What Is ‘American Fashion’ Now?

As New York Fashion Week begins and the Met Gala returns, it’s time to confront the question of who gets to define a nation’s style — and whether anyone can.

In less than a week, on Sept. 13, as the sun sets over Central Park, the great and the good and the very, very glamorous will sweep up the marble steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the party of the year, otherwise known as the Met Gala, for the first time since the pandemic began. They will greet the evening’s hosts — Naomi Osaka, Timothée Chalamet, Amanda Gorman and Billie Eilish — as socially distanced paparazzi record every entrance-making gown. The next day the choices will be picked over in snarky detail, best- and worst-dressed lists compiled and, perhaps, a few new style stars crowned depending on how the attendees (or their stylists) interpret the dress code. Themed “American Independence,” it is a homage to the costume exhibition the party is meant to celebrate, the first of two parts focused on that weird and amorphous term that tends to get thrown around a lot in design circles but is rarely heard in the real world: “American Fashion.” On the red carpet that will probably mean a lot of star-spangled skirts. Perhaps even a faux Statue of Liberty or two. (No one ever said dress code interpretation was subtle.) But in the pop culture conversation and the belly-button-gazing world of style, it raises a different question: After a global pandemic and the outcry of the social justice movement, what do those words — American fashion — even mean? Within all the sepia-tinged nostalgia for the easy-to-swallow (or easy-to-wear) version of the American story, after all, there is plenty of discomfort and darkness — even ugliness.