And the wheel of fashion turns and turns and...

I’m back!!

How did your New Year start?

For me it was very good: I spent amazing days with Tommy and our friends Martino and Liza that came to visit us in Gent for winter holidays. We saw a lot of interesting things but mainly ate too much (junk) food, drank a lot and shop even more (that’s why I kinda happily disappeared for 5 days)

Right now I am trying to detox eating normally (not even healthy, so try to imagine how my diet was the last few days…) and going to the gym but I really don’t know how it will go, let’s say, in two weeks… I’m still lazy Al in the end.

But let’s skip all this boring bla bla bla about myself and my holidays and let’s talk of the important stuff here (well… important…)

The first of January we were all lying in bed/sofa trying to recover from the previous alcoholic-dancing night (I think it was one of my best New Year’s Eve nights by the way) so we decided to watch a movie. We chose “Play it again, Sam” from Woody Allen because Liza never saw it, but it’s one of Tommy and me favorites.

Put aside that Diane Keaton has always been one of my favorite actresses and also one of my style models and icons, there was one moment in the movie that really made the fashion bell in my head ring.

So the bell ring was actually a very stupid question that will always stay without answer I think, one of those in the style of “which was born first: the egg or the chicken?” or “are we alone in the Universe?”.

So the question that my mind delivered in its huge intelligence and power is: “In the end, isn’t fashion just a copy of styles and ideas from the past decades?”

Oh yes I know, what an original question!!

But since after a couple of hours after the end of the movie the matter was still buzzin in my head, I decided to discuss the problem with you.

Look at Diane here:

Diane Keaton in a scene of "Play it again Sam!" and two pictures from Céline website

You could say that also the screen-shot of Diane comes from Céline SS 2011 collection.

I’m not saying that Céline is not original and it copied a style that Diane Keaton actually put together with extreme grace in 1972, I love Céline and I’ll ever do, but don’t tell me it doesn’t make the bell ring to you too.

Plus her long necklace, her hat and especially the gloves (those motorcycle black leather gloves are everywhere this winter) and the bag… aren’t they that vintage style you see on stylish girls in the streets these days? (I’m not gonna go through 5 years of The Sartorialist posts to show you what I’m talking about, I’m sure you all know know what kind of style I mean).

I could talk about this for ages, on why and how fashion always re-invent past ages looks and classics (how many times we read “the return of 50s” and similar titles of fashion magazines reportages?) and on how only a few bunch of designers is doing something really new (which doesn’t necessarily mean beautiful and good, but I have a few names in mind in which the three concepts coexist).

But it’s becoming again a very big bla bla bla and I would prefer to hear your opinions (which is actually the reason why I wrote this post) so…

What do you think of Diane style and the boom of “vintage” in contemporary fashion? And of the mix of going to the past and looking forward of fashion? Are we lazy, preferring to rely on past classics that we know are beautiful, or is it just the shape on fashion in the first decades of 2000?

And with these veeeery egg-and-chicken questions again, I run to sleep and send you a big hug!

Al