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.

Rick Owens New York Store Opening

Fashion, Retail

This past weekend Rick Owens reopened his New York boutique on the corner of Crosby and Howard streets in Manhattan. This particular stretch of SoHo has exploded this year with the opening of the 11 Howard hotel and the adjacent interior design shop Oliver Gustav (which coincidentally carries furniture by Rick Owens). The former textile factory building was previously occupied by a Jil Sander store, and has undergone extensive renovations to reflect Owens’s universe.

StyleZeitgeist Pop-Up in New York

Retail

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration we will open a pop-up shop inside the new storefront location of Atelier New York. We will carry exclusive items from many designers we have supported over the years and who have graciously agreed to create exclusive products for the shop. All of the products are either new styles or have been customized in some way. Most come in limited editions of three to five pieces. Some come in editions of ten or eleven. In the coming days we will begin releasing product imagery. I will try my best to be at the pop-up every day, so come and say hi.

Gus Van Sant: Icons

Culture

The director Gus Van Sant is one of those creators synonymous with the youth culture of the 90s, when the fringes hit the mainstream. The Drugstore Cowboy (ok, it came out in ‘89, but you know what I mean) and especially My Own Private Idaho (’91) made him more than an instant cult figure. And if his later releases like Gerry, Last Days, and Paranoid Park, did not seem as impactful, perhaps it’s because the youth culture that changed and not the man.

Undercover

Undercover Monograph

Culture, Fashion

It is hard to believe that that the perennially young Japanese label UNDERCOVER turned 25 last year. As part of the anniversary, the publisher Rizzoli is releasing a 256-page book on the brand ($65). It is the first comprehensive overview of UNDERCOVER’s body of work and the first book on the brand available in the West (if you can find it, hunt down the fantastic “The Shepherd,” which documented UNDERCOVER’s first Parisian shows.)

haider ackermann men ss17 41

Fashion Week Ramblings – S/S 2017

Features/Op-Ed

If I had to summarize this past menswear season, it’d be the one of plenty of good product and few good ideas. It was neither weak nor strong, pretty much in tune with what I have come to expect of fashion as of late.

Men’s fashion has been now thoroughly splintered into parts that cater to the youngsters and to the adults, and nowhere has this been more evident than at Pitti Uomo in Florence, where the bulk of the trade fair itself is devoted to traditional menswear, and where three designers that are of interest to the young were showing – Gosha Rubchinkiy, Visvim, and Raf Simons.

9780714871080-2D

This Brutal World

Culture

I did not know that one of the most impressive modern buildings is in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, until I saw its photo in This Brutal World (Phaidon, $49.95). The jaw-dropping structure is a testament to the human aspirations and follies. If architecture, like art, should reflect our world, the still-unfinished (inside) Ryugyong Hotel is it.

Portrait

Thamanyah on the Move

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Thamanyah, the fashion label designed by Ahmed Abdelrahman, has been on my radar for quite a long time. There is uniqueness in Abdelrahman’s approach to taking the traditional Middle Eastern dress, making it modern, and mixing it with Western sartorial codes. In his hands a white kandora turns black and gets paired with a fine wool bomber jacket. Not only such a combination results in a new menswear silhouette, but also both the Middle Eastern and the Western staples acquire a new meaning. It is no wonder then that Thamanyah has acquired a cult following in both worlds.

Chanel_cruise

Silence of the Lambs: The Fashion Media Prostrates Itself Before Chanel and Louis Vuitton

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Vestoj and StyleZeitgeist have teamed up in a dialogue and series of critiques of recent events in fashion media to raise more wide-reaching questions about the state of contemporary fashion media – and what that says about our industry at large. In our second installment of this collaboration, we examine the recent political faux pas of the Chanel and Louis Vuitton resort collections, and the fashion media’s sycophancy.

vetements-fw16-collection

Op-Ed: Is Haute Couture Losing Its Meaning?

Features/Op-Ed

Each season the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (CSHC) meets to decide which guest designers get to show during the haute couture calendar in Paris. These designers, while not being formally accepted into the rarefied couture club, are considered as worthy of showing alongside the likes of Chanel and Dior. Its selection process is supposed to be rigorous and extremely selective, in order to reflect that haute couture is the pinnacle of fashion design and craftsmanship.