In a lot of ways, the life and career of Saint Laurent are helpful in understanding why it is futile and also probably dumb to sit around waiting for his avatar. “That world is gone,” his former partner Pierre Berge said days before Saint Laurent’s death. By that Berge meant, as Jill D’Alessandro, an associate curator at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, recently explained, that “fashion was more about artistic and creative output—Laurent was someone who wanted to help with social change”.

Director Jean Renoir once wrote a letter to Ingrid Bergman, in which he cautioned the actress against falling for the hype axiomatically attached to the next big thing. “The cult of great ideas is dangerous and may destroy the real basis for great achievements, that is the daily, humble work within the framework of a profession,” Renoir wrote.

It’s a quote I plan to take with me into the Fashion Week fray, with a hope that the expectations placed on any single designer will yield to something more flexible, plural and modern. The next big thing may not be a single person at all but a yeastier and more broadly based network of shared information and connections.
_GUY TREBAY, NYT