FASHION — SPRING 2022

*La Poupee, Alexander McQueen, Spring/Summer 1997*

A few short years ago, I remember watching some of Grimes’ Instagram stories about how she was pleading to introduce ‘Ethereal’ as a music genre on Spotify — to specify her sound apart from the umbrella of Pop or Dream Pop. This exchange could have been in 2018, maybe ‘16, or even 2020. Time is extra illusory these days, and so is this beautifully aqueous, immersive realm of Ethereal. Lately, I’ve been pushing for my own subcultural term in today’s artistic universe — Neo-Ethereal.

Neo-Ethereal tastes like metal, freshwater pearls, iridescence. It smells like heart-shaped lockets, delicate tattoos of daggers, handmade silver jewelry shaped like ancient totems. It is opening a treasure chest from the deep past and embedding bejeweled objects into the deep future. Visually, it is Dune, in all of its breathtaking, cinematographic precision — defying current space, it is sci fi, but it is supernatural. It is super spiritual. A gauze-mesh dress, salmon-colored hair. The rainbow of Neo-Ethereal color is infinite, reaching our gazes via our smart devices, channeled from thousands of miles apart. The light is wet, the paintings are sometimes matte, dewy and glowing, all at once. It is of the deep earth and the highest celestial space. Violet like the crown chakra, or amethyst — clear, lucid like a raw chunk of apophyllite. Beings from around earth are quietly partaking in the material culture & creation of this movement. It feels like a visual language that is understood, not taught.

I see Neo-Ethereal embodied in all mediums — quite like Art Nouveau, the separate artworks form a whole gesamtkunstwerk.

“A total work of art.”

For his spring/summer 1997 collection La Poupee, Alexander McQueen presented a series of glistening dresses, floating above the 100-foot long water runway. Lit dimly like a vision from a dream, or an echo from the psyche — the hair and makeup looks transformed the models’ natural beauty into dolls.

These looks pair silky, brocade textiles & metallic makeup with a runway transformed into a surreal reflection pool. McQueen knew experiencing his works of fashion could mean shattering the illusion between fiction and reality… forming a bridge between the mind and our tangible world.

I believe fashion lives eternally in the psyche — we can’t forget what we’ve seen others wearing. It becomes embedded into our mental hard drives, encoded into our own internal compass that guides us toward what we love and how we wish to dress.

The fashion historian also becomes a fashion psychologist — connecting the dots to a larger constellation. We dress based on the data embedded in our psyche, even if it is so simple — we dream of this simplicity. Neo-ethereal dress of 2022 feels like a collision of rhythms, ranging from styles of the 90s & 2000s back to the 1920s.

Thinking back one hundred years ago feels less far, but also like an entirely different civilization, both because of the birth of the Internet and our immediate access to infinite images of the past.

McQueen’s works of fashion somehow hint at the technological — utilitarian structures and architectural tailoring create systems that fit the body and yet distort it. We’ve seen this kind of anthropomorphic play of bodily shapes with Rei Kawakubo’s 1997 show, Body Meets Dress / Dress Meets Body. In her

I view these design concepts as neo-ethereal because they give an etheric quality to the worldly flesh. Online now, I’m seeing jewelry, art, and fashion that augments realism — we’re adding a layer of visual experience onto the physical world we are forever familiar with.