Viktor and Rolf Make a Fashion Statement

In their latest collection, the duo used couture techniques to work bold, eye-catching phrases such as “No photos please,” “I’m not shy I just don’t like you,” “I’m sorry I’m late I didn’t want to come,” and “Go to Hell” on the fronts of their usual pretty-but-oddball gowns. The gimmick drew a massive amount of attention as images of the clothes, or more specifically the clothes and their slogans, exited the normally tight gravity of fashion followers and spread—along with many jokes, to much broader social media audiences that usually wouldn’t much care about couture.

In a world where runway images come and go in a flash, it’s a readymade lesson in what it takes brands to break out from the crowd and actually get noticed. Particularly for a medium such as couture, where thousands of hours of elaborate crafting and painstaking handwork practically vanish in the constraints of a blip on Instagram or Twitter, the path to getting attention is usually to go big and blunt.

Designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren recently told Vogue that their collection, titled “Fashion Statements,” was asking, “To what extent can you say something with clothing, literally.” Their statements varied, but the subtext was always the same: Look at me.

Meme-ready designs, which practically seem created just to be shared online, have become a particularly successful means of grabbing eyeballs. The 2018 “Year In Fashion” report by the large fashion-search platform Lyst pegged “meme fashion” as one of the year’s most important trends. “When meme culture met Internet-melting product design, the result was a series of Internet breaking fashion moments that got the world talking, and searching,” Lyst noted.

This state of affairs is a consequence of social media’s importance today, and it has very real effects on the way brands and retailers work. If the point of holding an expensive runway show is in large part publicity and branding, then getting attention is a measure of success.

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