"Agyness Is The Girl Of The Decade" Steven Meisel in ID Magazine: PH:Terry Richardson for ID May 08 via TFS

I hadn't left NY is almost two months which was quite unusual as the big grinding machine that is Gotham usually has me ground out after a three week cycle. But now that Spring is clearly here, I find myself running through the city streets excited, invigorated and stimulated. (Literally!) I love how the new kids are dressing now in those clashing colors, in that skintight silhoutte, with all that generation/seperating bravado. I see more eccentricity, daring and individuality than I have seen in a long time. I love Agyness Deyn , I love all these exciting new bands and DJ's bursting out of not only America and England but also from Germany, Canada, France and Australia. I love how much information you can glean from Google/MySpace/Facebook/Youtube and I love that every entrepreneur large and small gets into the viral marketing of that. In other words I love the time I'm living in, the late Zeroes.

Most of all I love where fashion is going right now. If the typical consumer could see into the crystal ball of what is happening in those inner sanctums of corporate magazine offices I think he would be heartened. Big Media I suspect has looked at what is brewing with Google/MySpace/Facebook/Youtube and vital information centers like TFS and MDC and they realize the consumer today is not passive and is not WAITING to be informed on anybody's corporate schedule.

This week TI was first to "soft-release" the news that an "all black" issue of Vogue Italia was looming. I soft-pedaled the story at the request of several sources because :

A. The edit was still being shot.. and is still being shot this weekend and...
B. That means no-one but Meisel and his team knew EXACTLY what the final result of that shoot will look like.

But buried in that diversity post was a bigger story than just an "all black issue of Vogue Italia". What I do know is that across the board, at all the Vogues there is a clear understanding that in this new consumer landscape, where the everyday buyers of the product have their own strong opinions about the imagery around the product, this shift cannot be ignored. At Vogue Paris, there is a coming processing of this shift. The same is true for British Vogue as well as Vogue US. But as the comments on TI have posited, 'diversity' does not only mean black and will not work as a one time statement.

Nor is the shift in consciousness limited to a question of race. Look at the current US Vogue for instance. As a joked I said to my colleague "Have you noticed that the girls (Coco) (Maryna) actually have arms as opposed twigs-for arms?" . It is exactly as Fashionhow's Christie Denham explained to me " Women in their 30's and 40's are the ones with the income, who can EASILY stop to buy all those beautiful things you see in advertising. A 15 year old on a runway is nice to look at but that is the daughter of the woman who buys not the woman who buys "
"Aha", I thought "The corporate kids are not being random. They probably have market reserach stats flashing all that! Thus the Return (yet again)Of The Supermodel. Claudia Schiffer...Linda ...Naomi...they have grown up to be the reflection of the rich real estate's mogul's wife who has nothing all day to do but shop!"

The question is , will a consumer friendly ideal of fashion... racially diverse, with a range of body types, marketed around the mature glamour of an iconic supermodel keep fashion in the "directional" zone? Or will that road lead to banality? Well the alternative, which is to keep everything looking exactly the way it looks now would be redundancy. If fashion doesn't change then it is not fashion. Fashion magazines and campaigns have looked the way they have for 7 solid years now. There will be designers, when advertising their product and when casting their runway shows who will rightly argue that they have the perogative to put together their vision of fashion built on their personal tastes and preferences...for a certain silhouette, for a certain sameness of girl...But then the cost of that MUST be the right of the consumer to reject that "certain silhouette", that "certain sameness" . If this were an industry that was solely about the art of the thing and the vision of artistes, then why solicit a mass market as a public company? If the "directional" dress... (directional, that is based on "restrictive and exclusionary") sits there in Barney's not selling, then let that be the final vote on the issue. Exclusive and exclusionary should not be the same thing in the modern world.

But to get off the high horse and get back into the hiss...TI waits with bated breath for that issue of VI. The willingness to even shoot it shows Sozzani's and Meisel's ability to be market leaders and shrewd ones at that. Has there ever been an all Meisel issue of VI? Or is that aspect of the hiss misinformed? Who will make that final edit in that story? It will be interesting to sit out May waiting in suspense. I know the TFS brigade is already organizing around the question of the May VI cover. All I can say is guys, you ALREADY know. She is very much on the forefront of your buzz right this minute.