The unsettlingly rapid development of ultra-fast fashion altered our relationship with clothes and the cost of their creation. With thousands of items of clothing available at just one click, fashion historians, anthropologists, and environmental activists are concerned about the recuperations of reckless consumption. Some believe that the promotion of traditional craftsmanship could alter the course of the fashion industry. Many fashion brands experiment with reviving heritage techniques. Here are 4 major designers who contributed to the growing interest in traditional garment production.
1. Fashion Designer Alexander McQueen: Victorian Fashion Revival
Alexander McQueen came from a working-class background and miraculously found himself as an apprentice at one of the Savile Row tailors. In the late 1980s, when McQueen was starting his career, heritage tailor shops that provided bespoke clothing for the British aristocracy faced a crisis and a severe lack of qualified staff. The London Savile Row street was known for its tailors from the seventeenth century and managed to maintain its reputation despite changing styles, fashions, and consumer habits. Working as a pattern cutter and tailor’s assistant, McQueen learned the basics of classic tailoring and pattern making. These traditional elements later formed the basis of the Alexander McQueen brand.
McQueen’s exploration of history and tradition was not over after his apprenticeship. Over the years, he examined historical costumes and learned the techniques behind them. For his debut collection Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, he reconstructed complex Victorian frock coats and corsets, crossing the line between fashion and sculpture. McQueen also decorated the garments with human hair, referencing the Victorian tradition of mourning jewelry.
Several years later, he based his 1999 collection No.13 on the ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris called to rely on handicrafts instead of machine production and advocated for a sustainable approach to design, even though the word “sustainability” was not yet in active use. The collection featured hand embroidery inspired by Morris and even hand-carved wooden prosthetics for one of the models, a paralympic athlete.
2. Martin Margiela: Preserve and Repurpose
Deconstruction was the key artistic technique in the works of the legendary Belgian designer Martin Margiela. Known as a brilliant patternmaker and tailor, Margiela also enjoyed flea markets and thrift stores, taking things apart and bringing them together in an entirely different form. Such an approach is much more natural than it seems, given the way clothes were mended and remade before the rise of fast fashion.
His use of craftsmanship relied mostly not on heritage techniques (although he often made references to historical garments and their functional purposes) but on clever resourcefulness. He repurposed a butcher’s leather apron into an evening dress and published a tutorial on making a sweater out of socks. Despite its minimalist look and limited color palette, Margiela’s garments were always filled with the sheer excitement of craft and experiment, continuing the tradition of repurposing and prolonging the life cycle of a single garment.
Over the years, Margiela incorporated theater costumes, Japanese workers’ garments (such as the famous split-toe tabi boots), or suffragettes’ signature puff sleeves into his collections, adapting them to his contemporary period. Soon, the domain of fashion became too suffocating for him. In 1997, he presented an exhibition titled 9/4/1615 in the Rotterdam Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. What was intended as a retrospective turned into a performance. Margiela treated garments from his old collections with agar and fungi spores. Over the next few days, dresses, jackets, and shoes turned blue, red, green, and yellow, entirely covered by mold. Thus, even the decomposition of clothing became an act of human creation, this time in collaboration with time and nature. In 2009, Margiela quit his brand and is now focused on fine arts.
3. John Galliano: Rebellion Recycled
Just like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano came from a working-class environment and managed to find his way out due to his talent and attention to detail. In 1984, he graduated from Central Saint Martins College, one of the leading fashion institutions in Europe. Galliano’s graduation collection was inspired by a particular subculture from French history. In the years that followed the French Revolution, the pro-royalist youth started to express their protest by wearing abnormally opulent costumes and exaggerating their emotions and manners.
Demonstrative luxury and decadence were at the heart of the short-lived movement, known as Les Incroyables (The Incredible) for men and Les Merveilleuses (The Marvelous) for women, which were often made fun of by the press and lower-class witnesses to their theatrical antics. Men wore lorgnettes and canes, even if they did not need them, cut their hair short in the back, leaving long braids on the sides. The costumes were equally provocative: extremely short jackets compensated for their length with structured shoulders, raised collars, or back panels that sometimes made the wearers’ faces almost invisible.
Women cut their hair short, imitating curly styles on Antique Roman sculptures. A suitable alternative for a haircut was an oversized wig, often dyed blue or green. Their dresses were made out of almost transparent gauze or linen, shocking the more conservative viewers. Galliano blended the historically accurate silhouettes with his contemporary punk influences, creating a counterculture to the counterculture.
After a series of public scandals caused by Galliano’s alcohol abuse, the designer was fired from the position of Dior’s creative director and went silent for several years to treat his addictions. In 2014, however, he was appointed creative director of the Maison Margiela brand. Many critics expressed concerns about his appointment, noting the stylistic differences between Margiela’s conceptual minimalism and Galliano’s opulence. Nonetheless, Galliano’s 2024 couture collection dispersed all possible doubts, bringing together theatricality and resourcefulness. The collection referenced the decadent life of Paris a century ago and was described by many as a collection of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings coming to life.
4. Fashion Designer Dilara Findikoglu: Old Traditions, New Contexts
Dilara Findikoglu represents a new generation of fashion designers who revive traditional techniques and concepts by bringing them into the domain of fashion trends. Born in Turkey into a conservative Muslim family, Findikoglu managed to break free from external limitations and discover her own creative language—provocative, aggressive, and based on the celebration of femininity and women’s sexuality. Some fashion lovers compare her to the late Alexander McQueen due to a similar interest in tailoring and reinvention of historical garments. Findikoglu gathers together fetishwear, Victorian corsetry, and Medieval fashions and finishes it with traditional techniques of embroidery and carpeting found in her native Turkey.
Turkish embroidery masters usually used cotton and gold threads to create flowery ornaments on garments. The history of the technique and its iconography is impossible to trace, but for many centuries, it was an integral part of Turkish dress and design. Today, this technique has fallen out of fashion and is considered merely a popular souvenir for tourists. Findikoglu commissions her embroideries from a group of local Turkish craftswomen.
The designer aims to bring the tradition back into trend while rethinking the legacy of Turkish culture. In her works, she reinvents the gender dynamic, putting women in the positions of power. She also dissolves cultural connotations and stereotypes. Apart from reviving and reinventing traditional techniques, she pays extra attention to the work of the human hand and careful detailing—be it the elaborate structure of corsetry of the dress with dozens of Victorian table knives sewn on. Findikoglu’s inventiveness allows her to adapt historical costume and heritage practices for contemporary dress to present-day conventions and demands.
