Fashion Forward: Toronto (ad)dresses the future [Exhibition Catalogue]

Fashionistas have come to expect the unexpected from Dutch design team Viktor and Rolf.But even against that background, the show of their Fall 2008 Ready-to-Wear collection was disconcerting.Opening with a precise, grey trench coat featuring the word "No" bulging from its chest, the extravaganza highlighted models with "NO" emblazoned in black on their faces and ended with a strapless black dress that declared "Dream on" in embroidery.Stark refusals -but of what?Parsing this odd combination of decisiveness and directionlessness, Olivier Zahm, editor of the magazine Purple, said, "We have to protest, but today we don't know why we have to protest."Contrary to Zahm's analysis, the designers in Fashion Forward have some good ideas about why they might protest -starting from the tiredness of the clich about fashion serving no purpose.To complain that fashion has no point is to say that ineffable concepts like imagination and aspiration are irrelevant.True, these notions have been under attack from the collection of ideas known as postmodernism for decades.But this onslaught, its persistence and insight notwithstanding, hasn't dislodged our sense that we're free in our minds, if nowhere else.At the very least, most of us still believe that we can, and should, think of ourselves and our world as other than they are.In Toronto, this perspective has long been sustained by designers whose clothes invite us to look at ourselves differently, often with a sense of humour -as in the case of the Comrags coat in this exhibit, treated to look as if street salt has damaged it irreparably.Together with Hoax Couture, Comrags points to a long-standing, underappreciated community of fashion designers who encourage us to think of clothing as aesthetic objects rather than simply utilitarian coverings for our backs.And, with more space, far more people could be included: Jeremy Laing, Philip Sparks, Nada Sheperd, Lucian Matis and many others.On the fringes of this community are designers who encourage us to rethink the very idea of clothing, again often with a sense of humour and a sly edge of commentary.Thus, Christabel proposes an improbable 'what if' with his rainbow-hued hooded robe for the "gay KK" (just the thing should the Klan develop a counterpart to the Log Cabin Republicans), and Lily Cornell has anticipated the possibility of an evening getting too dark by creating a dress that lights up.The impracticality, delicacy and bizarreness of some of these pieces can prompt us to wonder why they exist: who would wear such a thing?But this complaint misses the point.It's not about having your feet on the ground.It's about the good that can happen when your head's in the clouds.This attitude has everything to do with the Toronto fashion community's restless curiosity, which not only endlessly reconsiders what clothing might be -how new materials and processes might be used, historical motifs revisited, and so on -but also how the fashion community might relate to its broader context.And the larger point of Fashion Forward is to explore this inventiveness as inspiring new forms of social responsiveness.By forcing the issue of what new possibilities are presented to us by emerging technologies and ideas, these designers pick up on an important thread of fashion's history: William McDonough and Michael Braungart, in their influential book Cradle to Cradle, argue that fashion was key to driving the

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