Christian Audigier, 1958–2015

Christian Audigier was probably one of the most important designers at the turn of the millennium. This is a morally neutral statement; whether or not his two most successful clothing lines, Von Dutch and Ed Hardy, appealed to your aesthetic tastes is irrelevant.

They certainly were not my preferred look in the early 2000s. I was gravitating towards Seven Jeans and “funny” Urban Outfitters graphic t-shirts (much classier) while I worked at a boutique in one of Toronto’s fanciest neighborhoods. So many people came in to buy Von Dutch hats! So many people wanted Ed Hardy t-shirts!! And I judged them all so harshly!!

But the history of fashion is just like regular history: it’s written by the winners, and the winners are the people left standing with the most money. Christian Audigier didn’t succeed because he designed the best clothes. He succeeded because his clothes were deemed to be the most of their time, standing in for our values as we inched farther away from Y2K. Excess and vanity are the two most easily identified sins from that time: “What’s the fastest, easiest way to convey that I’m young, hot, and burdened with too much disposable income?” people asked. Christian Audigier had an answer that spoke volumes with fabric, not words.

It’s too easy and too simplistic to look back at the trends we’ve discarded and reduce them to bad taste, or bad morals, or even just bad buys. Over-designed t-shirts and aggressively structured hats were choices made by reasonably intelligent people based on their options at the time. We’re trained to value newness and nowness over our memories, particularly in a medium as quickly-paced as fashion, but our current trends rely just as much on what came before as they do on what’s next. If we all dressed only according to the principles of so-called “classic style” (true barf) we’d have no way of visually or sartorially marking time; if our jeans were always blue and boot-cut, or if our t-shirts were always plain, or if our hair were always a color found only in nature, we couldn’t measure our personal and cultural histories against our present realities.

Fashion needs people like Christian Audigier. They keep us honest. More than clothing and accessories, they produce some of the best representations of a time, a place, and a choice. R.I.P. Christian Audigier.