Is financial crisis the wayback to the grey scale?

Attending Paris fashion week while the world’s economy goes into freefall is a disorientating experience. There’s nothing like watching the talking heads on CNN getting increasingly apocalyptic about the state of your finances, only to turn the TV off to rush to a fashion show featuring dresses and shoes with four-figure price tags. Of course, clothes take months to design and produce, so the styles that were on the runways last week were designed way before “credit crunch” sounded like anything more than a cute piece of alliteration. In that sense, you can’t really blame the designers for being as free as ever with the gilt and the gold.

As fashion is used to do, it has got a whiff of the crisis. That's why in the lastest shows disapperead the costly flights of fancy that have characterized the runways for the past few years: the tulip skirts, the enormous handbags, the heavy detailing, the frills and ribbons. Instead, they’ll return to tailoring in safe colors—blue, gray, and black—because customers will need to be convinced of the durability of any of the few purchases they make. You can say a lot of things about a metallic tulip skirt with frayed edges, but “durable” is probably not on the list.

Then again, that line of reasoning is probably too simplistic. Designers will likely opt for even more ostentation, because they know that the real money is with people who won’t be affected by this financial downturn at all. Fashion houses will be aiming for the new markets—Russia, China, India, the Middle East, and South America—and the enormous wealth therein. The lower end of the upper market (i.e., those who live in the West) will be the ones cutting back. The people who are buying up Francis Bacons and sailing round on super yachts (mentioning no names. Oh, just one, then—Roman Abramovich) will continue to shop without concern. This newly emerging demographic don’t just not worry about price tags, they don’t even look at price tags. So what we’ll see on the runways will be a microcosm of the world itself: the plain will get plainer and the ornate will get even more ornate.