, a minimum of four collections a year now? If the idea of designing is to sell then how are we the customer supposed to keep up? I know that a lot of things these days are becoming frenetic and ADD-like and it’s something I’ve noticed being bandied about the media at the moment. I see it in say, a review of Grimes’ new album Genesis, I see how within the past three years blogging has shifted from-at times-considered, thought out articles or musings to rapid fire re-blogging of images and GIFs at Tumblr. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m lamenting old media or anything like that. I love Tumblr but when I type up something on Blogger I feel like a dinosaur or worse, that it’s a waste of time because people don’t want to spend more than a few seconds looking at something.

I also don’t remember ever receiving so many e-mails from online stores. I’ve been buying clothes from Asos for maybe three years now and I don’t think they ever sent me e-mails but now I get them daily. 50% off selected shoes, summer style, blah blah blah. It’s overwhelming how much I choose to expose myself to because after-all I opt in for this shit.

Okay, I just realised I’m ranting so I re-read this and what I could have said about two paragraphs ago is that I’ve allowed myself to be so heavily bombarded by fashion media that I’m struggling to pick what really stood out to me and made a lasting impression.

Update: I’ve been thinking about this overnight and one thing that stood out for me was the Miu Miu spring 2013 collection but not because I thought it was amazing-because it wasn’t. The reviews for this collection weren’t positive. It looked like a mish-mash of past collections and seemed like Miuccia Prada was cherry picking things she liked from the past five years. Duster coats, fur, mid-riff. It was all too familiar and had an ‘oh if I must’ feeling to it. So the collection was quite unremarkable but then over the next couple of months images from the collection began sprouting up on Tumblr and the collection seemed to be picking up some traction. But what’s really topped it off is the ad campaign by Inez and Vinoodh. The ad has models Adriana Lima, Doutzen Kroes, Bette Franke, Tamara Weijenberg, Martha Hunt, and Malgosia Bela (there’s a lot of girls in this campaign, I may have missed one), just hanging out at some sort of beach house set and it is flawless.