Eugene Rabkin is the founder of stylezeitgeist.com. He has contributed articles on fashion and culture to The Business of Fashion, Vogue Russia, Buro247, the Haaretz Daily Newspaper, and other publications. He has taught critical writing and fashion writing courses at Parsons the New School for Design.

Op-Ed: Why There May Never Be Another McQueen

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Speak to fashion enthusiasts today, and they will tell you how impoverished today’s fashion has become, and how hard it is to envision a change. Inevitably they look back, more often than not to the ‘80s and the ‘90s, which many see as the golden age of fashion, the era when a generation of designers created clothes that did not serve as status symbols but had deep cultural roots. In this new, exciting milieu, the Camp greats like Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler coexisted with the seriousness of Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, the sober minimalism of Helmut Lang and Jil Sander was juxtaposed against the playfulness of Franco Moschino and John Galliano, and the Antwerp Six and Martin Margiela ushered in a post-bourgeois sensibility that was taken up by the second wave of Belgian designers and culminated in the brutalism of Rick Owens. The idea that fashion could be the provenance of intelligent, culturally educated people, and not that of Houston oil housewives and Thai princesses, came to a climax in the late ‘90s in London with the awe-inspiring work of Hussein Chalayan. And then there was Alexander McQueen, whose clothes-making skills equaled his aesthetic edge.

Op-Ed: Is the Era of Primacy of the Brand Over the Designer Coming to an End?

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

In 2004 Gucci was flying high. Tom Ford, its designer, and Domenico De Sole, its CEO, were on top of the world, having turned around a flailing brand in the mid-90s and making it one of the hottest tickets in the world of luxury fashion. The pair seemed untouchable; after fighting off a takeover attempt by Bernard Arnault, the founder of LVMH, and having found its perfect white knight in François-Henri Pinault, they formed a rival conglomerate. Who in their right mind would fire them? Pinault did, sending a very clear message across the industry that was in the throes of corporatization – no designer was as important as the brand, even the one who brought it back from the brink.

Paris S/S 2025 Women’s Fashion Week Report

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

The City of Light welcomed this edition of women’s fashion week with pouring rain; proof that god hates fashion. No matter; the influencers influenced, and I am convinced that a tsunami could not stop the fake dressing for the cameras — mother nature is no match for late capitalism. At Dries Van Noten without Dries Van Noten the change in the makeup of the audience was palpable. The editors were mostly relegated to the second row to make room for “content creators.” In front of me sat a girl who must have been in her early twenties. She was armed with an iPhone ensconced in some gizmo that allowed her to record the show on video in a semi-professional way. Preoccupied with filming, she did not look at the clothes once. And what did she miss? A definite change.

Op-Ed: It’s Time to Stop Calling For Young Designers at Top Fashion Jobs

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Over the last several years the generational-divide-as-culture-wars has penetrated fashion. The narrative goes that it’s the same handful of old people who keep juggling for top creative director positions and that those positions should go to younger designers who could bring fresh blood and new ideas, and rejuvenate the stale fashion establishment. That narrative is…

THE CONTROLLED ANARCHY OF JUN TAKAHASHI

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

“Jun is the only designer from the Ura-Hara scene who knows that true creation comes from and with pain,” Hirakawa

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TOKYO – The offices of Undercover, the cult Japanese fashion brand, are located in the maze of the Upper Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. Undercover occupies the entire building, whose front is a repurposed shipping container that floats above ground, a window cut into its front end. On a recent visit in March, just after the end of Tokyo Fashion Week, I found the brand’s operations spilling out in front of the office, where boxes bearing the Undercover logo lay on the ground, its signature motorcycle jackets that retail for thousands of dollars spilling out of them. A middle-aged man with long silver hair wearing a coach’s jacket that said “Undercover Records” on the back milled around the boxes.

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion at the Met Museum

Fashion

The 220 artifacts for Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, the latest exhibit by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan museum of art in New York, opening to the public this Friday, were drawn from its archives with the stated aim of “reviving [their] sensory capacities.” After all, clothes are not just for looking at; they are tactile objects, and they smell. Or so the exhibit tried to remind us, in a rather clumsy way, by jumping through some snazzy scientific hoops that I doubt an average exhibit visitor will care about. In real life the olfactory experience of clothes has to do more with their wearer, that ineffable familiar smell of your lover, for example, an experience diametrically opposed to what was offered, the smell of dead, disembodied clothes. To their credit, Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Institute, and his staff, are well aware of this, but their attempts at resuscitating the sartorial corpses felt forced.