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.

Sex Pistols by Rizzoli

Culture

Last month Joe Corre, the son of Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, publicly burned his punk memorabilia collection (and, of course, told the world about it), for the umpteenth time declaring that punk is dead. The month before the publisher Rizzoli released a new book simply titled SEX PISTOLS, essentially begging to differ. The 320-page tome holds as many photographs documenting the meteoric rise and crash and burn of the seminal English punk band. Besides the photos of the band, there are many pictures of the now iconic Sex Pistols DIY concert posters and other graphics, as well as correspondence and song lyrics.

Robert Rauschenberg at Tate Modern

Culture

If art is supposed to reflect the world around us, than the American artist Robert Rauschenberg is an artist par excellence. Rauschenberg was one of the most important artists in the burgeoning, energetic New York art scene of the mid-2oth Century. His ability to gather materials from the dilapidated, grim streets of New York and morphing them into art remains unparalleled, and his influence on the likes of Andy Warhol, who was heavily influenced by Rauschenberg’s silk-screening techniques, is undeniable.

Deborah Turbeville at Deborah Bell

Fashion

As you might know if you follow the output of this magazine closely, the photographer Deborah Turbeville holds a special place in our hearts. I interviewed her for the second print volume of this magazine, and we published the profile posthumously on our website, with a slew of original photographs of her apartment. So, I was delighted to see a new exhibit of her photographs in New York, in the gallery of Deborah Bell, no less.

Wonderwall: Case Studies

Design

Masamichi Katayama, the founder and principal of the Japanese interior design and architecture firm Wonderwall, turned 50 earlier this year. To celebrate his achievements, amongst which are countless retail interiors in Japan and beyond, the german publisher Gestalten released a first comprehensive monograph on Katamaya’s work, Wonderwall: Case Studies ($69).

Alexander McQueen: Unseen

Culture, Fashion

This hasn’t been the case with fashion designers until the 2010 suicide of Alexander McQueen. And while you couldn’t exactly sell his artwork at inflated prices, an entire post-mortem cultural industry sprang up around his legacy. This is a testament not so much to McQueen’s unquestionable genius, but to how much more central fashion has become to the contemporary cultural experience. (We did not see such an explosion of media after the murder of Gianni Versace, for example.)

Aitor Throup – Make It New

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Yesterday the Dutch denim company G-Star RAW announced the appointment of one of our favorite conceptual designers Aitor Throup as its Executive Creative Director. The designer has been consulting for the company for some time now, presumably with enough success to warrant a full time upgrade. After initial eyebrow raising the appointment has come to make sense. While the G-Star aesthetic leaves much to be desired, it has exactly the kind of construction and fabric know-how that Throup might take advantage of in order to create something interesting outside of his previous conceptual flights of fancy, which have been both creatively mind-blowing and mind-blowingly unattainable. In any case, I am curious to see what will happen, and I would like to share with you our in-depth profile of Throup that I wrote for our print volume 4, in which Throup makes clear that he would be interested to translate his creative vision and formidable design skills into something more accessible.

StyleZeitgeist Magazine Holiday Gift Guide, Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonne

Francis Bacon: Catalog Raisonné

Culture

If you are a fan of the Irish painter Francis Bacon, you are in for a serious joy ride (if such a term can be applied to Bacon’s work). Earlier this year his estate released a painstakingly researched and compiled Catalog Raisonné of his work. That’s right – every single Bacon painting known has been searched for, discovered, photographed, described and put into this five-volume cloth bound colossus, distributed in the US by D.A.P.