Material World

Image by Getty

Today is Amy Winehouse’s funeral, and I hope, but am not convinced, the fashion world will acknowledge what it has lost.

She did, after all, provide the soundtrack to a season: just after her award-winning album “Back to Black” was released, when Rehab was the most popular track at fashion shows. I remember sitting in a Comme des Garcons collection listening to it; ditto Dior. If one song could work for both those brands, which stand for pretty diametrically opposed value systems (clothes as concept vs clothes as couture; clothes as challenge vs clothes as perfect costume), you knew it was something special.

Amy Winehouse in March 2010. Getty Images.

Meanwhile, in 2007, Karl Lagerfeld declared her his “muse”, and the next year Fendi tapped her to headline a gig at their super-selective pop-up fashion week club, Fendi ‘O.

But that was then. Then, the fashion world loved Amy Winehouse: they loved her look, that exaggerated and enormous beehive that always seemed like it would topple over her tiny frame; her cat’s eye makeup; her teeny weeny skirts and push-up bras; her appropriation and re-imagination of the girl group looks into something significantly more subversive and dangerous, just like her music.

In this, her personal style, she reflected an approach to image that was direct from one school of the runway: take a familiar old trope and destroy it to remake it. This is what John Galliano did, for example, in his notorious Matrix collection for Dior, when he de-and-reconstructed black maxi coats as billowing skirts, and in his ode to the newsprint-wrapped homeless along the Seine. It’s what Rei Kawakubo does almost every season, when she inverts the cliches of fashion to question their current meaning by, say, making dresses that deform the body.

The tragedy of Ms Winehouse is that it all got more extreme from there; the image turned into reality, and she subverted not a stereotype, but herself. At which point, of course, fashion had moved on to new sources of “inspiration”: more malleable musicians like Beth Ditto and most recently Florence Welch, who is proving happily amenable to the current game of imagineering, wearing Gucci on her world tour. So far, Fendi is the only fashion house to have made a statement about the singer, saying: “We are very sad for the loss of such a unique talent who in many ways transcended music, fashion and culture.”

But I mourn the fact we didn’t get to see what form Amy Winehouse’s future would have taken, literally. She was her own fashion statement, and it’s my guess, had she been able to deal with her own demons, she would have ended up shaping fashion, not the other way around. She wouldn’t have sung for her style; her singing would have set the style. And the effects would have reverberated at a deeper level.

Still, come the next round of shows in September/October, I put odds on at least one designer, if not many, sending out a spring/summer collection featuring models in big beehives and miniskirts. Fashion is pretty shameless that way.