How the Pandemic Taught the World to Speak Fashion
Written & Modeled by Meghna Iyer
Fashion has been forced off the runway and left to walk the fine line between life and death. The COVID-19 pandemic is holding fashion at gunpoint, threatening everything the industry once held dear. In this moment when our safety is not guaranteed and we have chosen to stay home, people are not buying or wearing clothing—the beautiful offspring of the fashion industry—as they once used to.
I look longingly at my once well-loved heels, wondering when I’ll get to power walk in the halls of my office or dance down the street in them again. While my heels still look lonely and sad, still unable to grace the streets of Boston, I have noticed that fashion has somehow eluded impending doom. Instead, it has metamorphosed into something different, but still ubiquitous.
Fashion is one of the most resilient entities the world has to offer. If you look beyond short lived trends, overconsumption, and other not-so-desirable industry traits, you’ll notice fashion reflects life itself and situations occurring in the world around us.
During WWII, designers focused on creating more masculine fitting clothes for women when they dominated the labor force for the first time, just as they introduced cork heels into the market during the Great Depression when cork was one of few readily available materials. In the midst of our current pandemic, fashion has similarly managed to adapt into something unexpected that occupies the space society needs it to—and it’s surprisingly refreshing. It has evolved into a mechanism of sharing your own story.
Fashion was, of course, always a method of expression, but it is ultimately dominated by its social implications. This isn’t to say fashion isn’t still performative; if anything, putting on more than a pair of sweatpants is playing an invented part these days. My point is that the motive behind these choices has changed from sending a specific message to those around us to sending a message to ourselves, to evoking our own emotions. We might still be dressing to play a part, but we are doing it for ourselves rather than everyone else.
This revolution is a product of the times. Far fewer people are witnessing our outfits given social distancing practices, remote work and class, and less occasions to go out. Additionally, in this time of worry and loneliness, our values have shifted. Concerns about how others perceive us have taken the backseat, while doing the little things that can boost our moods and make us feel better—like dressing how we want to— have taken the forefront. Instead of letting the horrible situation COVID-19 has put us in to dictate what fashion will look like, we have been given the opportunity to decide for ourselves.
This new scope of possibility has not gone unnoticed by influencers and designers. Simon Porte Jacquemus, a designer that launched his namesake label at just 19 years old, has wholeheartedly embraced this idea and run with it. His new line revolves around his first creation as a 10 year old—a pencil skirt for his mother, made from a linen curtain. The line is grounded by this story, revolving around this sustainable fabric. Jacquemus surprised customers with experimental FaceTime photoshoots over the course of the pandemic, but even more unprecedented was his choice for the official face of the line. His favorite model and the brand’s newest face is Jacquemus’ grandmother, Liline.
Along with this unveiling, he released a book of his own photography as a toast to his first job as a photographer. He solidifies the change in his own brand by writing, “Fashion is primarily about image, creating a story, how to tell a story. To create a brand, a lifestyle, a story, you must be obsessed by image. It’s not about doing a good collection or having a beautiful show, but how to share values with the audience, how to pass along a message.”
Other designers are slowly adopting Jacquemus’ ideals and following in his footsteps, but his words implicate far more for fashion on the individual level. They get to the crux of the pandemic’s effect on fashion and the valuable lesson it has taught us: performance and authenticity don’t have to be mutually exclusive when it comes to how we express ourselves.
I’d like to think I took after Jacquemus myself. Growing up in a small Massachusetts suburb, I was always the overdressed friend for every occasion (I would argue that I was also the best dressed, but ‘overdressed’ was the label I got). My mother, the inspiration behind my style, wore as much color as she possible could—she couldn’t be bothered less about loudly broadcasting her aversion to plain beige office-wear around her khaki-loving colleagues.
I, however, didn’t inherit her striking confidence. I walked to class in the clothes that I adored but made me stick out like a sore thumb. There came a point where I seriously questioned if being the overdressed friend was worth it anymore, but my time in quarantine solidified that my style and my identity were so closely intertwined that I couldn’t possibly give either one of them up. Towards the beginning of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time in sweatshirts and pajamas with the thought that I didn’t have to dress up anymore. It was like having a Freaky Friday moment, seeing myself trapped in someone else’s body (I understood why Lindsey Lohan’s character in the movie despised it so much).
It didn’t take long before I reverted back to my second skin of Levis and dresses that attempt to achieve the effortlessness of French fashion—even if it always seemed to fall one beachy wave of hair and stained shirt short. However, the earnest attempt, slightly marred by my stain-inducing lack of coordination, is just ‘me’, as are the clothes I wear.
Fashion is like a language. Each person has their own accent, vernacular, and quirks. It's rooted so deep within us that we don’t notice the uniqueness of how we speak until another points it out. During quarantine, fashion was analogous to speaking a dead language. It was something no one else understood because they couldn’t hear it—or in the case of fashion, see it.
In the absence of other people to dress for, it became so personal and reflective of our individual lifestyles, passions, and memories. We were given the opportunity to decide for ourselves what we would be before sharing it with the world. As the pandemic has yet to end, both the fashion industry and all of us have been given a second chance. In the time that we’ve been blessed with, ask yourself who or what you’d like to leave the world with a glimpse of. Fashion will take care of the rest.
