Op-Ed: The Avant-Garde Post Mortem

When I founded StyleZeitgeist in 2006, my aim was to build a forum for people who genuinely love fashion as a creative discipline that speaks to a wider culture. I did not mean for it to solely concentrate on the fashion that I loved, the forward-thinking, boundary-pushing, one connected to youth culture, especially music, especially of the goth / industrial / postpunk-tinged kind. But it kind of morphed into that, because it attracted like-minded people. And so StyleZeitgeist became a hub for what’s come to be called the avant-garde – the truly IYKYK stuff, a fashion subculture.

A large part of what we championed on StyleZeitgeist was what we used to call artisanal fashion – small brands that produced high quality work, often in-house, whose esthetic was often too out there to be understood or even known about not just by laymen, but also by the fashion establishment; brands like Carol Christian Poell, Carpe Diem, Boris Bidjan Saberi, m.a.+, Geoffrey B. Small, and Paul Harnden. We had fun playing in our small sandbox away from the mainstream. I will never forget the collective chuckle elicited on SZ after John Galliano mentioned in a 2010 interview to Women’s Wear Daily that he loves Paul Harnden but doesn’t know anything about him, and when the fashion girlies from the Cut scrambled to find out who this Paul Harnden guy is, swiping pretty much all the info from StyleZeitgeist, because there wasn’t much to google. And when GQ writes an article about these designers (Paul Harnden, Geoffrey B. Small), they still call yours truly.

For a while, say from 2005 to 2015, the avant-garde flourished. StyleZeitgeist was the nexus of information that nurtured it, along with a handful of important stores – Atelier in New York, Maxfield in Los Angeles, L’Eclaireur in Paris, the Library in London, and Lift in Tokyo. And then it imploded in just a few years. What happened? Two things: structural changes in fashion, and plenty of self-inflicted wounds. Let’s examine (I will not name names out of respect for these brands.)

The first thing that happened is prosaic, inevitable, but important, and it is what always happens in fashion – a new generation of fashion consumers comes along, with different tastes. It’s as simple as that. Plenty of people who started their style journey on StyleZeitgeist when they were twenty, turned thirty ten years later, had families and jobs and life got in the way, and that’s a market segment that has largely disappeared. Unless these people were a part of the creative class that demanded a certain look, they had other things to concentrate on.

The new generation of young men – and on SZ they were mostly young men – came along, nurtured by other things, streetwear and hip-hop. I am not lamenting this, that’s just the reality. In the past ten years men’s fashion moved in one direction only, and that is streetwear. The obvious outlier here is Rick Owens, who was embraced by the hip-hop crowd, and hence the streetwear crowd. One must wonder what would have happened to Owens’s menswear business if he wasn’t.

But Rick Owens is not an artisanal brand – he operates within the fashion system and he understands that system well. Many of the avant-garde brands, however, never understood that they are in fashion after all, even if they squarely stand against the establishment. And fashion means change and newness. There exist only two brands that can offer pretty much the same product, with minute variations year on year – Carol Christian Poell and Paul Harnden. They were the OGs, and they have established self-perpetuating mythologies that work, even if most of their clients today are nothing more than avant-grade hypebeasts. The rest of these makers never realized that the job of a designer in fashion is to innovate, and that uniform dressing has a limited lifespan. Those who only offer slight variations on a theme in their work have run out of clientele once that clientele has built up their wardrobes.

So that part is clear. But the self-inflicted wounds are less so, so let’s get onto those, because they hold valuable lessons. One big problem with the avant-garde was that the designers who pioneered the space – Poell, Maurizio Altieri of Carpe Diem, and Harnden – envisioned themselves as artistes. They wanted to just do the work, sell it to only a handful of carefully edited shops, and were satisfied with a small cult following. They were not going to participate in the fashion system – no shows, no presentations, no marketing of any kind, and no press. From what I’ve been told, they were highly encouraged in this line of thinking by a certain savvy merchant who encouraged this behavior, because it would fall on him to sell these designers and make a nice chunk of change in the process, because there were only so many shops that sold them worldwide (and never more than one per city).

And this mentality was fine while you could count the avant-garde brands on one hand. But after Altieri – who comes from a well-off family and never had to worry about money – closed Carpe Diem on a whim, each one of his former collaborators or assistants launched their own brand. And more than a few others joined the fray. And even though there were more customers for them in no small part to the fact that StyleZeitgeist has become one of the most exciting places to discuss fashion online, and stores like Atelier and L’Eclaireur were becoming more influential, with new stores opening to knock off their look and assortment, the competition also increased.

And yet, the mentality engendered by the OGs permeated the entire field. Many times I have tried to explain to these brands that we should all work together, that we form an ecosystem. They welcomed me in their showrooms, but they continued to rely on stores in the face of several obvious facts; one, that fashion will eventually move on, that information is key in the age of the information avalanche and the avalanche of choice, that stores often do a bad job when it comes to story-telling, and that new audience for their work will not come out of nowhere but will have to be nurtured. The world of social media was taking over, yet they behaved as if the Internet did not exist. Perhaps they viewed StyleZeitgeist through the traditional magazine-advertiser lens instead of an integral part of the community. (As if the stores they sell to are not merchants at the end of the day.)

There was a brand who did not want their lookbooks published for fear of being copied. Others haven’t bothered to send them, even though I’ve told them that we will happily publish them, for free. Showroom pictures were a no-no, even if I had a professional photographer with me on hand at all times. Another designer did not want to explain his work process on the pages of StyleZeitgeist, even though his offerings did not look immediately enticing to an untrained eye. How do you convince someone to pay a thousand dollars for what looks like a fairly mundane knit long-sleeve top without explaining all the intricacies that went into making it? That brand temporarily went out of business, though is quietly back in Paris. All kept mum on the StyleZeitgeist forum, even though I welcomed direct communication between the designers and their audience. The only designer who took advantage of StyleZeitgeist was Geoffrey B. Small, where he painstakingly documented his work process. His sales went up fivefold in the matter of as many years.

Before long the results were evident. Boris Bidjan Saberi, who wanted to be both Carol Christian Poell and Rick Owens – an impossible feat, because you can only be either one or the other – was the first casualty. First he stopped doing a Paris show, then a Paris showroom. If he could not decide who he wanted to be, the market decided for him. He now operates out of his Barcelona atelier, selling only to a handful of stockists, and is engaged in the death spiral of raising prices, punishing the existing loyal customers for the lack of new ones. Other brands followed. Sure, the pandemic did not help, but the self-inflicted wounds festered. A few brands we’ve championed since the beginning did not even invite me to their showrooms once they were back in Paris – not out of malice, but out of lack of organization and management.

Last week I sent an email to one of the artisanal brands, with whom StyleZeitgeist had a great relationship for many years, after they reneged on our previous arrangement. I usually don’t speak with brands in such a direct manner – after all, these are not my businesses, and I am not the one to tell them how to run them. But this time the brand in question went too far, and StyleZeitgeist will no longer support it. And I told that brand what I would have liked to tell everyone else – what you are doing is simply bad business.

It’s a shame to see brands you love severely diminished or gone. I still love them. But I am exhausted from having my words fall on deaf ears. After all, fashion is about change, whether we like it or not.