What’s in a name? That’s a pretty big question in fashion these days, given that designers can end up not even owning theirs or the mere existence of one – pick a name, any name - in the collective subconscious is reason enough for its revival into a fully functioning, muscle-flexing industry player. The dangerous thing about revivals however is that monsters can be made out of too much doctoring.
You may stand on the do-what-the-tin-says side of the argument (if so, I apologise for not giving you a more elegantly put manifesto) or you might want to see bright young things doing just that regardless of how old the name on the tag is. Either way and every shade of the rainbow in between, explain to me this: why, when clearly the capital is available and the faith in the talent must be there already, do you not let the designer do their thing under their own name or a new one they made up on the spot or spent years figuring out in old sketchbooks? What difference does it make to anyone interested in Goga Ashkenazi’s designs that the label reads Vionnet? I doubt it does any at all. By that I don’t mean that they don’t know or care about Madame Vionnet and her impact on fashion, but that what they end up buying or dreaming about buying has such little to do with her that it makes the name itself, Vionnet, irrelevant. And making the name Vionnet irrelevant must surely be a sin in someone’s playbook.