Opinion / Jamie Waters
Blank expressions
Last week, Gauthier Borsarello (pictured), a menswear aficionado who runs the Parisian vintage shop Le Vif, posted a photo on his Instagram. Its caption read: “The word ‘vintage’ is dead. It has been so overused it’s become meaningless. I will not use it any more to define what I do.”
It was an incisive comment on buzzwords. Fashion, like other industries such as food and film, loves a quick, sellable phrase. To “vintage” we can add “sustainability”, “seasonless”, “concept store” and “experience” as terms that have been bandied about ad nauseum in recent years. There have always been concepts that are particularly popular at any moment, yet social media, which thrives on punchy captions and pithy hashtags, surely means labels become exhausted quicker now than ever.
The thing is, many of these words du jour denote important ideas. Fashion brands should be engaging with “sustainable” practices; physical retailers should be offering interesting “experiences” if they’re to entice shoppers away from their laptops. The key is to actually do these things rather than merely use the words connected to them as selling ploys – or maybe we just need to come up with some alternative jargon.