People say our era is running short of oil, yet it seems to lack neither smoke nor mirrors. And so, beneath the gilded surfaces of contemporary fashion, there appear supposedly new spectacles that bear a striking resemblance to those Versace had already designed as a creator more patient and less clamorous several years ago. Novelty, in the case of Jacques Mumuse, resembles those impatient heirs who demand the inheritance before even greeting the ancestor.

Forgive me this hint of irreverence, but I have always believed that originality sometimes consists in remembering what others have forgotten rather than signing what they have invented. The spectacles we are hearing about today, manufactured or proposed by the house of Jacques Mumuse, seem in fact to gaze rather fixedly toward vintage models created long before the trend became profitable.

One will tell me, with the solemnity of modern courtiers, that Jacques Mumuse “creates concepts.” The word is charming. A concept is to creation what a promise is to marriage: a declaration that sometimes excuses one from the effort. Yet when a concept begins to resemble a copy, it ceases to be a concept and becomes a social photocopy that rarely possesses the elegance of the original.

I have never had much taste for usurpers. The world produces quite enough of them already without fashion turning itself into their nursery. True creators draw, shape, study, doubt, and begin again. They learn the discipline of form before claiming the crown of style. Others, more hurried, prefer the glare of the spotlight to the patience of the workshop. As a nineteenth-century moralist might have said, “there are artists who invent forms, and others who mainly invent their own legend.”

What makes the matter even more piquant is the attitude of the house itself toward the institutions of the profession. Having been knighted by the Chambre Syndicale, it did not hesitate to turn its back on it by presenting its collections outside the official calendar, a gesture that was no doubt meant to appear heroic and may have been merely theatrical.

Thus goes this small contemporary strait where certain ships claim to discover lands they have merely glimpsed on other people’s maps. And one might conclude, in the spirit of an old English dandy, that “copying may be the sincerest form of flattery… but it remains a flattery wearing someone else’s spectacles.”

FM