Feature and Op-Ed articles

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.

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.

vestoj banner 5

VESTOJ X SZ: WHAT REVOLUTION? T-MAGAZINE, GUCCI, AND VETEMENTS.

Features/Op-Ed

We would like to announce our collaboration with Vestoj – the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. Through an ongoing exchange of articles about recent fashion developments we will aim to delve deeper into the state of fashion and the fashion media today. In our first exchange we share reactions to a major piece published in T-Magazine of the New York Times. Stay tuned for the response from Vestoj to the article below.

Robbie Snelders (1)

Robbie Snelders on Life at Raf Simons

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Capturing the nineties moment as a young, skinny, intimidatingly cool, raw, isolated, and underground night rider, Robbie Snelders was in the right place at the right time. Some 20 years ago his life took a dramatic turn and landed him in the then-emerging menswear brand, Raf Simons. He represented then, and still does now, the essence of that era and everything that the brand stood for in its early days. Fashion being the mirror of the zeitgeist and of tendencies within society, Snelders’ style became a trademark for youth culture around the world.

Grailed

Op-Ed: HOW GRAILED IS KILLING THE MENSWEAR AVANT-GARDE

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Buying and selling designer clothing by collectors and fashion enthusiasts on the Internet is a longstanding practice. Fashion forums like Supefuture, Styleforum, and StyleZeitgeist, where these enthusiasts tend to congregate are invaluable assets for hunting down that long-coveted piece, called “the holy grail” in the forum parlance. The forums, however, are, first and foremost, places…

London Fashion Week Fall Winter 2016, Day 3

Op-Ed: The Rise of the Fashion Hipster

Best of, Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

This past Paris fashion week the young label Vetements headed by Demna Gvasalia was the talk of the town, and their instantly recognizable logoed raincoats and sweatshirts were seemingly everywhere. They were mostly worn by the young, self-conscious, well-informed fashion insiders and were instant fodder for the street-style photographers, who themselves tend to be young, self-conscious, and well-informed.

undercover-womens-fw16-18

The Ups and Downs Of the Paris Fashion Week

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

So, I finally went to the Paris women’s fashion week (and liked it). I arrived fashionably late and missed a few shows that I would have loved to see, but I got to see a bunch. Everyone warned me that the women’s fashion week is more hectic than the men’s, but I did not find it so. If anything, it seemed more relaxed because spread over a longer period of time.

S_Meunier_M_Villalobos

Sebastian Meunier: To Be Myself

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

A little over two years ago Ann Demeulemeester announced her retirement from her signature label. After the initial shock subsided, the question of succession inevitably came up. That’s when Sebastian Meunier, a Parisian designer who has had a long tenure at Margiela before joining Ann Demeulemeester, stepped out of the shadows. Meunier spent two years at the label before Demeulemeester’s departure and has worked closely with her. But the big question remained; how could anyone fill the shoes of a designer whose style was so clear and who was so inextricably linked to her label? In other words, could there be Ann Demeulemeester without Ann Demeulemeester?