Designers have become speechless in the context of globalization and often only play a secondary role. But the fashion cycle has submitted itself to the principle of rapidness to give brands independence. As a result, there is increasing copying instead of designing. But if European companies want to have a future, designers must once again change from imitators to initiators.

By Sebastian Fischenich

Have you already asked yourself today how many products you are wearing, which were not manufactured in Europe? Most of your clothing is probably the result of the global market. I find this attitude strange. We Europeans try to identify by law on which tree our apple grew and we would really like to know why our chicken laid the egg for our breakfast. We are much less conscious of the path of our t-shirts on the other hand.
We have only become interested in the country of origin of our clothing over the past few months. This was the result of the textile quotas between China and the Western world. Chinese caricaturists already depicted us freezing at the European quay walls waiting for warm clothing. We have been lucky once again. Europe came to an agreement, and the Chinese wholesalers had already gotten around the quotas a long time ago by shifting their production to other Asian countries, which were able to export goods free of customs duties.

Design and Globalization
But where can I position myself as a designer in this discussion? Certainly not as an economist, and certainly not as a sociologist. My position can only be between esthetics and responsibility.
There is no doubt that we have to deal with new questions due to a networked world, which is becoming increasingly complex. We know that globalization is a process, which is developing further continually. We also know that the globalization of markets has set the ball rolling. Aspects of the economy and production play an important role here, but the question about a designer language is also a pivotal one. Language is a personal means of expression and a reflection of our soul in our understanding of culture; consequently, designer language is a means of expression of a designer as an individual. If one person imitates the way of speaking of another, we disparagingly call this parroting, whereby we mean the loss of individualism. But what has become of we designers – design parrots?

Management instead of Design
Designers have become speechless in the context of globalization and often only play a secondary role. Instead, purely economic interests are the focus, which are determined by the objective of continual growth. Stagnation, slowness and steps back seem local; rapidness, growth and progress global. Accordingly, growth means for products that they must be compatible globally to ensure coverage everywhere for a brand. The product then moves into second place behind the brand with its global requirements. The fashion cycle has submitted itself to the principle of rapidness to give brands independence, which translates into increasingly short lead times for production. Topics and contents are usually only dealt with superficially and no longer really treated in depth. This means increasingly less distinction for individual products and increasing interchangeability. As a result of this growth business, the actual products are less in the forefront than a concept of predatory price-cutting, efficiency increases and rationalization. This means for design that many parameters influence it from the outside before it can develop. Designers, who should make their products distinctive, appear to be superfluous in this setup. We will no longer be able to talk about design and fashion sooner or later.
The fashion theorist Yuniya Kawamura talks about the fashion system and the clothing system in this context. Ms. Kawamura considers fashion the tip of the iceberg, which represents the longings and desires of people, while clothing only serves a functional purpose for people.

Spiritless into the Crisis
Could the concentration of German industry on clothing, which lacks any identity, have caused the death of production here? Hardly anyone has thought about identity-creating fashion here since the Second World War. Spiritless clothing is a global phenomenon today. The clothing industry has achieved unexpected rapidity to increase its enormous economic clout. Tom Ford said to Time Magazine: “Fashion would be more appealing to consumers if it didn't change so quickly. The demand for Change has put an enormous strain on the business and it caused artificial changes in styles, and that ultimately is why so many people have rejected fashion and walk around in t-shirt and comfortable pants.” This is an interesting statement from a man, who was the creative director of a brand, which became the embodiment of uniformity. However, this statement shows the situation in which fashion is; it is the discrepancy between standardization and individualizing.

Fashion Was Always a Global Product
Designers have a decisive role in the end here. As “tendency collectors” and creators, they are the people who give fashion and products an identity and consequently can change the market. Designers have unexpected possibilities and information sources in our networked world of today. These expand the research work and development options of the products they design. The ethnologist Ulf Hannerz coined the term creolization in connection with the globalization debate in the middle of the 90s. Creoles are mestizos of Spanish and French origin, who were born in Central and South America. He described a mixture of different cultural identities to create a new one with the term. If we consider fashion and its products in history, it becomes clear that fashion has always been a global or “creolic” product. For example, we only need to think of the shawl, which found its way as a gift from the orient to European royal houses in the 15th century and then developed its current relevant significance as a warming or decorative accessory. Or chinoiserie, which embodied desire and longing for the foreign and served as a pleasurable adornment on the clothing and items of everyday use of European royalty.
Another example, which revolutionized the development of fashion over the past 20 years, is the appearance of Japanese designers in France. They brought an absolutely new kind of creativity in the 1980s into a Europe, which had been characterized by a traditional understanding of fashion until them. Issey Miyake describes it as follows: “There was a bit of a shock effect. But probably helped the Europeans wake up to a new value.” Kawakubo, Miyake and Yamamoto created a break with the customary symmetry in the West with their asymmetric, monochrome and wide look. Consequently, they applied a designer language from their cultural context to a new context and created the foundation for an understanding of design without clear dividing lines, which was new at the time but is still valid today.

The Decisive Point of View
These few examples demonstrate that it is a question of perception in the end. We evaluate fashion according to the pattern of our perception, in other words, we search for what we know in the foreign and name it with our vocabulary. Accordingly, design language mainly means perception for me.
Before we design, we become conscious of and formulate our ideas. This always happens in the context of what we know. This applies to colors and shapes. The designer and theorist Christoph Häberle describes in his dissertation “Colors in Europe” how colors in our environment, the colors in the places where we have live, determine our preferences. He concluded in his analysis that specific colors such as a strong tomato red, which he located during his analysis in Italy, was used more often by designers there. In the same way, products in this color are consumed preferably there.
This shows which local influences can and must exist in design in order for it to function at different places.

Initiators instead Imitators
Local future is certainly not on a reservation, but instead in constructive dealings with our own design language and local conditions. Local products were able to develop sheltered at the beginning, because they left their original markets very slowly to position themselves in new ones. This gave them the possibility to be cutting-edge and maintain the identity given them by designers. Consequently, we should once again fight for their role as initiators instead of imitators.
One example of how this could look is Intoxika Jeans, a jeans label of the Dutch company New Romans. The concept is based on not producing mass fashion, but instead on maintaining local, individual characteristics. This means concretely to use only cotton grown in an environmentally compatible and fair way from selected plantations in Zambia and to produce only small quantities of cotton to ensure quality. This is woven in local factories in Japan and tailored into pants. Intoxika Jeans is dependent on the cotton harvest and the capacities of the selected factories for the quantity of jeans it can supply.
Misericordia works in a similar way. This is a label, which the two French citizens Mathieu Reumaux and Aurelyen Conty founded. They came across the production sites of Benedictine nuns in the Peruvian town of Ventanilla during a trip. Tracksuit tops were produced there in aid projects and training centers for orphans for regional school and sports uniforms. Mathieu and Aurelyen picked up on this idea, because they found the tracksuit tops to be real cult objects in their perception and designer language. They imported the tops to Europe and founded the Misericordia label, which now has a cult status of its own.
Both projects are distinguished by the fact that they have nothing in common with an indiscriminate esthetics of “environmentally compatible or 3rd world fashion”. The limited number of products due to production issues has a significance far from a handed-down term for luxury. Roland Barthes wrote in his book “Myths of Everyday Life”: “An object of luxury is always connected with the Earth and always reminds us in an especially valuable way of its mineral or animal origin, the natural topic, from which it is only its present form.”
Consequently, imitation will become a phased-out model of the 21st century and designers will change back from parrots into people.

Sebastian Fischenich is the Creative Director at bel epok and an instructor at Berlin University of Arts.