Pushing the boundaries of traditional fashion, often with experimental and unconventional designs.
The term was requisitioned from the battlefield. In French military usage the avant-garde was the advance guard — the detachment sent ahead of the main body of the army to make contact with the enemy first and, by implication, to take the first losses. The nineteenth century borrowed it for artists who claimed the same position in society, and the metaphor has never quite been domesticated. To be avant-garde is to be exposed.
The Advance Guard in Paris
Fashion’s own vanguard has arrived in distinct waves. Paul Poiret released the waist from the corset; Madeleine Vionnet turned the cloth forty-five degrees to the grain and discovered how it moves. When Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto showed in Paris in 1981 — black, distressed, asymmetric, cut for a body the city did not recognise — the reception was openly hostile, and within a decade their propositions had been absorbed into the mainstream so completely that they were hard to see. The Antwerp designers of the mid-eighties, and later Alexander McQueen, repeated the pattern: derision, then imitation, then orthodoxy.
The Economics of the Unwearable
There is a persistent misunderstanding that avant-garde collections are commercially irresponsible. In practice they are among the most carefully financed things a house does. A collection that provokes generates the images, the press and the cultural standing that sell fragrance, eyewear and leather goods for the following five years, and the industry has long understood the trade. The garment on the runway may be produced in single figures. What it underwrites is produced in millions.
For a career, this is worth understanding early. The most experimental studios are rarely the most secure employers, but they are where technique is invented, and the people trained in them tend to be visible for the rest of their working lives.