Feature and Op-Ed articles

Op-Ed: New Media, Old Problems

Features/Op-Ed

The likes of social media-first media entities like Style Not Com and I Deserve Couture are hailed as upending the status quo, but what do they actually say, if anything?

“It’s literally NOTHING,” fumed an established street-style photographer on our shared taxi ride during this past men’s Paris fashion week, echoing a sentiment I had heard more than a few times from fashion insiders over the past several months. He was referring to Style Not Com, an Instagram account that documents fashion. Founded by Beka Gvishiani, a Georgian native living in Paris, it broadcasts fashion commentary to its 181 thousand followers. Though to call what Style Not Com produces “commentary” would be a stretch — for the most part the account provides a retelling of what most people with Internet access can see with their own eyes. To wit, on Rihanna’s recent Super Bowl appearance — “Rihanna, Loewe, Alaia.” Such snackable content comes in an attractive visual package — white san serif font on a cobalt blue background. The blue, repeated ad nauseam, has beсome a trademark; whenever Gvishiani is out and about fashion events, he is easy to spot by his ever-present “Style Not Com” baseball cap that advertises him to others.

Op-Ed: The Society of the Fashion Spectacle

Features/Op-Ed

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, …illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

These words were written by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, in the preface to his book The Essence of Christianity, reborn as an epigraph to Guy Debord’s famous critique The Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967. In it Debord, one of the most famous French postmodernist philosophers, posited that we live in a world where the only thing that matters to us are appearances, which leads to an alienated existence, mediated and untethered from a lived reality. We conduct our lives for the sake of appearances. The result is a postmodern (Debord would say post-capitalist) personality in which acting takes precedence over living, appearing over being. To anyone who’s partaken in the contemporary culture driven by the social media, this is felt intuitively and does not require much persuasion. But it’s worth delving into the mechanics of this cultural system and fashion’s role in it in particular.

Welcome to the Post-Fashion World

Features/Op-Ed

Observing the changes in the art scene in the early 1970s, the great art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote, “The artist today is primarily a maker not of objects but of a public image of himself.” The model for this new attitude was Andy Warhol, who spent more time cultivating his persona than making art, which quickly stagnated after his overwhelming success in the ‘60s.

Fast-forward fifty years and we are witnessing the same state of affairs in fashion. For plenty of creative directors of major houses their own image trumps their creative output. At the same time, there exists a tug of war between the primacy of the brand and that of its creative director. 

This is, obviously, not to say that there is no fashion being produced — there is more of it than ever. It’s just that by and large it has become rather unmemorable – familiar garment archetypes with logos on them – eclipsed either by the personas of its creators or by the brand image. The winning formula for today’s successful creative director of a major brand is something like persona + merch = fashion; designer as celebrity pushing unremarkable product. Fashion design, as such, has taken a back seat to public image as a marketing device.

How Luxury Fashion Killed the Joy of Shopping

Features/Op-Ed

This past summer I went to an Hérmes store on rue St-Honoré in Paris, with the idea of buying a cardholder. The one I wanted was sold out, so I decided to browse the store, which was already full of shoppers at ten in the morning. I was almost on the way out when a thin black leather cuff with a matte black leather buckle caught my eye. Attracted by its subtle elegance, I bought it on the spot. By the time I was done with my tax refund process, the sales associate who was helping me magically appeared at my side, with the cuff gift-wrapped and swaddled inside the iconic orange shopping bag. This was one of my most pleasant shopping experiences of the past several years, and an increasingly rare one.

Dries Van Noten

Dries Van Noten: The Man Who Played with Color

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

On the recent evening during the men’s show of the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten, a crowd bustled outside the show venue, the small Musee Bourdelle, tucked away in a side street near Montparnasse train station in Paris. Outside, the desperate hangers-on were held back by the implacable PR watchdogs, while inside the buyers and the press were trying to squeeze into the tiny Great Hall, where the most prominent statues of Antoine Bourdelle, who was one of the most prolific student’s of Rodin, stood.

Let the Death of Experiential Shopping Be Its Rebirth

Features/Op-Ed, Retail

Fashion has a tendency to suffer from collective amnesia. Trendy but questionable concepts tend to die a quiet death in order to free the industry from embarrassment of unfulfilled promises. One of these silent casualties is “experiential shopping.” The term came in vogue earlier in the last decade when the fashion industry decided that customers wanted more from stores than a convenient location, a cool interior, an assortment of desirable product, and great customer service. The specter of e-commerce was brandished before retail executives that spurred them into a do-or-die frenzy. Lounges, live events, interactive art, virtual reality changing rooms, digital mirrors were touted as remedies for failing brick-and-mortar retail. Needless to say, only retail conglomerates and corporate brands with deep pockets could afford to invest in such expensive toys.

Fashion Comes for Books

Culture, Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

In his 1967 classic critique of late capitalist society, “Society of the Spectacle,” the French philosopher Guy Debord posited that the West has reached a new stage of relations between commodities and people. Whereas before the laboring classes were alienated by capitalism from the product of their labor, now they were also alienated by it from their entire lives, from their surroundings, and most importantly from each other. He posited that during early capitalism the process of alienation occurred only during the workday. Once the factory lights were out the worker could at least go home and engage in his or her communal life. Now, however, leisure time became completely monopolized by what he called “the spectacle,” a mode of life in which fetishization of commodities has “moved the focus of existence… from having to appearing.” If that sounds like Instagram to you, you are not wrong.

Op-Ed: Fed Up With Fashion? Try This.

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

“The real issue is that in the fashion business, it’s almost against the law to tell the truth, and anyone who steps behind the silk curtain to show how raw the business is can expect a rough time. Designers go to grotesque lengths to exaggerate their concepts to the press. And the press is just as guilty when it swallows the bait and spews forth huge headlines. The self-importance of our profession is appalling.”

So wrote John Fairchild in his 1989 biography, Chic Savages (quoted in Teri Agins’s book, The End of Fashion). Fairchild being the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Women’s Wear Daily for decades, I see no reason not to believe him. Another reason not to believe him is that over the past ten years I have increasingly come to feel the same.