Late Twentieth Century

1980s
The fashion society of the Eighties no longer criticized itself as consumerist, but was, instead, interested in 'the spectacle'.

The self-conscious image of the decade was very good for the fashion industry, which had never been quite so à la mode. Fashion shows were transfigured into media-saturated spectaculars and frequently televized, taking high priority in the social calendar. Appearance was related with performance, which was of supreme importance to a whole generation of young urban professionals, whose desire to look the part related to a craving for power. The way in which men and women associated with the latest styles was no more a matter of passive submission but one of active choice. As fashion once again looked to the past, baroque evening dress and long gowns made a reappearance.

 Extravagant fashion outfits by designer Nolan Miller for the 80's TV series DynastyThe two French fashion designers who best defined the look of the period were probably Thierry Mugler and Azzedine Alaia. Strongly influenced by his early career in the theater, Thierry Mugler produced fashion designs that combined Hollywood retro and futurism, with rounded hips, sharply accentuated shoulders, and a slight hint of the galactic heroine. Mugler's glamorous dresses were a remarkable success, and signified the complete end of the hippy era and its unstructured silhouette. Known for his awe-inspiring combinations, Azzedine Alaia greatly influenced the silhouette of the woman of the Eighties. The master of all kinds of techniques that had previously been known only to haute couture, he experimented with many new and underused materials, such as Lycra and viscose. The finish, simplicity, and sheer sexiness of Alaia's look made women of every generation identify with his seductive style, and during the 1980s he achieved a certain glory and was held in very high regard by members of his own profession.

Also creating designs very typical of the era were Claude Montana, whose imposing, broad-shouldered designs, often made of leather, would not have looked out of place in the futuristic universe of Thierry Mugler, and Christian Lacroix, who sent shock waves through the world of haute couture, with his flounced skirts, embroidered corselets, bustles, and polka-dotted crinolines which evoked the rhythms of flamenco.

A number of promising newcomers entered the fashion scene in the Eighties. Angelo Tarlazzi, an extraordinary technician who once worked for Patou, bewitched both the press and his customers with his 'handkerchief' dresses. Made of squares of fabric, they transpired, when you came to put them on, to be far more complicated than at first appeared. Many a Parisian soirée of the 80's was enlivened by his dresses, all in a fluid and original style, in which cutting and sewing were kept to a minimum. Chantal Thomass, the queen of sexy stockings and lace, won a devoted following for her seductive underwear and for evening gowns that looked like nightdresses and vice versa.

Guy Paulin was one of the first designers to promote a severe, plain, and uncluttered look. His garments were classical in their proportions and made for comfort and simplicity, with their harmonious lines reinforced by a subtle palette of colors and fine materials.

Under his own name, Joseph designed luxurious knitwear along classic lines, creating loose, sexy garments in neutral colors. Carolina Herrera, long regarded as one of the most elegant members of the jet set, in 1981 launched a series of collections aimed at women like herself, featuring impeccably cut clothes of very high quality and outstandingly attractive evening dresses.

 The short, flounced rah-rah skirt created by Norma KamaliInducing cold sweats, perplexity, and enthusiasm in more or less equal proportions, Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto offered a look which marked a total break with the prevailing fashion image of the time. Flat shoes, no make-up, reserve, modesty, and secrecy were the hallmarks of this very modern look. Eventually, it began to include details from the fashions of the past, as Europe's ancient sites were revisited by these anarchists of fashion, whose influence on shape of clothes, at the end of the twentieth-century, became legendary.

In American fashion the seductive, clinging style of Donna Karan and the casual sophistication of Ralph Lauren were very influential. A star of the New York social scene, Donna Karan brought a very personal and feminine approach to the severe, sober-colored, casual look that dominated American ready-to-wear. Setting up her own label in 1984, her designs won instant popularity among active urban women who greatly appreciated the understated luxury of her clothes. In 1971 Ralph Lauren opened a fashion boutique for both men and women in Beverly Hills. His aristocratic style at prices the average American could afford created a sensation. For an elite faced with all kinds of avant-garde fashions, it represented a rallying point, endorsing, as it did, a classic look that had been adopted for an active life.

The number one of American ready-to-wear, he was equally successful with his sportswear and jeans, which allowed him to reach the widest possible range of social classes and age groups.

Central to the success of a new wave of American sportswear was the Perry Ellis label, established in 1978, which used color and natural fibers to great advantage in its elegant variations on the basics. Norma Kamali, with her short skirts made of sweatshirting, leotards, headbands, and leg warmers, made jogging look fashionable. Kamali also created the popular 'rah-rah skirt'.

Also notable is the extreme popularity of the Adidas sports label, which achieved an incredible level of street cred in the '80s, even inciting the hip hop group Run DMC to release the single 'My Adidas' in 1986. The legendary French shoe designer Manolo Blahnik also rose to fame during the 1980s, with his fantastical high heels, divine mules, and majestic boots.

The astonishing multiplicity of fashion trends that bloomed during the Eighties were curtailed by the economic recession that set in at the beginning of the 1990s, largely destroying the optimistic mood that is so advantageous to the fashion industry.

1990s
In the 1990s it was no longer the done thing to follow fashion slavishly, a sharp contrast to the highly á la mode '70s and '80s. The phobia of being underdressed was finally completely displaced by the fear of overdressing. Fashion in the '90s united around a new standard, minimalism, and styles of stark simplicity became the vogue. Despite the best efforts of a few designers to keep the flag for pretty dresses flying, by the end of the decade the notion of ostentatious finery had virtually disappeared. As well as the styling of the product, its promotion in the media became crucial to its success and image.

The financial pressures of the decade had a devastating effect on the development of new talent and lessened the autonomy enjoyed by more established designers.

Fashion at the end of the 20th century tackled themes that fashion had not previously embraced. These themes included rape, disability, religious violence, death, and body modification.

There was a dramatic move away from the sexy styles aimed at the glamorous femme fatale of the Eighties and many designers, taken with a vision of romantic poverty, adopted the style of the poverty-stricken waif, dressed in a stark, perversely sober palette, with a face devoid of make-up. Clothes by ready-to-wear retailers such as The Gap, Banana Republic, and Eddie Bauer came to the forefront of fashion, managing to tap into the needs of women who simply wanted comfortable, wearable clothes. Retro clothing inspired by the 1960s and 1970s was popular for much of the 1990s.

In the '90s the designer label Prada became a true creative force in the fashion industry.

The Milanese company was first established in 1923, when it was a firm that sold high-quality shoes and leather. It was not until the Eighties that Miuccia Prada, the niece of the company's founder, began to produce ready-to-wear fashion, gaining fame for her subtle, streamlined, yet unquestionably luxurious style, that catered for the privileged young woman who prefers understatement to flamboyant extravagance. The equally famous Italian fashion house, Gucci, was founded just a year before Prada, in 1922, and was also, like Prada, originally a firm that sold luxury leather goods. Under Guccio Gucci, by the end of the 1960s the label had expanded to include a plethora of products with a distinctly Latin glamor. However, only in the '90s, when the Gucci heirs gave up control of the company to Invest Corp., who planned to turn the business around, did it truly begin to enjoy the kind of success it enjoys in the present day. Employing an unknown designer, Tom Ford, as design director in 1994, the fashion house was endowed with a great prestige, as Ford triggered a tidal wave with his chic and shocking collections, perfumes for men and women, revamped boutiques, and advertising campaigns.

In America three of the most influential fashion designers of the time were Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, and Calvin Klein. Michael Kors set up his own business in 1980. However, it was not until the Nineties that the designer reached the peak of his popularity. His knowledge and consciousness of trends enabled him to produce simple well-cut garments, whose sophistication and elegance appealed to a whole new breed of wealthy American customers drawn to the new vogue for minimalist chic. Marc Jacobs is one of the most notable American designers of the period in that, unlike many American fashion designers in the past, he was not so much the co-ordinator of a mass-produced garment as a designer in the European sense of the word. One of the most promising talents in the fashion industry at the time, the LVMH (Louis Vuitton-Moet Henessy) group offered him the job of designing a line of ready-to-wear to compliment the de-luxe products of luggage specialist Louis Vuitton in the late '90s. One of the first fashion designers to anticipate the globalization of world markets, the already well-known designer Calvin Klein started to market his fashions, perfumes, and accessories not only right across the US, but also in Europe and Asia, achieving an unequaled success.

A brilliant artistic director, Klein used carefully constructed advertisements containing images tinted with eroticism to promote his sophisticatedly functional mass-produced designs, which won massive popularity among the urban youth of the 1990s.

The group of designers known as the 'Antwerp Six' (so named because all of them were graduates of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp), who first emerged in the 1980s, came to prominence in the 1990s. Three of the most influential of the group were Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, and Walter Van Beirendonck. Ann Demeulemeester, from her first collection in 1991, demonstrated a great deal of confidence and inventiveness. Naturally inclined to understatement, she built her designs on contradictions, introducing contrasting elements into her fluid and streamlined fashions, which appealed to women who dressed, above all, to please themselves. The work of Dries Van Noten was founded on a solid mastery of the art of tailoring, to which the young designer added discreet touches of fantasy in a highly personal style.

 Managing to be both classical and original, his fashions appealed to those who preferred to express their individuality rather than slavishly follow trends. Walter Van Beirendonck, who erupted onto the fashion scene in 1995, produced decidedly futuristic designs under his label W & LT (Wild and Lethal Trash). Deliberately using fabrics developed by the very latest technologies, in violently contrasting colors, he produced clothes that were full of erotic and sadomasochistic references, touched with a caustic adolescent humor. His highly distinctive approach related to a resurgence of anti-fashion, but this time an anti-fashion with nothing in the least ethnic about its origins, instead based on science fiction that provided the inspiration for displays of such high-spirited provocation.

In Italy, Gianni Versace, with his brilliant, sexy, and colorful designs, and Dolce & Gabbana, with their superfeminine and fantastical style, broke away from the serious and sober-minded fashions that dominated during much of the Nineties. The British designer Vivienne Westwood produced many influential and popular collections in the early '90s, which included outfits inspired by eighteenth-century courtesans and the Marquis de Sade, with rounded hips, corsets, and platform heels. The London-based designer Rifat Ozbek was also popular, particularly in New York and Milan.

His youthful style, which mixed references to India, Africa, and his native Turkey with clever takes on historical clothing, was reminiscent of hippest nightclubs and the more outrageous street fashions of the time. Rap music was a prominent influence on popular and street fashion during the early- and mid-Nineties. Followers of hip hop adopted huge baggy jeans, similar to those worn in American prisons, with big patterned shirts and heavy black shoes. The sports label Nike had great popularity and materials such as Lycra and Spandex were increasingly used for sportswear. Increasing eco-awareness and animal rights made even top couture houses such as Chanel introduce fake fur and natural fibers into their collections.

2000s
 An outfit in the popular boho chic style of the mid '00sIn the '00s, as the future began to seem increasingly bleak, fashion, and indeed the Arts in general, looked to the past for inspiration, arguably more so than in previous decades. Vintage clothing, especially from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties became extremely popular and fashion designers often sought to emulate bygone styles in their collections. The early '00s saw a continuation of the minimalist look of the Nineties in high fashion. Later on, designers began to adopt a more colorful, feminine, excessive, and 'anti-modern' look. Name brands became particularly important among young people and many celebrities launched their own lines of clothing. Rap music had a considerable influence on popular fashion, these days less based on actual street wear and more on an idealization of such.

For many of the own-label designers who emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century, financial factors became increasingly critical. Many new young talents found they now depended on investors (to whom, in extreme cases, they would even surrender their names) and were always burdened by the risk that their partners, motivated by market realism and the desire for quick returns, would severely restrict their autonomy