Empty Paris for a while mid-August.

!!!PROUSTMAXXXING!!! Madeleines c/o Graine.

Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: my other August durational project. I have a lot of time for Juliet Berto pouting, and I’d watch Jean-Pierre Leaud open an envelope. Which he does a lot in this 13h movie.

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Stéphane Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode, the Symbolist Poet’s short-lived 1874 fashion magazine, in which he took the role of editor, designer and a number of columists, male and female, including Miss Satin, Marguerite de Ponty and ‘Ix’. I was lucky to find this giant repro edition (madeleine for scale) secondhand. More on Mallarmé soon.

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The last days of Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156. at Pinault Bourse.

The Carrie Dress (James Perse). I haven’t bought a dress in 15 years, maybe more. I haven’t worn one for almost as long. I have long given all the dresses I owned (ok, 2) away. I found the Carrie Dress cheap on Vinted. The extreme heat made me buy it, but why not (another) pair of shorts? I’m making peace with Carrie (who features a lot in Girl Online), reworking her with unshaven legs & pits, trainers and tube socks.

Text & images (except Carrie & J-P L) © Joanna Walsh 2026

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Kinda chic was perfect for meming because it’s all about claiming the ‘unchic’ as chic. As chic is an idea that trades on inbuilt exclusivity, there’s a lot of excluded content ripe for use out there.

But chic itself needs a glow-up. The word has become kinda… unchic. Though it does have the definite meaning of ‘smart’ in France, as in ‘bon chic bon genre’, French shorthand for what Americans call ‘preppy,’ “the word,” as Vogue wrote in 2025 “has finally lost all meaning”. The transposition of a fashion word (chic) onto material that’s—well—not, enacts the same process on the word as the meme itself. It brings it back into focus, kinda like when Jaques Rancière wrote that art exists only via a continuous process of bringing the ‘unaesthetic’ into the aesthetic realm.

But chic couldn’t be reclaimed without its qualifier.

I use kinda a lot. I write it then delete it. Then I put it back in again. Because it does a complicated thing. It draws attention to the phrase it qualifies, but also softens it. It acts like last year’s viral phrase I’ve almost forgotten, the feminine urge to. In an excellent recent substack post, Lauren Elkin wrote about her frustration with one woman’s feminine urge, introducing a gallery talk, to soften and deformalise her language. Elkin both “wanted to say, occupy your position, you have chosen to be here, don’t act like you’ve just been put in charge of the class while the teacher steps out to the toilet,” and was “sympathetic to her insecurity — what she was saying, as well as please quiet down we’re going to start was: please don’t reject me.”

Chic has always been about rejection. In refocussing attention from garments to something more ineffeable, ‘effortless’ chic rejects the work done to achieve it. Chic’s disappearing act hides what gets vaguely called privilege, which can be more explicitly defined as an advantage given by the invisible labour of others. A chic look always costs, in terms of money or hidden maintenance work, which may be done by the wearer or by uncredited third parties. But, like so many other style words that refuse to define themselves, chic keeps in play what it hides: discussions of ‘effortless chic’ often centre on exactly what sort of work can be done to reproduce it. Chic, always ‘classy,’ is a venue for the performance of class. Or, to paraphrase Stuart Hall on race, chic is kinda the modality through which class is lived.

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While chic is a strong-looking word that reveals itself to be all deferral, kinda is a weak-looking word that acts strongly, kinda like Kathleen Stewart’s Weak Theory. It draws attention to its situation as a linguistic fabric softener but, simultaneously, to the circumstances that make this necessary.

Like last year’s “very demure, very mindful,” some people are taking kinda chic straight and, no surprise, it’s been picked up by advertisers, but both these phrases were created by people who did not have this intent in mind. “Mindful” Jools Lebron is a trans creator whose demureness is performative in ways that exactly draw attention to the situation in which this word is used.

In her first viral post, Lebron goes to work wearing a shirt with “only a little chichi out; not my chocho” (am I even spelling these right? I have no idea). Is Lebron a comedian? Yes and no. She occupies the nebulous area of an influencer whose work blew up and became too popular for her to handle. Her work is very funny, but to laugh out loud is to acknowledge the whole of the complicated, brutal situation of a trans woman in a gender-conformist capitalist workplace, as well as an exploitative internet. The stakes are high.

And I think about the range of modes available to us as women, and as people who have been taken for women, or who choose to be women despite these stakes. In terms of fashion the range of modes available to us seems very wide, but this variety of garments is not, on the whole, where power is situated. But I also think about the nuance allowed in female modes, and the stiffness that constrains phrases and clothes traditionally coded ‘masculine,’ which, though they wield power, have so little flexibility.

One solution is to add a modifier.

Another solution is varied iteration.

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@loudmouthcontent’s complaint is kinda like the long-running beef between Jacques Derrida and John Searle about how and whether iteration transforms or dilutes the meaning of words.

Iteration, Derrida wrote, creates a question. The fact that Very demure, very mindful and chic to be are memed to the point that the appear to become meaningless is their meaning. They exist to widen the plurality of situations in which they can be expressed. They are a hinge, a portal. Their swing away from meaning creates a mechanism that enables speakers to detach originally conservative terms like ‘chic’ or ‘demure’ .

To claim style as someone who has been considered a stylistic outsider (plus-size or trans—or, there are a million more iterations: after all, aren’t we the 99 percent?) is to always insert kinda before the noun. We are never not kinda iterating a term from which we have been excluded. And we are never not making that claim kinda visible.

It may be no accident that Searle dressed like a guy who thinks his clothes mean exactly what they say, while Derrida dressed like a guy who thinks his clothes say inexactly what he means…

Text © Joanna Walsh 2026

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At Pride, where everything is bright and shiny, a person whose matte, light-absorbent textures draw attention, whose large t-shirt (is it brown or black?), almost a sweatshirt, necessarily drapes into folds, is pulled in at the waist over huge pleat trousers, which, again, pull back at the ankle (though not too tight), whose dark matte colours, whose heavy materials, whose short, round, neat hair and absence of all decoration, draw the eye amongst sequins and rainbows. And whose absolute androgyny, in a place where gender is performatively re-perfomed, argues a lack of interaction with the crowd. Or maybe an absolute interaction not as a relational unit within the crowd but in relation to the crowd as a whole.

I’m not dressed bright. It is liberation for me, who has lifelong been asked to be something shiny for men, to dress down. So I notice the invitation of this precise, quiet queerness where everything else is marked by différance: pants too low, too loose; tops too cropped, too tight to be taken ‘straight’. What kind of invitation does it offer?

In Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s 1997 critical anthology, Novel Gazing, Renu Bora proposed ‘texxture’[1] as an interface for interchange, a space in which people become things and objects touch back. James’s shiny interface keeps things at the surface level, and may contain an invitation to rub them to a shine, or to rub some of the shine off them in order to interact. To “take the shine off” something is to render it less enchanting. To “take a shine to” is to like someone. Both phrases take without asking, bringing something to the experience.

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Having lived in the UK and Ireland, I know how take and bring hit differently in each English. In England I’d take you to Pride: in Ireland I’d bring you. Irish English follows the Gaeilge grammar for beir (to bring) and tóg, and tóg (to take). Tóg only happens with a transfer of possession, which is why a person can seldom be taken but everything and everyone can be brought. In the UK I bring something to you (from where I am). There, things are brought to people. In Ireland I bring you to, or from, some thing. Subject and object are interchangeable between these Englishes, and I am some thing that works between them, just like in Boru’s texxture: I take, I bring, I am brought. I can also be taken. And I am taken with this person whose soft and folded texxtures invite the viewer in.

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[1] Renu Bora, ‘Outing Texture’, in Novel Gazing, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp, 94-127.

Once upon a time, Canadian poet and classicist, Anne Carson, began to read Proust (in French) for half an hour a day. She completed the entire series over seven years, usually reading after breakfast, after which she entered “the desert of after-Proust”.

I decided finally to commit to Carson’s Albertine Workout, if not for seven years, at least for August. I put the idea out on Instagram: turns out everyone else wants to too. !!!PROUSTMAXXXING!!! was born.

Anakana Schofield, one of the very best contemporary writers in the English language, runs regular live reading sessions from her Substack Binge Reading. She’s currently binge-reading Don Quixote, but welcomes !!!PROUSTMAXXXERS!!! Her commitment to reading for 4 hours a day is a reclamation of Lost Time that defies the current pressure to MAXX everything. It’s a Quixotic act in the best sense.

Join us here on Wednesday 5 August at 4pm IST/GMT; 5pm CEST, 8am PT. I’ll be reading in French. Any language is fine. No set amount, read at your own pace.

See you tomorrow?

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But, wait, Proust and style? Of course.

I think of Proust’s literary style as “nested,” like email structures that ensure you reply to exactly the wrong person. You start at the beginning of one of his famously long sentences and hit a subclause. You step down into that sub-level, only to find another waiting at your feet. You descend another step, then another. You start to feel you will never surface. But then you begin to, one step at a time, the steps not even (that would be too easy), but every step up answers a step down. By the end of a paragraph you find yourself back on the surface, often in another time, another place. The landscape has completely changed.

One writer currently exploring near-endless sentences is the poet Ellen Dillon, with whom I shared this very smart essay by Hannah Smart on DFW’s long sentences.

If, as Simone Weil wrote, there are not enough poems about butter, then Dillon has expanded that genre with her Kerrygold-shaped Butter Intervention, which I recently bought when we both performed at Christodoulos Makris’ re:verb festival of poetry and the verbal arts.

Here’s a video of the highlights:

…but I have descended into a Proustian cellar of hyperlinked thought. Back to style.

The pleats and subpleats of Proust’s sentences are recalled in Yves Saint Laurent’s designs for Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s "Proust Ball,"(1971), in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the writer’s birth, for which YSL created costumes to be worn by, amongst others, Nan Kempner, Hélène Rochas, and Jane Birkin.

Proust was particularly keen on the designs of Fortuny (the Catalan designer, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo), born in the same year, and wrote, in La Prisonnière:

“The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan’s wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolize alternatively life and death were repeated in the shimmering fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a malleable gold by those same transmutations which, before an advancing gondola, changed into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal.”

Here’s a gown by Fortuny, blue and gold, bird-ridden, column-shaped, pleats contained within subpleats: we descend deep into its architecture and ascend again. COULD THIS BE THE DRESS??? This one sold at Christie’s auction house in 2011 for £2000. Surely, in real terms, compared to what must have been its original price, a bargain…

Text © Joanna Walsh 2026

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Yesterday I was wearing the most nondescript/banal “classic” outfit of white tee and pale blue jeans and I felt horrifyingly visible. 🤷‍♀️ Yet today i am wearing another ‘classic’ of blue & white striped buttondown (about 6 sizes too big) and black trousers (limp) and I feel perfectly dressed and visible in the right way.

If a turn to the classics is more a methodology of flirting than a desire to co-opt their authority, what happens when we don’t enjoy the very specific visibility they confer on us? How do we test our disguises without becoming associated with their power regimes? Can we claim the classics without being claimed by them?

(Obviously, this applies to both dressing and art making)

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The style analyst will see you now…

With the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, we’re squarely in hot classics summer. Or maybe haute classics summer. I haven’t seen the movie and I have no intention to. But then I also have no intention to wear this summer’s haute fashion “classic,” the Carolyn Bassette-style slip dress (read my last post), as seen in Connor Hines’ FX series Love Story, which I haven’t seen either .

Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey’s 2017 edition, was “grateful” (in the London Review of Books) that Nolan made a classic visible to a wider readership, though she, as well as other critics, tell me the film renders “invisible” various aspects of Homer’s work: the poetry, the women, and a lot of material culture, including clothes. Wilson’s takeaway is that this is a drab, depressing adaptation: humourless, sexless, and the food, despite the frequent feasting in the poem “looks horrible”. Her assessment has, in turn, been blasted for being “elitist”.

If there’s art being produced here, it’s not only the works by Nolan, Wilson and Homer, but the discourse. UCC professor, James O’Sullivan dismisses this, asking, Why Don’t You Just Read the F-ing Odyssey? Spoiler: I haven’t read the (f-ing) Odyssey either. At the same time I haven’t not read it. I have read parts and I’ve encountered various interpretations, from Joyce to the Coen Brothers to Studio Ghibli. In other words, I’ve read around the text, the original remaining, at least partially, invisible.

But what has all this to do with the way “classic” garments make us “visible” in ways that feel “right” or “wrong”?

Like the Nolan movie, “classic” garments claim authority beyond themselves via provenance that remains invisible: they have an, often quasi-anonymous, mythic source. For a classic to work we have to know both that it’s a classic and that whatever contemporary interpretation differs from an original that is absent. Literary classics are, definitionally books no one has read. Once read they become a personal choice but, before reading, they threaten us from the library shelves.

The classic garment (and it’s always a garment rather than a full outfit, though an outfit can be made up of individual “classics”) has a glitching visibility held in tension with the wearer’s visibility.

A classic has the reputation of foregrounding the owner, but also of being visible enough to be “read” by authority. It is a password that allows the wearer to pass. Try one on and you know you are about to have an encounter with power.

Not all classics occupy the same place in power hierarchies. The trench may speak of warfare (and, as it was derived from a design for officers, class), but the workwear jacket, and the shell suit, (the DH Lawrence and Jean Genet of the clothes rail?) have recently entered the canon, followed by last season’s Miu Miu housecoat—a rare entirely femme clothing classic.

The housecoat is claimed as a classic at the moment increasingly few people wear it for its original function. It is the garment of unpaid domestic workers of an increasingly scarce older generation. (Likewise, a book is mostly only “classic” once the author is dead.) Contemporary, commercially-employed cooks and cleaners are more likely—as in the Nolan movie—to wear grim-coloured tabards.

To call a garment a classic is already to mark its displacement. We know the housecoat is a “classic” because it is becoming subject to interpretations. But there’s a painful double appropriation when working class-ics are reproduced as designer items. Though Miuccia’s intentions seemed to render women’s maintenance work visible and, though imitation is essential to fashion, and all fashion, even (or perhaps particularly) minimalism leans into parody, a €2550 housecoat isn’t, for example, a zoot suit. The appropriation and exaggeration of white-oriented business clothes by c20 black and Chicano hipsters was a classic declassified. To reverse this process, bringing a “non-classic” into the “classic” imaginary is very different. “Classic” garments’ claim to be “timeless,” just like costume designer Ellen Mirojnick’s aspirations for Nolan’s movie, is a disturbing attempt to strip them of political context.

Classics mostly derive from menswear so, when women wear them, there’s already an element of appropriation that can distort the “visibility” and “invisibility” of the outfit and the wearer (see the double visibility/invisibility of female zoot-suiters).

A garment that exists, for a woman, in a field of “non-classics” can be, for a man, merely a jacket, a shirt. Of course not all men (and not all women) but the obsession with a traceable “original” garment found in excellent guy-oriented publications like Permanent Style and L’Etiquette (which has just brought out a supplement on 100 Icons of French Style) is very different to the “classics with a twist” line so often pushed in female-oriented fashion publications (apologies for the use of traditional genders alone here, but that’s how so many fashion publications still orient themselves).

This kind of reminds me of Foucault’s knicker-twisting over the difference between searching for origin and formatting a genealogy, in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. And how, for Cixous, Butler, Braidotti, the matter of origin isn’t even a starter question.

But how to twist as methodology? There are a million influencer videos to tell you. It’s usually to do with some kind of mysterious golden mean proportion thing, or adding a scarf; all attempts to codify a je ne sais quoi, which is itself “invisible”.

Your second try of classics worked precisely because they were visibly “twisted”. Too ‘big’, too ‘limp,’ they were “classics-too” or maybe Classics.2. There are limits to queering when playing with authoritative forms (though, as Butler wrote, what the hell else do we have to play with?). With The Odyssey movie/book, this is inverted—in our current era of war on the arts and humanities, power lies with the Academy Awards, not the academy—but the power of classic clothes continues to be distributed between the blockbusting commercial clout of the latest interpretations, and the solid authoritarian power of the ‘real thing’.

So, to paraphrase O’Sullivan, why not just wear the f-ing classics?

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It’s not as easy as it looks. Anyone who thinks they can clothe their bodies or their minds with “timeless classics” is onto a loser. It’s impossible to reproduce the original cultural context and any attempt will look like cosplay. Plus, one generation’s twist on classics doesn’t work the same way for the next. When classics read “right,” it is only with the acknowledgement of contemporary context.

A classic can’t be ‘decoded’ in any way that doesn’t give airspace to its history of meanings. It can only be détourned via the work of multitudes of wearers across space and time. As fashion is a social art, this offers hope. But so does attention to the sensual—to what’s “big,” or “limp”.

When you’re choosing “classics,” think less about the associations than the body’s relationship with them. Choose hairy tweed jackets, heavy satin shirts; thick, slippy nylon tracksuits. To paraphrase Sontag, why not an erotics of classics? To eroticise (a move against interpretation, as any Sontag-reader knows) casts flirting as an apt—perhaps the only possible—move.

Wilson notes that, sadly, Nolan’s Odysseus is neither a storyteller nor a flirt: his relationship to his origin text seems—to use another “classics” word— agon-ised. Agon is pain encountered in socio-legitimised struggle: war or sports. An encounter with “classic” clothing can feel like both. But, if fashion is an agon, the only goals scored and battles won are achieved not through struggle but through play. It’s participating in this play that matters.

All text (c) Joanna Walsh, 2026

Written in the Bibliothèque de la Poésie Contemporaine at the Centre Internationale de la Poésie, Marseille, France.

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Launched by Tanya Sarne in 1984, Ghost exploded in the 1990s. After the hard, square shapes of the 1980s, this was itself a nostalgia trip, the expensive revival of a certain kind of bohemian femininity. In the garage, a cream satin jumpsuit with covered buttons could have been—was surely—a tribute to 1960s designer Ossie Clark who had, himself, reworked the silhouettes and textures of the 1930s. Turns out Clark ‘helped’ with the label. Sarne, a boho refugee from the decade that produced Clark as a major name, did not actually design the collection but outsourced that work to ‘ghost-designers’, hence the (unashamed) name, though I’ve also seen the label’s origin story attributed to fashion PR Lynne Franks’ advice to Sarne: the label didn’t stand “a ghost of a chance”.

Fisher’s lost futures are strongly linked via aesthetics (in Fisher’s case, mostly music) to the post WWII welfare state’s broken promise to artists of working class origins: that their rise was instrumental in a social revolution that would be ongoing. Despite Sarne’s fancy milieu (I’ve read claims that she was the model for either Patsy or Eddy in Jennifer Saunders’ Absolutely Fabulous), Ghost shares characteristics of the uncorporate creativity Fisher mourns.

Though Fisher namechecks both feminism and fashion (as a subset of “music culture”) Ghosts of my Life’s exposition approves no instances of female creativity, though Fisher does mention several he condems as “belong[ing] neither to the present nor to the past but to some implied ‘timeless’ era,” history depoliticised, “serenely liberated from the pressures of historical becoming”.

Ghost always marketed itself as ‘timeless’. Though its collections had themes, they didn’t respond to contemporary hemlines or pant shapes. It was also an overtly feminist label, if one that used the vocabulary of ‘flattering’ and ‘disguising’ that, at the time, was less often critiqued within the industry. Although the brand used the standard size/age catwalk models, it touted itself as size and age inclusive: interviewed by This is London in 1999 Sarne claimed, “I can find any woman a Ghost outfit that will make her look wonderful. Guaranteed, any shape, any size, any age”. The dresses’ bias-cut fabric draped without clinging, and hugged women’s bodies without restricting them. The fabrics were eco and low-maintenance: the garments could be machine-washed and didn’t need ironing. Then there was Sarne’s own story: starting the business as a struggling single mother (if with a privileged history). She told fashion writer Ruth Picardie how, as an ex-model and former Hollywood wife, she fought back against being “treated like an utter bimbo moron idiot”.

How did what Tarne called Ghost’s “modern realism” fit with the neoliberal “Capitalist Realism” that (Fisher cites Thatcher) brooked “no alternative”? The decline of UK textile manufacturing paralleled the decline of state support for creativity. Fisher mourned both but, in this case, these factors pulled against each other. Many of the new designers produced by the creative explosion of state-school talent facilitated by the UK’s 1962 education act and the European postwar boom, were untrained in commercial practicalities. In 1994 Scottish manufacturer, Steven Purvis, quoted in Cultural Studies theorist, Angela McRobbie’s British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? said “There is a shocking ignorance of the basics of production among design graduates.”[1] And, while most British clothing in the late twentieth century was still produced in the UK, these factories, geared to producing in bulk for the high street, were reluctant to work with innovative designers’ small orders.

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In 2006 Ghost was sold to Karen Millen/All Saints’ Kevin Stanford, and the Icelandic investment group Arev, and was promptly bankrupted in the country’s 2008 crash, when it was bought by UK shirt brand Hawes & Curtis. The brand is currently stocked by Marks and Spencer. From £89 for a dress (many currently 50% off) Ghost now sells at high-street prices. In 2023, Tarne said, “It’s not the same brand I started – the materials are different, as are the cuts and designs and it’s lost the sustainable ethos that the viscose fabric (which was a natural fibre from a plant) inherently had”. After selling Ghost, Sarne almost immediately launched Handwritten, a label with similar characteristics and techniques and, when that closed after six years, another, finally, under her own name, which lasted for three.

Fisher relies heavily on ‘hauntology’, Derrida’s pun on ‘ontology’ (try saying both with a french accent) or, as Fisher puts it, “the persistence of the no longer…” A 2012 piece in US Vogue enthused, only seven years after Ghost’s heyday, that the label was back as ‘vintage’. It was ripe for resale, commented the owner of appropriately-named NY vintage shop Resurrection,: “Girls in their early- to mid-20s have no reference for it—they never heard of it,”. Even in the present, when trends cycle so fast the past and future are scarcely distinguishable, ‘vintage’ clothing is usually defined as over 15 years old. Maybe what labelled Ghost vintage was not the clothes’ date but the way they looked, embedding recursive cultural nostalgia for the 1930s via the 1960s via the 1990s. Nostalgia (Fisher references Fredric Jameson) is a “longing for a form”. Was Ghost an example of Jameson’s Nostalgia Mode that trades on the “sheer persistence of recognisable forms,” providing an aesthetic revisit that muddies history? And if that’s the case, what—after the end of the end of history—am I to think of what I saw in the garage: was this the dehistoricising revival of the revival of a dehistoricising mode?

I don’t think so.

If, in our current “conditions of digital recall,” as Fisher writes (though he might as well have said “digital retail”), “loss is itself lost”. I was recalled to life in no way via online representations of Ghost dresses but by their sensual actuality which spoke precisely of the era in which they were made. Ghost dresses were cut from rayon that was shrunk many times, in a technique developed by Sarne’s collaborator, Andrea Sergeant, to create a dense, matte satin that looked and behaved like vintage silk crepe but had a desirable heaviness that made it absolutely contemporary to its era of production. It is indeed “discrepancies in the texture” that Fisher identified as marking the difference between ‘original’ culture and what haunts it. Texture matters as well as text. There can be no theory without material.

It was only in touching them did I realise that I am no longer haunted by Ghost dresses I desired but never possessed. That future is permanently lost and I ask myself whether I am instead haunted by the loss of this desire.

It may look like my desires have shrunk but I think they have expanded. The garage is in a place I used to live, where I am visiting friends with young children, I pass a street party full of parents and kids; all the women in sun dresses, long and loose, no variation in their variegation: a homology of heterogenous prints: ditsy and daisies. If Ghost was Tarne’s escape vehicle from a life that centred her only as a mother, the desire for a Ghost dress I couldn’t afford was part of a machine that kept me there. It is complicated to unweave the complicated intentions of the designs from the complicated mechanisms of their sale and distribution but that 90s bias-cut contained, for me, a bias. Nevertheless Ghost showed me a portal. It suggested that other outfits were possible.

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“What is important about the figure of the specter,” wrote Derrida, “is that it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet.” [2] For Sarne, for me, for all cultural minorities, the materialisation of speculative design can be a way of navigating a time that affords us no place to dwell. The already looping nostalgia embodied by Tarne’s take on Clark’s take on 1930s glamour makes the dress a ghost that can’t be laid. “The spectre,” Fisher writes, “will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.”

The night before I’d met an ex in a pub, now as rich and heavy and as far from my desires as a Ghost dress. He remarked on my jacket (second-hand Lemaire). Leather? No… some kind of oilcloth. Like the Ghost dresses, a particular texture, expensively produced and, also like the Ghost dresses, a garment I could never afford new. But now Vinted embeds a past so recent we used to call it the present, sometimes I can. The expression may have changed but my desire (which is always a recursively Lacanian desire to desire) remains the same.

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Text © Joanna Walsh, 2026



[1] McRobbie, Angela, British

Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry, (Routledge, 1998), p. 118.

[2] Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, (Stanford University Press, 2008), p82

So ekphrasis is a mode.

A mode is a style of approaching whatever. Its mobility makes it a form of street style. I can’t lurk with a camera in the street: a diffident glance doesn’t make for good photography. But if photography’s a matter of timing, then words are a matter of time. And so is style.

In What is an Apparatus? Georgio Agamben links clothing to chronos—time in its linear mode—but fashion to kairos, which is all about the moment: the rhetorical-sartorial technique of being in the right mode at the right time. Both are ways of managing time and working with it, or through it. Words are clothing: but, add kairos, and both words and fashion become style.

The word fashion comes from Latin fascare: to make, but also to do, and also to compose or write. It has shrunk to the modern suffix, ‘-fy’, as in beautify, and falsify, implying that whatever goes under its hand starts as something else. It is also there in anything ending in ‘-ficent’ like magnificent or sufficient, and anything ending in ‘-ficial’ like superficial and artificial.

But, though it sounds like it might be its root-word, fascere’s mobility and malleability mean it has nothing to do with fascism.

If Kairos is a mode of the radically particular[1] that ties theory to praxis, in coining ekFASHsis, I insert ‘making’ into ekphrasis’s ‘description’. Fascere, besides being in factor, is also in factory. So fashion, far from being only conceptual, is also practical. It is both make and do: it is concept made (literally) material.

EkFASHsis is kairotic: it is a rhetoric, a poetics, of style writing. It describes the writing of clothing into style by the wearer, in relation to other wearers, as the instant of an outfit. It is the collaborative poetics of a glimpsed sartorial moment.

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EkFASHsis 1: Métro ligne 4

How to start with something that seems to go on too long: long pale wash jorts, trapeze-shaped: a difficult shape, a difficult garment? How to wear jorts without something that reinforces their meaning as jeans, which can look like full-on cosplay? Or rather. How to wear them without something that doesn’t reinforce their meaning as jeans without producing a contrast that looks too calculated and so falls fadé, fuddy, flat?

Like this: the bottom half: all jorts, reinforced by sturdy Birkenstocks.

On top, the blouse, pulling in the opposite direction, both temporally (it’s ‘victorian’: high collar, pleated, white, almost transparent, cotton lawn) and physically—sitting at the hipbone, a christmas-cracker waist, a christmas-cracker dagger hem; this shape itself pulling against the wearer’s shape, waisted below the waist, then the waist of the jorts lower, barely hooked to the hip bones, dangerously, almost impossibly, low.

Producing the gap.

It’s the gap that matters.

This seemingly-casual outfit is all tension, movement, direction, held together by that slice of skin that appears and disappears, as the strap-hanging wearer exits at Gare du Nord.

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[1] Paul, Joanne (Spring 2014). “The use of Kairos in Renaissance Political Philosophy” (PDF). Renaissance Quarterly. 67 (1): 43–78. doi:10.1086/676152. JSTOR 10.1086/676152. S2CID 152769631.

I go into DSM, which is one digit short of a mental health diagnosis. It is, as Phillip Larkin wrote, a large cool store, but it doesn’t sell cheap clothes. The walls are white and the garments presented like sculpture and, as in an art gallery, everyone looks cool: even shabbiness, even Normcore looks intentional. And, also, as in an art gallery, there’s a mix of real buyers and enthusiasts like me—or like Bedwyr Williams’ man who absolutely loves clothes—in long-saved-for or thrifted Dries or Comme.

Outside the shop, those big cylinders in the DSM courtyard are covered with Comme des Garcons flags. The flags are brightly coloured but everyone is in muted tones. There’s a woman standing in front of one cylinder and is this a photo opportunity?, like the protestors have suddenly become to the tourists strolling the street of the bourgeois french?[2] She holds a strip of entry bracelets.

The protestors?

A few doors down members of France’s general trades union, the CGT, are outside Uniqlo, protesting the low salaries and bad working conditions that continue despite the company’s rising profits (up from 23.2 to 33% between ’22 and ’24). They demand an immediate 100% increase in salaries, a management detox and a cleanup of working facilities. The protestors are mostly young and they are dressed in Uniqlo-quiet colours and loose shapes. Even on strike, they’re on-brand.

Back to the Comme cylinders:

—It’s an event for a new shoe. If you want to go to the event you have to wait in line. Because—capacity.

Hello, manufactured exclusivity. This isn’t a show for invitees only, yet there has to be some sort of barrier. As outside the shows, the sales, there’s a queue.

A car passes and beeps, and the protestors hoot and cheer like the football supporters last night when France scored their first goal against Norway.

I’d watched the Lemaire show on video two days ago. It was the hottest day in France ever. The clothes on the catwalk were Normcore just like those of the Uniqlo protestors, and the watching buyers. I always look at a catwalk audience’s clothes, and the front row’s anxious-desirous glances are something I see repeated on the faces of the protestors waiting for that car to pass. Who is in it? I don’t know. Someone to do with Uniqlo? This is the car they shout at.

Normcore was coined by “trend forecasting group” K-Hole, in 2014, as a reaction to what they termed “mass indie”, or the commercialisation of individuality, concluding that “the most different thing to do is to reject being different all together”.

Normcore wasn’t a style but a mode: it was not about the clothes (there are times when it’s Normcore to dress outré) but about positive herd thinking; the outfit-matching facilitating what K-Hole termed “empathy”.

Unsurprisingly, Normcore was taken up in its physical expression and became as fashion-marketable as any other concept, which is not to say concepts are a bad thing. Kant called them ‘norms,’ and said we can’t think without them.

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Later, in lesbian-founded queer bar, Le Coyote, all the women look like lesbians and so do all the men and all the non-binary people too, and I like it. I order a cherry soda and click on a proof of K-Hole co-founder Dena Yago’s new book, That Figures, shortly to be published by After 8 Books. If ‘queer’ is still cast as ‘difference’, and different clothes—as Normcore Larkin wrote—have the power to conjure how “separate and unearthly… women are, or what they do,” as “love,” then not everyone here is dressed with ‘difference’ in mind—it’s just I’m looking differently. The queerness is in my gaze and I am reading every difference as evidence of the same.

Love is what will remain of us, according to Larkin, a possibly surprising keyword from a poet with such a bad rep in personal relationships. Still, there is no guarantee of solidarity in appearances. If the difference of sameness can be read as queer, the Lemaire models (and the catwalk audience) were not the same Normcore as the Uniqlo union members, whose visual codes were, in any case, subtly different; the Uniqlo-wearers somehow more born-to-it, without the anxiety of referencing the effortlessness of Normcore as luxe. A union, like Normcore, is not about being the same, but about solidarity of difference, which, in an age of fragmented individualism, in which we’re not only encouraged to enjoy your symptom, but perform and monetise it (as anyone who’s ever applied for an arts grant will know) is a valuable thing.

Meanwhile on the catwalk, Micheal Rider at Celine went for what could be called abnormcore: minimalist silhouettes, each with an integrated self-difference—a brown suit with a perfectly-balanced flash of red ankle-zip or a block of bright shirting— which the audience (a typically atypical outfit: dark structured suit with butter yellow cowboy boots) empathetically mirrored. JW Anderson at Dior was all about the wonky bow tie. What could be a the name for these small differences? The production of new fashion words is a fashion thing that, like cool itself, is also all about difference and repetition, but we could go down that poststructuralist k-hole forever.

It’s difficult to have real cool on a catwalk. The menswear week models looked just as blandly beautiful as any other socially-approved bodytype thrust into clothes they haven’t chosen or ever worn before (tho isn’t this a bit like Normcore’s abnegation of the personal?). The interaction between the body and clothes that produces the real difference of cool can only really take place outside the catwalk’s homosartorial space. But Anderson’s was a gesture towards this difference, a hint that it existed somewhere, sometimes. Nonetheless.

And everywhere, at the shows, there were sounds of water: crashing cartoon waves at Celine, a rainstick at Lemaire. And, elsewhere, in every primeur in the rue Rambuteau, baskets of cherries on sale the size of apricots: this was different, this was new.

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Text © Joanna Walsh



[1] Heatwave

[2] rue des Francs-Bourgeois

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