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A fashion designer's job is dependent on the ability to predict the future. Nicolas Ghesquiere, designer for the hugely influential Balenciaga, has always bucked that tendency. Hadley Freeman reports. A fashion designer's job is dependent on the ability to predict the future - or at least what customers will want in six months' time.
Their sense of time occasionally seems confused because fashion's vision of the future is often rooted in the past, whether it's promoting a sepia-tinted 1970s look via flares and kaftans, or ruffles and frills that could have come from a Merchant Ivory film.
Nicolas Ghesquiere, designer for the hugely-influential Balenciaga, has always bucked that tendency, and his revered status is largely due to his inventiveness, as opposed to the wearability of his clothes, which still seem mainly for the very tall, the very thin and the very brave.
Quite how the humpbacked dresses in raincoat material he has proffered for this season will work on the high street remains to be seen.
Yet in a recent Balenciaga show in Paris, Ghesquiere took a definite step back to the past, albeit the past's vision of the future.
With silver tunic dresses over metallic leggings which morphed into slightly-flared trousers, and men's simple suits, consisting of narrow trousers and long, boxy jackets, the collection looked like the wardrobe for a 70s sci-fi film, which, like that genre, was alternately beautiful and surreal.
The truth is that clothes from the past are more appealingly familiar to customers than newly-coined novelties and, with the economy as it is, it's not surprising Ghesquiere has retreated to something safer.
Anyway, taking style tips from Logan's Run - a movie in which characters are killed when they reach 30 - seems a perfect source of inspiration for anyone in the fashion industry.
