When We Say “Modern,” What Do We Mean?

A common catchword thrown around at fashion week and in the subsequent reviews that command our opinions on the shows: modern.

An uncommon question to counter its exaggerated use in context with which it tends to have little business co-mingling: what exactly do you mean by modern?

It would be one thing if suddenly every designer on the face of the metropolis set out to honestly strike the freshest, newest, most contemporary take on the clothes we wear. However, as evidenced by both an argument expounded upon yesterday in a story on the evolution of the 70s revival and the mere notion that as humans interested in what is used to cloak our bodies, we crave reliable clothes that boast familiar ideas. Most of the interpretations of bygone decades and themes that we’ve witnessed resuscitated in the last month are effectively borrowed and very loosely-edited material.

But there’s a baseline understanding here that of course these clothes will be called modern — they’re present tense depictions of past references, right?

Here’s where I get confused, though — because, really, can a pair of corduroy flare leg pants evince the spirit of “modern”: a word that is defined by its basis on the newest information, methods or technology? Didn’t that sense of modernity already happen the first time corduroy and flares came around?

Transcendental meditation sets out to quell a collective struggle of the human condition — our discomfort with uncertainty. We try to control the future in an attempt to find stability in it and as Amelia points out, that may be precisely why we’re such a generation of nostalgists. It is only inside the corridors of the past where we can safely deposit our respective senses of security, and so perhaps in attempting to blanket our fashion under a term that roots us in the present, we’re able to fake a level of comfort opposite our relationships with the future. But that doesn’t quite rectify our having homogenized a term that has historically (though, yes, literally) pertained to the new.

So what we mean, I think, when we say modern, is simply, “intriguing.” Creatures of the Wind’s Christopher Peters is a bit more cynical. He told me that modern is a filler word we used to add gravity to our descriptions without quite knowing what we mean, while J.Crew’s Tom Mora defines it by considering “clothes that withstand trends and fleeting fashion whims.”

Fresh, isn’t it? But what do you mean?