From The Stories Issue
If there’s one large-scale production contemporary fashion cannot deny, it is that of storytelling. Brand image, runway shows, personal branding, exhibitions, documentaries…
A permanent staging and narrating that has allowed the sector to establish its legitimacy within the entertainment industry. But the art of storytelling depends entirely on the mastery of silence. Thus withholding information is an indispensable skill for fashion professionals. There is what is shown, and what is never said. Never. On pain of losing access to those unspoken things that belong to physical, intimate, off-the-record experience. "Knowing how to tell a story" implies, in fact, "knowing what to leave unsaid."
A dizzying question then creeps in: was fashion built on silences?
Big names, small stories
Throughout his career, Cristóbal Balenciaga gave only two interviews, shortly before closing his haute couture house. One to Paris Match magazine in 1968, the other to the British daily The Times, published in 1971. The great Spanish couturier did not merely refuse to open up to the press; he also burned the bulk of his notes and correspondence — a gesture betraying an extreme determination to shield his private life from an uncontrollable future. A privilege Gabrielle Chanel will likely never enjoy, given that since her death in 1971, Coco has been the subject of at least seven unauthorized biographies. Her successor, Karl Lagerfeld, thus long left doubt hanging over whether he would write his memoirs, hoping to scare off indiscreet authors. When, in 2006, the British writer Alicia Drake published a cross-biography of Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent (The Beautiful Fall, Alicia Drake, 2006, Bloomsbury), the Kaiser tried by every means to have its publication banned in France. Although French courts rejected the ban as early as January 2007, few Parisian bookshops nonetheless wished to go against the wishes of Chanel’s artistic director. A year later, it was Kate Moss’s turn to suffer personal revelations in a biography written by Françoise-Marie Santucci, without the top model’s consent (Kate Moss, enquête sur un mythe, Françoise- Marie Santucci, 2008, Flammarion). This literary exercise, halfway between journalistic investigation, historical narrative and celebrity gossip column, still promises many twists to come. In an age of media-people, fashion influencers with millions of followers and star artistic directors, it is hard to imagine publishing houses losing interest in these fashion personalities turned mainstream figures who remain no less baroque. In 2022, for instance, the artistic director of the Condé Nast press group, Anna Wintour, saw her life dissected by writer and journalist Amy Odell (Anna: The Biography, Amy Odell, 2022, Gallery Books). Within days, this book, packed with testimonies from those close to Wintour, was ranked among the New York Times bestsellers. Proof that the literary promise of dissecting extraordinary destinies seduces the general public. Since then, Amy Odell has been an independent journalist, highly active on social media. Her career runs on revelations and behavioral analyses of the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Meryl Streep and Kris Jenner. In her own way, Amy Odell rejects the culture of secrecy and positions herself as a direct witness to history, both small and great. These narratives, for which the main subject gave no consent, could indeed be seen, in the words of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, as "guardians of critical memory." For where fashion’s great names are concerned, their lives intersect with a broader cultural destiny, one liable to feed collective memory. Their paths belong to that history of fashion which they have shaped, and whose silences some of its actors have learned, otherwise, to organize.
A silent profession
While some public figures of fashion cultivate secrecy, many fashion professions, so-called "of the shadows," impose it. Among them, the most emblematic case is undoubtedly that of the seamstresses, long nicknamed "les petites mains." Their trade took shape within the workshops at the same time as the cult of the designer was born, at the turn of the 20th century. Despite an initial strike that reached the media as early as 1917, led by the "Midinettes," then another in 1949, the seamstresses of haute couture workshops still display, even today, great discretion. And yet, owing to their proximity to artistic directors, they are inexhaustible sources of information. A paradoxical phenomenon that journalist Loïc Prigent tackled very early in his career. In 2005, when he directed, with Mademoiselle Agnès, the documentary Signé Chanel for the Arte channel, Prigent handed the microphone to Raymonde Pouzieux, a trimmings specialist at the house for sixtyfour years. Signé Chanel marked a turning point in bringing this silent profession into the light: opening the way for testimonies, admittedly confined to technical discourse, but newly given a face. Of course, the current visibility of seamstresses remains largely controlled by the houses that welcome them onto the runway to take a bow, or allow a few cameras to film their handiwork.
Visual discourse comes first. Nevertheless, certain retired seamstresses sometimes indulge in more gossip-laden confidences, in interviews that let slip the inner workings of a bygone era. Such was the case with Colette Maciet, a former seamstress at the Chanel workshops, who confessed, in the pages of Vogue in 1995, to being afraid of Gabrielle Chanel — to the point of hiding when she arrived. Coming more than twenty years after "Mademoiselle’s" death, this revelation was no longer a scandal, but a piece of history. For the fashion industry is so well organized that every piece of discourse appears exactly when intended. From the press release to the credits that identify a project’s contributors, nothing escapes a process of framing discourse. Backstage whispers and toxic individual behavior turn into unverifiable rumors, spread at the end of working days in the bars of fashion capitals. For a long time, only critic-journalists could publicly voice a negative opinion or recount unflattering backstage details without risking disgrace. But that privilege ended around the 2010s, when their freedom of judgment dwindled in favor of a general discourse championing collective spectacle. To survive the mass phenomenon it has become, the contemporary fashion industry has indeed had to learn to maintain new, necessary forms of silence.
The mechanics of content
Creating a highlight, from a runway show to an advertising campaign, obviously requires a beginning and an end. Likewise, the length of content broadcast on social media follows creative, technical and digital logics which, once respected, reinforce the central digital place occupied by a fashion sector fed by storytelling. A pessimistic view would thus regard every element cut in editing as lost information. A new form of silencing, one that would grow as the length imposed on content by platforms keeps shrinking. And yet, on these very same social media, the watchdogs of contemporary fashion have emerged. Amateur runway critics, anonymous comments beneath a post, analysts guided by open-source archives… On Instagram and TikTok, fashion is subject to permanent popular judgment, one that has made the success of dozens of accounts such as @Ideservecouture, @DietParada or @Hautelemode. Thanks to their unfiltered commentary, they have earned a credibility that seduces and entertains hundreds of thousands of followers. Often mistaken for the journalistic neutrality that governed press discourse in the 20th century, the methods of these neo-critics are in fact springboards toward professionalization. Through sheer volume of content calling out luxury brands, they move on to jobs as consultants or media editors that open the sector’s doors to them — passing from seasoned commentators to indispensable fashion professionals. But this status is attained only at the cost of acquiring skills specific to fashion professionals — precisely, the skill of knowing how to keep quiet. And so today’s watchdogs, known to the general public and adored within the fashion world, may one day themselves refuse to see their name spelled out in full on an unauthorized biography.
If the internet has temporarily put an end to fashion’s silences, the proliferation of digital content has burst open the bubble of discourse, only to better renew the sorting of information. Made of unspoken things, secrets, anecdotes, official narratives and off-the-record information, the history of fashion repeats itself even as it tirelessly tells, ever anew, new stories.
