'What happens when nothing happens'

This season's defining looks draw on ordinary materials presented in extraordinary compositions, an approach that resonates with the writings of Georges Perec, who explored the minute magnificence of everyday life

- By Dal Chodha. Photography Alessandro Furchino Carpia. Fashion by Jason Hughes.

Fashion fetishises the new, the outré, the extraordinary, but it's our own thinking that keeps things feeling fresh. The whims for A/W23, namely the longer length of a jumper or the bumpier texture of leather, are just that. In 1973, the French author and artist Georges Perec wrote an essay called The Infra-Ordinary, an ongoing attempt to notice, record and then recall the exact opposite of the extraordinary. 'What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward,' he says, before revelling in the small and unexceptional. It is a meditation not necessarily on simplicity or finding the joy in the everyday, but a succinct reminder that the objects that soak up attention are often a diversion from an essential truth. We are too easily distracted from recognising - and knowing - what is effortless and sincere.

'What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us'

In 1974, Perec wrote