Feature and Op-Ed articles

NOTES ON PARIS FASHION WEEK, SPRING / SUMMER 2024 MEN’S

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Thinking back on this past Paris menswear season, I realize that it held few surprises. This is not a criticism. Lately, I have been thinking that as fashion increasingly becomes driven by celebrity and hype, the only thing left to do is to support those who produce genuinely creative work. This season they unanimously delivered strong collections, work that was strong in expression and full of conviction that they must stick to their guns as the world around them grows increasingly coarse and cynical.

Speaking of which, let’s get the gross spectacle that Louis Vuitton put on to celebrate Pharrell’s coronation as the new creative director of its menswear. To be fair, there were actually few cool looks in there – I, for one, was not mad at the Minecraft print. But most of it was exactly what Louis Vuitton wants, logo-driven drivel, the kind of lowest common denominator stuff squarely aimed at the masses consumed by conspicuous consumption.

The clothes, however, were not the most off-putting part; the cabaret show with which they were presented was. It was a pure power exercise; power over Paris, power over the fashion industry, power over its media, power over contemporary culture. For half a day a private company closed Pont Neuf, a major Parisian public bridge in the city center, so it could put on a celebrity-fashion industrial complex circus, bringing attendees to the show by boats, and essentially keeping them hostage for four hours. Perhaps in Louis Vuitton’s opinion everyone craves to be at a private Jay-Z concert, and considering the number of the blurry I-WAS-THERE! pictures of the rapper – taken in the hope that celebrity pixie dust will rub off – they weren’t entirely wrong. But they weren’t entirely right either. In the next few days I spoke with more than one editor who was quietly angry that Louis Vuitton simply assumed that they had no better place to be. What the brand signaled, I told them, is that they own them, and so the editors are expected to kiss the ring.

Op-Ed: Is It Time to Separate Fashion and Luxury?

Culture, Features/Op-Ed

“Fashion brands are like toothpaste brands now,” the fashion journalist Lauren Sherman told me in a recent conversation on our podcast. I understood what she meant even before she launched into a car market analogy, that many brands today offer similar products, with the logo being the primary differentiator. What the luxury consumer has to decide today is not what garment to buy, but what brand to buy into, because their wares are increasingly interchangeable.

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.