Two announcements in the same week raise an uncomfortable question about fashion’s creative imagination. Balenciaga has appointed Martine Rose, a designer known for transforming familiar clothing and everyday social identities. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday, an exhibition devoted to designers who reinterpret commonplace garments and materials. One is a commercial appointment, the other a curatorial proposition. Yet both place the ordinary at the center of fashion’s creative ambitions. Has the familiar become our last remaining source of novelty?
