Destroy to rebuild? Yes, this too can happen in fashion, as the Japanese designers did back in the ’80s: a new approach, initially shocking but subsequently not only accepted but happily incorporated into Western fashion. It is the poetic of imperfection, which in the Japanese traditional aesthetic, is considered as being living, present, transformative, and can be infinitely experimented on and built on. Perhaps that is why deconstruction is so popular on the runways just now, used and abused by designers who do not normally dip into the genre; it allows them to make a clean slate of any garment and reinvent it, to do what they like with it, perhaps even when imagination or creativity is in short supply. At a time when fashion is dipping into past…
