“It used to be that if you were a young designer, you needed to come to the biggest city and the biggest stage to find your customers and start your business,” Anna Wintour writes in the foreword to The United States of Fashion, a new book from Vogue and Rizzoli that is out this week. Now, however, the center has shifted, and fashion is everywhere—only a swipe away.
Never before has this been so evident, in part because of the proliferation of social media, but also because of COVID-19, which necessarily directed our attention away from the places where people had traditionally congregated—big cities on the coasts—and toward local enterprises scattered throughout the country. Although this decentralization was well under way before the spring of 2020, the pandemic caused us all to reconsider the primacy of geography. “Who makes the best beaded bag, or the must-have boot?” Anna asks in the foreword. “Perhaps it’s someone in your hometown.”
The United States of Fashion is a reflection of that altered perspective: a new map of American fashion. It is also a snapshot of a time; a moment when the unpredictability of the world forced us at Vogue to think about it in new and creative ways. As we did for Postcards From Home, in many instances, we handed over the camera to the designers themselves, and the results were often startlingly intimate and disarming.
Because Vogue has always told stories in powerful words as well as images, we also commissioned some of the country’s leading writers to reflect on how their hometowns had shaped their sense of style. Many of these poignant reflections focused on the the past; the indelible experiences of youth that forever shaped these writers’ approaches to fashion. Even in this brave new world, where we’re going is always connected to where we’ve been.
The United States of Fashion is on-sale now wherever books are sold.
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