Fashion designers: Seeking exposure, knowledge and real critics

Iwan Tirta, Contributor, Jakarta

I have said it before, and I will say it again: Most Indonesian fashion designers are still cut from the same cloth. By and large, we are still dressmakers who have yet to learn that becoming a real designer takes more than just producing a few pretty dresses.

I was not a great designer of dresses but concentrated on fabrics from the start, which meant that my designs were inevitably confined by tradition to classic forms. For others during the 1950s to 1980s, fashion design was often a way out of restricted circumstances, to spread their wings personally and professionally.

Designers during this period, tended to come from particular ethnic and religious groups, such as Christians, Manadonese, Ambonese and ethnic Chinese. For the Javanese upper classes, it was looked down upon as sissy's work for a man.

With the growth of the media, changing tastes and exposure to international trends, fashion has gained more acceptance as a profession since the 1980s, and some designers have become celebrities in their own right. But the bread and butter -- the hard slog that goes into becoming a full-fledged designer without simply commandeering the name for oneself-- is still little recognized.

It would be too easy to simply blame the designers. It's all our fault, including the media, for not providing them with the resources to perfect their craft.

To become an accomplished designer, someone needs exposure and resources. They need to know what it is to choose different textiles, the different cuts, the technicalities of making apparel.

But they also have to be knowledgeable about the history of fashion, who did what and when, the different styles and how they have contributed to

It's not so easy to simply throw out a statement like, "Oh, this is inspired by the 1940s" or "This is a piece of Sulawesi textile". You have to know the intricacies of it all, what the trends were in the 1940s and what influenced them, or how that piece of Sulawesi textile came to be.

Fledgling designers need exposure to different aspects of fashion and also the resources to look back at historical precedents. Unfortunately, those resources -- the archives -- are very limited here, but that does not mean they are nonexistent. It takes going to the library of a publication like Femina women's weekly and looking up the trend from, say, 1979 or 1983 or 1990 to discover more.

A designer does not have to do it himself. He or she can delegate the job to an assistant who can return and inform.

Exposure means getting a hands-on education, learning under another designer. That does not mean taking a course for six months or a year which, while providing their own benefits in learning the basics of fashion, cannot substitute for the practical experience of an apprenticeship. Yves Saint Laurent, Givency and many other famous designers learned their craft by sewing on buttons as an apprentices, an experience they could bring to their later development as one of the world's great designers.

The media also shares some of the responsibility. We do not have a tradition of criticism, period, in this country. It's very hard for people to criticize, with all the potential for bruised egos and conflict.

And we do not have a fashion critic in the mold of say Suzy Menkes from the International Herald Tribune, who wields such power with her pen. What we have are fashion writers -- people who write about fashion, compile the facts but rarely are bold enough, or have the necessary knowledge, to be able to put the fashion in context.

Once again, that is a problem of the available archival resources. People have been talking about young designers using faded batik in the past couple of years; nobody remembers that it was actually done way back in the early 1980s. The spectacular performance shows to present collections, now the trend, were also done 20 years ago.

There are a couple of exceptions. Years ago, when Dini Djalal was still writing for this publication, she reviewed one of my collections and noted that several of the pieces were obviously inspired by the artist Georgia O'Keefe. I read it, and thought, "Show me this girl".

She had the cultural points of reference and knowledge to be able to recognize what I was trying to do. I also see that with your current writer, Hera Diani, and that she is willing to take the risk of alienating some by giving an opinion -- by being an actual critic.

There are other writers too, who can identify flaws but often they opt for the easy way out by "balancing" any criticism. A new designer debuts and shows some promise, and immediately the media blows them up into the Next Best Thing. Of course, they cannot live up to the inflated expectations, especially when they do not have the constructive criticism or resources to enhance their talent.

It's not about being bitchy or mean for the sake of being bitchy. It's about telling things the way they are, so that designers can learn, take the input and develop their craft. If someone writes, "Iwan Tirta continues his VERY classic ways", I know it's another, nice way of saying "old-fashioned". As the French say, "It's the tone that sets the music".

Style questions for Iwan Tirta? Contact him at sunday@thejakartapost.com