Of Two Lives

From runway muses to designer drawing boards, polarity returns in a big way for the spring/summer 2024 season. For Vogue Singapore's 'Dualism' issue, one editor unpacks its deep roots within the world of fashion.

- MAYA MENON

Picture this: a woman alights from a bus, her hands brimming with fragments of the day ahead of her. Draped over her is a cardigan that will take her through occasional fluctuations in temperature— accompanying her from the commute to the office and back—while perched on her shoulder is a work appropriate carry-all, bursting at the seams. A closer look unveils clues: heels from the night before, hastily folded swimwear, buried glasses and stacks of scribbled notes—intimate, yet forgotten. In her hurry, however, this woman wears a badge of chaos, disregarding perfection. Amid the bustle of her day lies a prideful acknowledgement of a sense of ‘this and that’. Chameleon-like, she defies definition. As she stands, she is a character from the spring/ summer 2024 runways: a dualistic occupant of two lives.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel underscores dualism as an intrinsic part of the fashion universe in his 1904 article ‘Fashion’. “As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom. The distinctiveness, which in the early stages of a set fashion assures it a certain distribution, is destroyed as the fashion spreads, and as this element wanes, the fashion also is bound to die. By reason of this peculiar play between the tendency towards universal acceptation and the destruction of its very purpose to which this general adoption leads, fashion includes a peculiar attraction of limitation, the attraction of a simultaneous beginning and end, the charm of novelty coupled to that of transitoriness. The attractions of both poles of the phenomena meet in fashion, and show also here that they belong together unconditionally, although, or rather because, they are contradictory in their very nature,” he writes.