Gallery
The global recession had considerable effect on fashion trends with consumers eschewing fleeting fashion changes, increasingly uneasy over its modes of production, in favour of heritage brands with a backstory such as Burberry and Barbour. The high voltage fashion statements of the 2000s were superseded by a more abstract cerebral approach as seen in the pared down luxe of Phoebe Philo’s first show for Celine in 2010 which launched immaculately cut clothes in teal, grey, cream and camel. Many catwalk collections displayed a play with transparency and the optical effects of light and shade rather than the historically influenced and highly embellished collections of the early 2000s and included Bora Aksu and Erdem. This move to minimalism could be seen in the Minimum Collection of 2011 and the Optica Collection of 2014 where editorial effects were created by playing with light, depth and shadow in the cuts, colours and styling.
The Internet was the ultimate fashion environment in which global tribes congregated creating transient looks that were cast off and off with will. In 2011 Sassoon created a trilogy of collections that celebrated such hyper-individuality from the austerity of White Noise, the cyberspace overload of Fruit through to the tweedy retrospection of Young Fogeys. The grunge revival and post-recession demand for authenticity revived rugged work-wear in particular classic American brands such as Filson, Woolrich and Pendleton; designers Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren incorporated the look into their menswear collections. In 2014, the 60th anniversary of Vidal Sassoon opening his first salon in London’s Bond Street, International Creative Director Mark Hayes mixed iconic 60s looks with the grunge and classic American work-wear trend in the Nu Pop and The Group Collections.
Sassoon’s fashion collaborations continued with American designer and Creative Director of Balenciaga, Alexander Wang, New York’s threeASFOUR and the London-based modernist Edeline Lee where hair was gathered into sleek, highly-glossed ponytails parted into graphic triangles to complement the juxtapositions of fabric and texture in the collection.