The Importance of Being Earnest
In the following Op-Ed we examine why fashion criticism will always matter.
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.
Guy Bourdin, Untouched
I am going to assume that you are into fashion photography, and if you are, I am going to assume that you undoubtedly know the groundbreaking work of the French photographer Guy Bourdin. And even if you don’t know the name, you’ve seen the photos, the sexy without being cheap, the playful without being tacky images in which color burst off the page, the perspective questioned the conventional wisdom of your line of sight, and the careful staging let you know that photography is way, way more complicated than simply pressing a shutter button.
Old Designs, New Life, New Money
This past summer Raf Simons held a show in New York City’s Chinatown that was ostensibly based on the movie Blade Runner. The presentation had plenty of Runner-esque elements; the darkness, the wetness were reflected in the umbrellas and the raincoats that Simons showed. But there was one element in the collection that made no sense at all – the New Order and Joy Division graphics that Simons used liberally throughout have nothing to do with Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi film, at least nothing I could discern. Simons showed the same graphics by Peter Saville, whom he is friends with, that he showed in his seminal Fall/Winter 2003 collection, “Closer, “ named after a Joy Divison album.
Robert Longo: Charcoal
The Brooklyn-born artist Robert Longo began drawing in charcoal in December 1999.
Undercover by Jun Takahashi and TAKAHIRO MIYASHITA TheSoloist – Next Guest Designers at Pitti Uomo
Undercover by Jun Takahashi and TAKAHIROMIYASHITATheSoloist will be the next Guest Designers at the Pitti Uomo fair in Florence in January 2018. To celebrate their friendship and mutual respect for their work the two designers will stage back-to-back shows on November 18th in a yet-undisclosed location. For more, please read my breaking news article on Business of Fashion.
STUDIO KO
Chances are you have not heard of Studio KO unless you keep a very close ear to the ground when it comes to architecture.
Dries Van Noten at the New Yorker Festival
Don’t have weekend plans yet? This Sunday the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten will be speaking at the New Yorker Festival in New York City with the New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear. Tickets are still available at the link below. And, yes, we will be there.
What I Saw in Paris – S/S 18 Women’s
New York Fashion Week has become such a dispiriting spectacle of banality and celebrity entertainment that I did not go a single show. So, on to Paris, the home of real design, or, more accurately, a place where real design is shown.
Joseph Dirand: Interior
For those who have established a certain aesthetic direction of taste the world becomes smaller and more intimate.
YOUR OLD BAND TEE IS A LAME TREND
This past June in Paris I was sitting in the lobby bar of the InterContinental hotel, catching up with a prominent boutique owner after the Haider Ackermann menswear show. She was in dour spirits. “How am I supposed to sell fashion when even people who go to shows don’t wear fashion?” she asked ruefully and rhetorically. She was referring to the way the continuing casualization of style has been taking a toll on designer fashion at large. She was right. Today, one can see fashion insiders sporting Adidas track pants or a Nike jacket worn by a so-called “fashion person,” as likely as say a Rick Owens leather or a Celine bag. Last season, Instagram feeds of street style photographers were flooded with images of fashion people in Thrasher magazine t-shirts. This time the trend seemed to pivot in a new direction, as time after time I spotted attendees in various band t-shirts – Hole, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, and so on.