I just came back from my vacation to fully embody the fashion drama that, on August 31, John Galliano withdrew from the exhibition that was supposed to be his redemption. “John Galliano: Horizons,” the Met’s planned spring 2027 retrospective, had an opening section literally titled to confront the “rupture” of his 2011 antisemitic collapse. Still, it was canceled one month after its announcement.

Before a single one of his dreamlike garments went on the wall.

Andrew Bolton, the curator who explicitly aimed to build the show’s entire architecture around Galliano’s atonement, put out a statement backing the decision: according to him, museums have “a responsibility to examine difficult histories with rigor, candor, and care.” Then he recognized “the pain and concern this exhibition has caused,” and let it die there.

What surprised me is that this wasn’t a retrospective that ignored Galliano’s history, or one that treated his famous, and highly publicized 2010 rant “I love Hitler,” a stranger’s “forefathers would be fucking gassed” as an inconvenient footnote. Instead—and quite cleverly, if you ask me — Bolton designed a show from the ground up to make that history the very narrative of the exhibition. Imagine the sensational storyline: fifteen years of visible atonement that include rehab, meetings with rabbis, a decade running Maison Margiela without incident were supposed to be the point, not the obstacle.

It wasn’t enough.

Let's, for a minute, compare that to what Karl Lagerfeld got in 2023. Lagerfeld had, on French national television, invoked the Holocaust to argue against admitting Syrian refugees — “you cannot kill millions of Jews and then take in millions of their worst enemies afterwards.” He’d called #MeToo something he was “fed up with,” and defended a stylist accused of assaulting models by telling them to “join a nunnery.”

And yet none of it stopped “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” from opening as planned, Met Gala and all the fanfare that follows a Met exhibition. Without an apology section, without an atonement narrative, without so much as a wall label acknowledging it as a problem to be solved. In Lagerfeld’s case, Bolton’s framing wasn’t rupture but rather… motherly-like affection: “Everybody is flawed, has contradictions and skeletons in their closets. No one is perfect.” Anna Wintour’s version was gentler still: he said things “to shock,” not things he believed.

Ok.

And behind both of them stands the ghost of Coco Chanel, who arguably spied for the Nazis and even tried to use Aryanization law to seize her Jewish partners’ stake in her own perfume house. None of those, ahem, problematic behaviors had to be addressed when she properly had her very own Met retrospective in 2005, then a V&A blockbuster in 2023, her wartime record handled, by her own curators’ account, “gently.”

Do you feel the asymmetry?

Let’s do some logistics: Chanel died in 1971, addressed 34-plus years post-mortem by the Met and then 52-plus years post-mortem by the V&A. Lagerfeld died in 2019, applied to be addressed four years later. Galliano is alive. That makes him the only one of the three who could theoretically issue a new statement, perhaps do a new interview, or say something else regrettable during the run of the show. And I feel that this live, and thus unpredictable, variable seems to be the thing long-dead systemic institutions can’t tolerate, regardless of how contrite the record already is.

The vultures feed on blood, not legacy.

So why the selective cancellation? Wintour’s own quote on Lagerfeld’s bigotry statements— “not necessarily things he believed in” — is the tell. It’s a standard nobody extended to Galliano, whose momentary breakdown on video ended up being more legible and damning than Lagerfeld’s decades of calculated, on-brand provocation.

Inside the fashion conglomerates’ pr offices, the variable isn’t the severity of the statement but rather whether the man is alive and expected to comment further, whether the house still needs him commercially, and whether death has already done the “reckoning” for you. It’s a well-oiled mechanism that despises artistic flair with all its vices when it's alive while profiting off it, and celebrates it when the artist is no longer there. What’s important is to shape, to own the narrative—and show who’s boss.

We all know the fashion industry’s memory is highly selective, and it loves to dig into other people’s downfalls, which is precisely why I feel the variable here is life, death, and proximity, not severity. Chanel is 80 years dead and evidently murky. Lagerfeld is recently dead and can’t add to the record. Galliano is alive, present, and therefore the only one whose bigotry can still be “activated” by fresh context — and produce content for consumption that may not be regulated.

In that sense, nothing here is honest. Everything is once more online rage bait for the hordes of fashion accounts that will drag Galliano through the mud, or the Galliano sympathizers who will note the asymmetry. Either way, the content machines win; you feed them new material without context. And you give fair warning to young, talented designers that they have to keep a low profile—after all, it's the dead artist-designer who can get atonement, not the living.

The living talent is dangerous.

You can easily say Jess Yin has already lived a few lives inside the same through line: twelve years of classical ballet, painting since she was four, a stint on Evercore’s alternative asset managers M&A team, an apparel brand she co-founded called SERENA LI, and a fashion-tech company, Inseam, before all of it. Now she builds digital worlds — interactive, experimental web experiences that, unsurprisingly, treat code the way she once treated a canvas or a barre.

For Yin, AI is a medium with the same open borders as a canvas, not a shortcut around the work of making just something. We talked about gatekeeping —in fashion media, in luxury brands’ hesitance around AI, in the archives that heritage houses still won’t open — and about why, no matter how digital the tools get, fashion keeps pulling us back into the body.

You built a digital archive drawing on the Met Costume Institute’s collection at a moment when so much of fashion media is closing itself off — paywalls, no-phone policies at shows. What made you want to build something open instead?

Especially in media, things have gotten very closed off right now; Vogue Runway put up a paywall, shows are going no-phones. I think it’s important that things stay open and accessible, so I’d love to see more archival fashion history projects like this, especially now.

That makes sense, and it has to be done carefully because so many people online are posting images from the past without doing proper research. Young people on TikTok or X end up learning this stuff completely wrong, or at least without the context it was meant to have.

I agree. Another thing is that a lot of these databases are skewed toward a certain time period or part of the world. When I made mine, people pointed out that it was mostly, if not all, European fashion — and that’s just what the Met Costume Institute had. They didn’t have many Asian pieces, or pieces from Africa or Australia or other parts of the world. So as we continue to document and archive things, I hope the databases grow and become more representative of other cultures.

How did you initially get involved with fashion?

I’ve been interested in fashion for a long time; since I was a little kid, I remember playing dress-up in my mom’s closet. As I got older, I started thrifting more and putting pieces together, so I think I was always really into it. The way I got here is a bit of a funny story. I studied business in college and then worked in finance after school.

During that time, I realized I was sitting in front of a computer all day looking at numbers, which was very boring, and I felt unfulfilled. So I started looking for other things I found inspiring, such as art and fashion. At the time, I was living in Soho, which is New York’s fashion center, with all these stores and events happening, so I threw myself into it for inspiration because my day job was so draining.

Eventually I left that job and hit this lull of “oh my god, what do I do?” I ended up working with a friend from high school, and we started a brand together. That was my first real foray into the fashion world, and I met a lot of cool people through it. Overall, it’s important to me that people recognize fashion as more than just clothes — it’s our social context, it reflects the economy, it reflects the politics of the time. I think all of my work tries to capture that.

You also have a Substack that speaks to that intersection of fashion and tech. Are you optimistic about technology and how it’s going to help creatives in fashion and beyond?

I think the biggest thing for me is that I don’t have a very technical background — I never studied computer science or anything. But the way technology is right now, it makes it easy for anyone to turn anything into an experiment.

Coming at it from a more artistic, non-technical perspective, creating software or even hardware is just another medium of expression for me, another vehicle for putting a message or a piece of work out into the world, the same way a paintbrush and canvas is. I think we’ll see more people making things in different formats as digital tools become more accessible. And many of them are extremely beautiful.

I recently came across The Pudding, a magazine made entirely of interactive essays, which I thought was really innovative. It was such a fun read, and I’ve been thinking about whether we could do something similar for fashion.

The fashion media landscape is interesting because most of the inspiring work is coming from smaller creators rather than the big legacy publications. I get the tension mega fashion media face- at the end of the day they’re trying to make money, so keeping things gated works in their favor. But fashion is only interesting when it’s spread, interpreted, and built on.

I hope we find a balance where the people doing cooler, more innovative work can collaborate with bigger publications. It always comes down to funding. I’ve never seen a genuine lack of ideas; it’s always about finding someone who believes an idea is worth funding.

Ideas build on each other — there’s no art of today without the art of fifty, a hundred, five hundred years ago. We build on it by borrowing from each other, so I think we really need to find a sweet spot, because gatekeeping doesn’t help anyone either.

I agree with you, and I’ve said as much to a lot of people I’ve spoken with. Gatekeeping doesn’t make fashion people look more alluring or chic — it makes us look stupid. It’s like The Devil Wears Prada, a caricature of what people think fashion is.

You have used your art background to understand fashion technology, in a way that didn’t restrain you. In fact, it seems to have given you an open mind.

For sure, I think that’s one of the more important things — it makes you creative and resourceful. When I first found out about AI coding tools and how people were making websites and apps with them, I didn’t see it as a way to automate my life and offload the annoying stuff. I was more like, I want to use this to make something I wasn’t able to make before. It felt like an exciting medium.

Like an art medium.

Exactly. It also made me more open-minded about how we apply this stuff in interesting ways. A more closed-minded response might be feeling threatened, not understanding what’s going on, thinking it’s stealing your job — and I understand why people feel that way — but I think it really is what you make of it. You can make it your tool instead of a threat, and that mindset has helped me expand my creative horizons.

How would you describe it to someone who doesn’t know your work?

Right now I make a lot of digital web experiences. It started off pretty experimental, and a couple went viral, which I didn’t expect. I think people crave a more personal internet, like the early Tumblr days, when everyone had their own highly curated little corner. Now it feels diluted by the algorithm, and there’s a lot of exhaustion with the platforms — a lot of slop going around.

Sometimes startups want to do a launch or a campaign, and I’ll help them build those too. My work is a combination of the artistic and the technical. The creative direction and artistic vision have to come from the mind, but the execution is technical, because someone has to actually write the code and put it on screen.

How do you see fashion right now, through your own particular lens? Are fashion brands moving in the right direction?

It depends. On the AI conversation specifically, some brands are very open to it — Gucci and Balenciaga, the edgier leading brands, have been among the first to adopt it. There’s also been a lot of backlash, reasonably so, with people saying couture is meant to be human-made. I think we’re still in a weird phase, not just in fashion, of figuring out what the sweet spot is and how to actually use this properly. But I’d rather see brands experiment, get it wrong, and recalibrate than sit it out entirely and get left behind. Even when it lands a little awkwardly, I think it’s an important dialogue to have.

Other brands are using tech more in their operations, which is a pretty safe approach. But at the end of the day, tech will always bleed into culture and the art we make. Jacquemus did a campaign a while back with these surreal, massively out-of-proportion pieces that were really well received — that wasn’t AI, but it was technology functioning as art. As time goes on there will be other technologies used to make art, and we’ll just have to find the right usage and the right spot for each of them.

Why do you think luxury fashion brands hesitate to experiment?

One piece of insight that extends beyond fashion: I was talking to one of my old business-management professors, who works with a lot of executive teams. The way these teams assess AI usage is by listing out potential applications and ranking them by risk. Fashion brands are super big, with a massive loyal customer base and sales targets to hit — it would be a huge risk to implement AI, have it go wrong, and then have to fix it.

So people tend to start with the lowest-hanging, lowest-risk applications, even if they’re not especially high-impact. That’s my guess as to why these legacy companies are more risk-averse than newer ones — they have more at stake, more people to satisfy, and that naturally makes an organization slower.

With huge KPIs to hit, it makes sense that it would make brands hesitant to bring in more AI, or anything new. So what’s your take on where fashion goes from here?

Fashion moves incredibly slowly. I once worked on a project building software for apparel companies, on the production and operations side, and a lot of these organizations are just big and bloated — they have a hard time making changes because there are too many moving parts and too much legacy software to work around. That’s one piece of it.

There’s also a cultural aspect: the people who’d actually use these tools need to be open to adopting them. Even if a company buys the software, the employee still has to choose to use it; otherwise, the purchase was pointless. Right now people are still wary of these tools because we don’t fully understand what’s going on with them. As there’s more exposure, better communication, and better education, I think the culture will catch up — I just don’t know how long that’ll take.

I think there’s a sense of gatekeeping happening in the wrong direction — heritage brands not opening up their archives instead of making them available to the people they’re supposedly building the future for.

For sure. That’s culturally important too. I think it’s important to keep the internet open. Over the past couple of years, there’s been a rise in paid content, and there are pros and cons to that. The pro is that creatives get to monetize their platforms and be compensated; the con is that more quality material is being closed off.

I think the next phase of the internet is figuring out how to give people fair access to content, keep things from being clipped and lost, and archive things well while also making sure people, especially in creative industries, get paid. That’s probably the next big thing fashion, and the internet more broadly, needs to figure out.

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Somewhere in this conversation, famed costume designer Molly Rogers describes two nearly identical vintage belts as “the green” and “the cerulean blue” — and it’s hard not to hear Miranda Priestly’s voice underneath her own. Rogers, who cut her teeth at Patricia Field’s legendary store before shaping the iconic wardrobes of Sex and the City, And Just Like That..., and now The Devil Wears Prada 2, has spent four decades proving that taste isn’t a swatch you can screenshot. Instead, it’s a lifetime of experience and experimentation.

I was fortunate enough to sit up with her and talk about algorithms flattening our eyes, why the best belts are always vintage, and why she’d rather champion an unknown designer’s caftan she really loves than dust off another award.

It all started in New York in the ‘80s?

I started working at Pat’s store,she had a very famous store in the ‘80s. Through Pat, her store, the styling, getting more interested in clothing — all of that led into television and film. It all started with Patricia.

I never really thought I’d become a costume designer growing up. I loved to read, I loved to write. It was just through working at her store that I started assisting her, helping her. She got so busy and in demand, and so did I. It kind of happened naturally, it wasn’t something I set out to pursue.

Did those other interests — the writing, the reading — actually help you get good at what you do?

Yes, definitely. There’s a part of it that’s a heightened sense of style — knowing what looks good on a real person’s body, not a model. As you get more experience, you refine your taste, you learn what works on actors, men and women — you just get better with time. But it’s not all about your fashion eye. It’s so much about your education, your knowledge.

Pat is a crazy lover of history. It’s how much you’ve traveled, how much you’ve read, not living by an algorithm. Exploring on your own makes you a much more well-rounded person, and that’s really important when you begin to translate a script and bring your own perspective to it.

That takes a personal sense of taste and style. There’s a lot of discussion these days about “taste level,” if you’ve seen that on social media. Do you think social media — tied to the algorithm, as you said — has made people tasteless in a way, or given everyone the same sense of taste because they’re fed the same images?

It’s an interesting question, and it probably doesn’t have a simple answer. If I see something visually interesting on Instagram and send it to a friend, they’ve usually already seen it. It feels like we’re all being served the same meal. I think it’s really important to go down your own rabbit hole. We don’t need AI — AI needs our brains and our information. It’s important to make sure these higher-intelligence machines serve us. I don’t want to be a slave to some robot that got its DNA from something a human developed or thought of.

You had the pleasure to work with Patricia. Did you collaborate with her on other costume projects before Sex and the City?

Oh yeah, we did. Because of her store, we did commercials, we worked with a rock band — I lived in L.A. for a couple of years, Pat went and did a movie in Chicago, and I did a lot of music videos and commercials in L.A. Then I came back. You do those smaller jobs — commercials, videos, shoots — until they lead to bigger projects.

Pat did a wonderful movie here in Miami; I didn’t do that one with her, I was in L.A. with Sarah Jessica Parker and David Frankel, who directed The Devil Wears Prada. Pat had done a comedy with them here in Miami, which is where I am right now. That led to things later — Sex and the City came along, and a network found her again.

Sex and the City comes along, and you have to design costumes for four completely different personalities. You and Patricia have to take into account each character’s personality, their world, everything. How difficult is that?

Pat told me that at her first meeting with Darren Star, who bought the rights to Candace’s book, he talked to her so deeply about each of those four women that she immediately had a clear picture of them. He told her things that weren’t even in the script like their backstories. When someone like the author, the screenwriter, or the director fills in those gaps, it helps you discover exactly what you’re shopping for — for a lawyer named Miranda, say, or a journalist named Carrie.

It’s very helpful to have those details, almost like a personality profile for every character.

Yes. And when you think about it, if someone else had been cast as Carrie, none of that would apply. A different actress would have brought different ideas, because she’d be a different person with a different body, and she’d play Carrie differently. It all came together like a perfect storm, at exactly the right time.

Did you and Patricia take Sarah Jessica Parker’s personal style into account? She dresses a little quirky herself — did she have a say in what Patricia chose?

Yes, it was very collaborative. I don’t think any actress wants to wear something she wears all the time, they’re trying to create a different person. But of course there are things they feel comfortable in and recognize in themselves. Every good fitting, every good outfit, happens because the actor is contributing and communicating and that always leads to a better project, better looks, everything.

If an actor in a fitting is just, “whatever you say,” it’s hard to find the joy, the real creativity. You need to bounce off each other, get some feedback. There has to be a lot of energy in the room so everyone feels like they’re creating something together. Every fitting, you want to explore ; “I wonder what that would look like on her.” Sometimes it doesn’t work. The journey never really ends, actually.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 — how different are the costumes from the original film?

The incredible thing about this movie is the cast. I think it would be anyone’s dream to work on it. Jokingly i would say that I’d serve coffee just to be part of it. It’s such an honor, such a challenge, such an excitement, both with the first movie and this one. But I have to say — I don’t know if you notice this the way I do — I always see articles about the first Devil Wears Prada talking about how wild or how great the clothes were. But I don’t see it that way.

I see clothes you can’t date. They’re timeless in the sense that you just can’t tell what year it is. That was really important to me on the second movie too. I didn’t want it to feel like a commercial. I didn’t want anyone to look at Miranda Priestly and think, “That’s look 12 from Spring ‘26.” You want to mix everything, the way Pat did, and make it feel seamless, without a real sense of time. I think that mattered for both movies.

I rewatched parts of the first film before this interview, and it really hasn’t dated at all.

That’s what I think. When people say the clothes were so amazing, they’re picturing the crazy coat montage with Meryl in those Chanel boots. But the majority of the movie is office wear, really. That sequence is exciting, and I’m not saying the clothes aren’t good — the film looks amazing, and Pat was nominated for an Oscar for it. I’m just saying, when I read that the clothes were “wild,” I think — what? It makes sense that people say it, but that’s not really what most of the movie is.

Did your personal aesthetic diverge from Pat’s at any point on the sequel?

Pat and I have been best friends since 1984. She’s taken me to Greece something like eight times and I owe her for showing me Greece, for my love of the country and its people. But in the end, we’re not twins. I like certain music, she likes different music. There are things we both agree on in a fitting room, and things I like more than she does — it’s all about personal experience, what you bring to it.

I have no idea if Pat would have chosen that tassel jacket from Dries Van Noten for Meryl in the second movie. She might have it because it does seem like something she’d like. But in the end, it’s about what you choose for that particular person. She might not have been as excited by it as I was. I saw that tassel jacket and thought,wow!

For the film, I read that you used both luxury and resale pieces.

That’s part of trying to keep things as timeless as possible when you mix. The best belts, for example, are vintage. If you walk into a big department store — in Athens, or Saks Fifth Avenue in New York — you can barely find a belt. There are certain basic things that just aren’t made well anymore. I can’t imagine doing a contemporary movie without resale or vintage. We don’t have the budget for luxury only, and honestly, that would be boring too.

It’s all about the treasure hunt.

Exactly. When I tell the shoppers we need a skinny black belt for a dress, they’ll bring back forty belts. And how do you know which of the forty is the right one? Just experience. It’s a bit like that scene in the first movie — “there’s no difference between these” — the green, the cerulean blue. Most people would say those belts all look exactly alike. But with experience, you know. An actor will try a belt on and say, “that one’s really shiny,” and you’ll say, “yeah, I think it’s pulling focus.” You all have your opinion, and you work through it by process of elimination.

I find it interesting that you also included upcoming designers in the film.

I always try to do that. It’s so easy for me to call Fendi and get anything I want — that’s easy, that’s exciting. But what’s really fulfilling is meeting someone who doesn’t have that exposure but who’s genuinely talented, and who needs a spotlight. A lot of times I’ll meet someone unknown and think, I love that skirt, it has pockets, it’s great fabric. And I don’t care that they made it out of their bedroom. It’s about giving someone who deserves it some exposure, and I love doing that. Sometimes it changes their lives. It’s such a massive audience, people are going to see the work on screen, maybe order that hat or skirt. It opens up the world to them.

Small businesses are in the fight for their lives right now, and that matters. When I was filming in Greece, I’d walk into a store and see something fabulous — a caftan — and tell the owner, I’m going to put this on TV. There’s so much talent in Greece ,the most wonderful jewelry. In fact, one of my favorite designers is Nikos Koulis. Greece has so much potential, so much creativity, the colors,the sun; it’s a lot like Miami. What I hear from Greek designers is that there’s no support system — no formal fashion or design education, no university departments to support early-career talent and that keeps them back.

Let’s talk awards. Which nomination or win are you most proud of?

I have to say — and this may sound crazy — that’s not really important to me. I don’t know how I could win an award over someone who did an equally great job on something like Hacks — have you seen that show? It’s fantastic. I don’t really understand the judgment of it. It’s nice to be recognized, that’s true. What’s rewarding to me is finding someone working hard in their own home who’s made something beautiful, and getting to put it on an actor who says, “where did you get this dress?” That’s what matters to me.

In fact,I don’t even have room to put an award up on the wall. I don’t know what I’d do with one. People with a more artistic mind don’t really care about formal recognition — they want to be recognized for what they do, for the passion they put into it. That, yes.But awards don’t really make sense to me.

Any future projects you can share?

I want to come to Greece and work there. Right now I’m in Miami, taking a little break, catching up on emails, swimming, enjoying my life. Everyone in my building has gone away for the summer because it’s so hot here. It’s a wonderful time to take care of myself and wonder what’s going to happen next or what’s the next phone call going to be. That’s how this business is. You never know.

You could literally starve to death, or your phone could ring this afternoon. It’s my choice, though. I never wanted to work nine to five. It’s exciting and scary at the same time. I look forward to anything — I don’t like to say no. If something comes up, I usually say yes, because I know I’m going to learn something and that’s the mantra I live with.

Astrid Wendlandt cut her teeth as a 21-year-old reporter in 1990s Moscow, and since then, never really left the frontier. What I admire is that she boldly calls the trade press that depends on advertiser goodwill “parrot press” — a term with the flat contempt of someone who spent fifteen years watching how the sausage gets, ahem, made, first at Reuters, then the Financial Times. Subsequently, she decided- pre-Substack- the only way to report on luxury honestly was to answer to subscribers instead of brands. Astrid, as many of us strive to, earned her independence- and no one can say it was easy.

Miss Tweed, the platform she launched in June 2020, inside the mid-pandemic frenzy, took French Ministry of Culture accreditation within months.No surprise here: her bold reporting has been arguing for a while now that the luxury industry’s golden age is ending, and that the conglomerates know it even as they hedge their bets in China or elsewhere. You heard it here first.

But I feel it’s her verdict on the industry itself that matters the most: behind the glitz, she says, is a jungle, run by executives with main-character-syndrome who think they’re “saving lives” — when really, in her words, they’re just selling trinkets to gullible customers buying a dream. What follows is a conversation with her covering everything, from her trips to the Siberian Arctic to her experience in the Paris showrooms-no contradiction here, she would note.

You launched Miss Tweed in June 2020, right in the middle of a pandemic, and within months, it received press accreditation from the French Ministry of Culture. What made you choose that turbulent moment to strike out independently?

I launched Miss Tweed because I did not want to work for media outlets that depend on advertising to pay journalists’ salaries. They are known in the trade as “parrot press”. The fashion and luxury industry has become one of the main pillars of the global economy. I thought there was a need for independent media to allow the free flow of information and serve as a platform for high-quality journalism.

Miss Tweed is advertising-free to guarantee complete editorial freedom. In an era where most media are either dying or dependent on brand money, how sustainable is a subscription-only, ad-free model in the luxury space?

This model is tested and approved. In fact, Miss Tweed is a profitable company, and this year it will pay dividends.

You spent over 15 years covering the luxury industry, mostly as European luxury goods correspondent for Reuters. What could you not say at Reuters that you can say at Miss Tweed?

At Reuters, like at Miss Tweed, I can say what I want. As with Reuters and my previous employer, the Financial Times, Miss Tweed is about fair, accurate and balanced reporting. We adhere to the highest standards of journalistic integrity and ethics. We never accept any gifts or free trips.

Your most recent analysis argues that the golden age of luxury goods is over — that the aspirational consumer is no longer interested in splurging on overpriced luxury items of dubious quality and ethics, preferring experiences. Is this a permanent structural break?

Yes I think the structural change is here to last and luxury and fashion groups have embarked on a major downsizing. They will sell brands, close boutiques and make hundreds of staff redundant. The process has already started as Miss Tweed reported.

You’ve pointed to China as a key market where the affluent now spend their money differently and on other things than Western luxury goods. Are the big luxury conglomerates — LVMH, Kering, Richemont — genuinely prepared for that reality, or are they still in denial?

They are not in denial of what is going on in China and many brands are already reducing their presence there. On the other hand, some brands such as Kering’s Saint Laurent are planning to open more boutiques in China and hold several events there.

Your book, How Luxury Conquered the World, was the result of a four-year investigation into the business of luxury. What was the single most surprising thing you uncovered in those four years?

It’s very difficult to say. This book shows that behind the glitz and glamour of the façade that fronts the luxury industry, it’s a jungle out there. Only the strongest survive. The problem is that many ultra-sensitive and creative souls work in the fashion and luxury industry, and they are not emotionally equipped to withstand the toxic environment you find at many brands.

Alongside your journalism career, you’ve spent over 20 years traveling in Russia’s Arctic region and the Urals and have written two books about those expeditions. What does a person who reports on couture and billion-euro conglomerates find in the Siberian wilderness?

I made these trips before I started covering the luxury and fashion industry. I think they have provided me with a precious and healthy distance from it. I have a lot of admiration for the work of designers but the fashion industry is a circus in reality. Many managers and executives have oversized egos and behave as if they were saving lives. But in fact they are just selling trinkets to gullible customers who buy the dream the brand is selling.

You may not believe it, but I passionately watch the World Cup. And being a fashion nerd, I can’t help but feel there is something almost too neat, too perfect about Loewe dressing Spain. And that took me inside the rabbit hole of team kits and what they represent.

Imagine that: the house known for its surrealist, cerebral work, built over eleven years into a temple of, as many say, visible intellectual labor — outfitting the squad whose footballing philosophy was constructed on the precise opposite principles. Spain’s Tiki-taka, if we view it at its theoretical purest, was a system where the player dissolved into the pass, allowing the self to be subordinated to the whole. Xavi, Iniesta, and Busquets are not stars in the conventional sense but nodes in a network, offering their greatness only in relation to one another. The ball moved; the people were a team.

And now here is Loewe, draping that same national identity in wide-leg suit pants and three-button blazers with a hidden striped cuff that reveals itself only when you know to look — offering a tiny theater of concealment and disclosure, a surrealistic echo of the above.

Which raises a question that the torrent of World Cup fashion coverage has, characteristically, declined to ask: when a nation dresses itself in a house’s visual language, whose vision is it actually wearing? How can a kit tell the visual story of its country when luxury brands come in and add their own distinctive touch?

This is the thing about the kit as a political document. Today, it is always, necessarily, a document written by someone other than the nation it represents.

Roland Barthes, writing in Mythologies, described how objects of everyday life become vehicles for ideology that presents itself as nature, as simply the way things are. The national football kit is a nearly perfect Barthesian myth: it appears to represent a nation’s essence, its character, its footballing soul.

Nowadays, though, it has become a tool to represent a series of corporate and creative decisions made at considerable remove from anything the nation would recognize as itself. The history behind the team isn’t necessarily taken into account. The collective soul is ignored as the sign points inward.

Cultural studies scholar Jennifer Craik, in “The Cultural Politics of the Uniform,” argues that the uniform does not simply dress the body — it disciplines it into legibility. In that sense, the uniform makes identity readable as it collapses the individual into a type. What the World Cup kit does, in this reading, is collapse an entire nation’s visual identity into a colorway, a badge, a design reference. Spain becomes surrealism. France becomes effortless. The complexity that would resist the uniform is missing; the actual self isn’t there.

Shall we blame high-end fashion collaborations for this?

Let’s return to our initial paradigm: Loewe and Spain, a house defined by surrealism and the visible seam of thought, dressing a team whose glory was built on the erasure of sole individual expression. There is a strong sense of structural irony here, one that makes someone wonder, in a Sartrean manner, about the existentialism of the player on the pitch.

Simon Porte Jacquemus, a designer whose entire brand mythology rests on Provençal light and effortlessness performed with precision, paired with the French national team, whose footballing culture oscillates violently between collective genius and Mbappé-cemented spectacular individual ego. The pre-match jersey is entirely blue, chalk-pinstriped, the cockerel emblem reduced to a sole whisper. It is, above all, tasteful.

And yet, for those who remember: France, famously, was not always tasteful on the pitch. Zidane was not tasteful. Cantona was not tasteful. But Jacquemus is, and so Les Bleus wear the tasteful version of themselves to the warm-up. The contradiction goes unremarked and gives the team a whole new identity — their projected collective myth of the French soul is more Emily in Paris than La Haine.

Gabriela Hearst, born in Paysandú, Uruguay, seventh generation of a merino sheep ranching family, designed Uruguay’s off-pitch suits from wool sourced from ranches in the north of her country. The fabric traveled from the Flores region’s Lanas Trinidad mill directly into the garments. The crest was placed inside the jacket — close to the heart, as Hearst herself explained — rather than on the breast pocket. A rare moment where branding gave way to collective biography. And I cherished it.

The Mexico kit tells a parallel, and more complicated, story. Adidas partnered with Someone Somewhere on the team’s third kit, hand-embellished by 150 female artisans from the Sierra Norte de Puebla region. Each piece carries a QR code linking directly to the profile of the artisan who worked on it. The intention was to make visible the human labor usually hidden behind the fashion object, and it is genuinely interesting.

As usual, controversy followed almost immediately, with critics questioning whether the artisans were fairly compensated. The story behind the story, the one the QR code was perhaps meant to preempt, or perhaps meant to answer, or perhaps simply meant to aestheticize into manageable form. We will never know for sure, but we are free to speculate.

Argentina’s away kit, designed with reference to fileteado — the traditional Buenos Aires decorative style found on signs, taxis, and storefronts — produced a different kind of controversy: artists questioning, as Creative Bloq noted, how faithfully the design reflects the traditional lines of fileteado. The cultural reference is present, but the culture that produced it is not in the room. This is precisely the tension Craik’s framework would predict. The uniform claims to represent; it cannot consult. It speaks for the body it dresses, and the body has no right of reply.

The World Cup kit isn’t just clothes. Every design choice is simultaneously an inclusion and a suppression. Today, more than ever, I feel that every squad kit is a confession. It confesses what a nation thinks of itself, or more precisely, what a fashion house thinks a nation should think of itself. Spain in Loewe surrealism, now executed by Anderson’s successors. France in Jacquemus's effortlessness, Uruguay in Gabriela Hearst’s traceable wool. The United States in Virgil Abloh’s archive — a dead designer’s gestures redeployed to give the host nation cultural credibility it hasn’t earned on the pitch.

The question is whether the nation being dressed was in the room when the choice was made, or whether it was simply measured and told to show up in whatever arrived. In most cases, the answer is the latter.

Any serious fashion lover has seen one or two of his documentaries — Martin Margiela: In His Own Words or Dries, for instance — often without noticing the common thread behind those cinematic works: the eye behind the lens. No surprise there; Reiner Holzemer has spent decades making people forget the camera is there. The German documentary filmmaker behind intimate portraits of Martin Margiela, Thom Browne, and Dries Van Noten approaches his subjects with the patience of a therapist and the precision of a craftsman.

On top of that, he has also portrayed celebrated photographers such as Anton Corbijn and Juergen Teller, while reminding the art world how much it owes to German postwar photography and legendary agencies such as Magnum Photos. We spoke about the origins of his practice, his philosophy of honesty in filmmaking, and his upcoming documentary based on Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis — a project that asks whether fashion can save itself, and how.

I have come to interview a lot of people. Curiously enough, I always ask the same opening question: how did you first become interested in what you do, the world of images?

Photography came into my life very early, though not at all professionally. My father was an engineer, but in his spare time, he loved to photograph landscapes and the family, and he also painted a great deal. Mountains, lakes, that kind of thing. I think he inspired me without either of us realizing it.

When I was fifteen or sixteen, living in a small town, there was a late-night TV program that showed American documentaries and independent fiction films, mostly in black and white. I loved those movies. But I never thought seriously about entering that world. I wanted to study psychology. All my friends said I was a good listener, that people trusted me with their private stories, and I liked that idea.

Then, when I was around eighteen, a friend told me about a group of young people working with video cameras at a culture center in the city. He asked if I wanted to come and just see what they were doing. So we went. My friend left after two weeks. I stayed for almost the rest of my life.

What was it about that environment that kept you?

It was a collective — everyone could operate the camera, everyone could edit or be in front of or behind it. I felt very comfortable behind the camera because you could observe, you could listen. And there was one experience I will never forget: we interviewed a former communist prisoner, a man who had been held in a concentration camp, tortured. He was ninety years old, and he took us to the site and walked us through it, sharing his memories. At one point he began to cry. I thought: the camera can be a tool for real intimacy. If you approach it honestly, it allows you to get very close to people and their stories.

Everything was complicated in those early days — the equipment barely worked, and batteries failed constantly. But gradually we got better, and ten years later our films were showing at festivals around the world and on television. It became a profession.

Your method hasn’t changed much since then, has it?

Not really — only the equipment has improved. I still keep the camera on my shoulder so people stop registering it as something separate from me. I still try to make the situation feel like a normal conversation rather than an artificial moment with an instrument between us. And I still listen — really listen. I come prepared with questions and themes, but I follow what the person gives me rather than forcing them into the shape of my concept.

Television people I encountered early in my career often had a very different attitude. They treated subjects as lucky to be filmed. It felt almost violent — this idea that you could point a camera at someone without their permission and they should be grateful. My intention has always been the opposite: to meet people at eye level, to be honest about what I’m doing and why.

You’ve made some notoriously private fashion people open up to you— Margiela, Dries. How do you create that sense of safety?

I value honesty above everything. When I do a portrait, be it Dries or Margiela, I always explain clearly what my intentions are and what I hope the work will be. I don’t play games. I don’t tell them one thing while pursuing a completely different strategy behind their back. I believe that the more honest I am, the more I show my own vulnerability, the more I receive in return.

I also always show the protagonist my first edit, the cut that reflects the direction I’m pursuing. I defend it, and I hope they trust me. Most of the time, they do. If someone says they feel uncomfortable with a particular moment, I explain why I want to keep it, and we discuss it. Ninety to ninety-five percent of the time, they let me keep it in. Occasionally, it’s a small thing that can easily be resolved. It feels like very normal work to me. I don’t make a production of it on set.

Fashion is often dismissed as superficial by the broader film world. What do you see in these designers that justifies the documentary form — what is at stake in their work?

I couldn’t make a film about someone I don’t admire. That’s essential for me. Sometimes it happens that I don’t fully understand an artist’s work at the outset, and that’s actually very interesting because then I have a genuine curiosity to discover what the idea is behind it. I don’t want to know everything before I start shooting. I want the process to be a journey I take together with the protagonist.

With fashion specifically, I see real creativity, something genuinely artistic. When I made the film about Dries, I had no idea how much work, how much detail, and devotion go into making a collection. But you feel it immediately, the perfectionist attitude. I’m a perfectionist too, in shooting and editing.

Wim Wenders said something similar when he made his film about Yohji Yamamoto: there’s so much similarity between filmmaking and fashion-making. I think that’s true. The struggles are the same. The question of how you preserve your signature while still evolving, now that’s something every creative person grapples with, whatever the medium.

Your new documentary on the Leica camera sounds like a departure — it’s about an object rather than a person. How do you build intimacy with a camera as your protagonist?

It’s really not about the object at all — it’s about people. About thirteen photographers, among them Sebastião Salgado, a war photographer working in Ukraine, a fashion photographer exploring sustainability, and JR, who makes those enormous mural works he calls chronicles. Each of them talks about their relationship with the world in front of the lens: how they learned to see, how they find the right image, what experiences shaped their vision.

Salgado, for instance, talks about how his childhood determined his way of looking at skies and clouds, that Baroque aesthetic he’s always been drawn to. The technical story of the film is simply the invention of the handheld camera, about a hundred years ago, which freed photographers from the tripod and made a whole new kind of image possible. That’s the historical entry point. But the film is about the artists themselves.

You were approached about making Dana Thomas’ book Fashionopolis into a documentary. What finally convinced you this was a story worth telling in your way?

Yes, it was announced in the Hollywood Reporter, so we can. The author herself approached me, along with producer Bronwyn Cosgrave and producer Daniel Parisi. They responded to the emotion and intimacy in my films, the quality of the approach.

I hesitated at first. I thought: maybe this is more of a journalistic project, a film about the bad things that happen in fashion. That kind of work is important, but I questioned whether I was the right person for it. I’m drawn to spending time with people I genuinely like. I don’t want to make portraits of the bad actors. There’s already so much negativity in the world. I open a newspaper, and it’s everywhere. That’s enough.

But they kept asking, and eventually I found a way in. The angle that made sense to me is to focus on the people who give us hope — researchers developing new fabrics, farmers finding more sustainable ways to grow cotton, designers working with upcycling or secondhand. A whole range of approaches. We want to give audiences a sense of what a way forward might actually look like, rather than simply cataloguing what’s gone wrong.

Of course, we have to point to the problems - you can’t make an honest film without acknowledging them. But the main protagonists should be people doing something that has a future. And the more Dana and I research, the more interesting people we find, especially young people who have simply decided they won’t participate in the old system anymore. They’re fashion lovers. They love beauty, they love craft. They’re not saying fashion is frivolous or superficial. That’s very important to me.

When we met Cate Blanchett for the first time to discuss the collaboration, she felt the same way. She said we don’t want to repeat the negative story. There are already films doing that. We want to show people a perspective — what the way out might look like. That’s the center of it. There has to be a way out, and I am happy to carve the path.

Fashion doesn’t start with the runway. It starts with our simple, mundane morning choices.

Every time we open our wardrobe, we make a choice, and at best we tell ourselves is that it is a practical one that has to do with the weather, the meeting, or the occasion. But something else is also lurking beneath the surface: every day, without knowing, we face the oldest problem the human animal has ever faced. Who am I, and how do I make that legible to the world?

Roland Barthes, in The Fashion System, revealed that it is not the object but the name that creates desire, the meaning that sells the fantasy. A garment is a sign before it is everything else, a means of communication with the Other. We don’t buy clothes. We buy the social signals they carry, the invisible codes that communicate who we are — or who we intend to become — before we have said a single word. And perhaps thats the very magic of it.

This inexplicably alluring yet pressing question is what actually made Jung, Freud’s implacable disciple, move beyond mere personal memory and desire; in his view, there exists a stratum of the psyche that belongs not to you but to the totality of the human race and history. A shared inheritance containing what he termed archetypes: a series of innate patterns, primordial figures that appear across every culture, every mythology, every dream hidden in plain sight. The Mother. The Hero. The Trickster. The Persona. Not stereotypes, templates that the mind did not learn but arrived with.

Let’s go back to where we first started. This is why fashion has never been trivial. It is not vanity. It is rather ontology in action, mythology materialized.

Fashion’s power lies in its ability to offer a special iconography; it offers you the universal archetype — the Club Kid, the Aristocrat, the Rebel — while promising you will make it your own. Not a type. A version. And it works because when a piece of clothing deeply activates an archetype you feel you belong to, you are not being sold something. You are being recognised — handed a mirror that shows not what you look like, but what you fundamentally are, or wish to be.

That very distinction between the archetypal who I am versus who I think/wish I’d be is all you need to know about how the top echelons of fashion marketing use the art and science of archetypes. And this is when, after this very long intro, is where Demna enters the conversation.

Demna’s Balenciaga was the place of discourse where the Persona was exposed as a construct, using good old postmodern irony as his tool. In short: make the mask more extreme until it becomes a comment on mask-wearing itself. The discourse was the product. And for a good old while, it sold. But irony at scale has a ceiling. As Cass Almendral's analysis put it with precision: "Irony requires an audience sophisticated enough to be in on the joke. At $10 billion, the audience includes people who are not in on anything."

See where I’m going with all this? At the very decadence of his archetype-use, Demna lands the Gucci gig. And he tries his favorite method of holding the irony mirror against his followers, the one that had made him the ringleader of the Gen Z clout-based social media-fueled society. And he fails. Gucci’s archetypes were forged not by a single creative vision but by decades of lived Italian social mythology: the unashamedly glamorous bomba of the 1980s, the sleek aristocratic signore, the Ford-era creature of unapologetic erotic confidence. These are not characters a designer invented but rather characters Italian society produced, and Gucci, at its best, recognised and clothed.

At Balenciaga, Demna was the author of archetypes. At Gucci, the archetypes pre-exist him, but he is far too arrogant to understand that. And worse, he doesn’t recognize himself in any of them, much like a writer who doesn’t identify with his novel heroes. The rule is harsh: the archetype produces its flash of recognition only when the designer believes in it. Tom Ford believed in his Gucci archetypes the way the aforementioned novelist believes in characters: completely, even while knowing they are constructed. The desire his clothes produced was not simply manufactured by a strategy. It was transmitted from his own.

By now, it’s evident that irony is, by definition, a mode of non-belief. It can produce fascination, conversation, and even tribal affiliation inside and outside the web. Yet it cannot endlessly produce the familiar, particular ache of wanting something so badly that you hand over an unreasonable amount of money for it. The culture has already registered this exhaustion.

Message to Demna: we are tired of provocation that doesn't believe in itself, provocation that doesn't hold a simple aesthetic starting point. We accept the archetypes held at arm's length, embellished with the beauty, we are starting to re-believe it will save fashion- and the world.

Fashion is not art. Fashion is about making clothes. And it's only once they're made that some clothes can become works of art."

Karl Lagerfeld

Sarah Paulson in Matieres Fecales

I kept stalling. The draft sat open for weeks, the cursor blinking over a blank page like a personal accusation. Where’s the MET Gala review? Why not submit it? The reason, I eventually admitted to myself, was that I wasn't convinced fashion is art. And if it isn't art, what exactly was I reviewing?

My mind keeps rolling around Valerie Steele’s argument: “Right, is it worthy? Is it good enough to be art?” Her response is exactly what a dear friend and colleague said: “Well, Valerie, if you can’t say that fashion is art, who else would say it?”

But I wanted to decouple the idea of Art with a capital “A” from fashion. This whole question of whether something is art is not a question of whether it's good. I regard fashion as being incredibly significant and important for culture and society. I'm only interested in, "Is this fashion a good fashion, or is it a mediocre or poor fashion?" — not, "Is it good enough to be art?"

In the same interview, she goes on to say: “Some of the best designers ask some of the same questions as art. Balenciaga, for example: How can I measure this volume? Or McQueen: How can I get across the anguish I felt about being gay and being rejected? Those are interesting and unusual questions. Designers are usually thinking, "What can I get to sell? What will the Park Avenue Princess wear this season? Those are not really art questions.”

She is right, they aren’t.

Fashion has a commercial aspect we can't avoid addressing, especially in our algorithm-led postmodern society of the Uber Spectacle. Fashion provides the golden combination of a product being both commodity and art, thus increasing in value.

Personally, I am very suspicious of this connection, especially when it's being used to profit. Because, let's face it — if a fashion item is considered art, it overall changes the value of the commodity. Right now, there's more need than ever to dominate the spectacle and increase the cultural capital of fashion.

"Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive… The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can't protect what is already ahead."— Coco Chanel

So the only reason to review the Met Gala is not whether it provides an answer to “is fashion art” — but rather, who decides it and why?

You see, fashion can be profoundly significant culturally, socially, and personally without needing to pass through the gates of the art world for validation. The question "Is it worthy?" already contains a verdict: fashion, left to itself, is not enough. It needs to be elevated.

We live in a moment when there is more pressure than ever to dominate the spectacle, to accumulate that capital, to position a brand not merely as a maker of things but as a custodian of culture. The Met Gala is perhaps the most visible annual performance of that ambition.

This year, Bezos and Zuckerberg were present at the Met Gala, which is not a coincidence. These are the men who own the algorithm, the platform, or, as Deleuze would note, the Spectacle itself. And now they sit at the very table that decides whether fashion is art. They are precisely the wrong people to make that call. Not because they obviously lack taste, but because, for them, elevating fashion to art is just another market move. Another asset class. The question "Is it art?" in their hands becomes "What is it worth?"

Is fashion capitalism’s favourite child and art’s bastard?

You have to be a special kind of fashion aficionado to dig the vast world of archives out there. The spread of social media gave precious exposure to people who patiently scanned some of the hidden treasures of fashion history, previously hidden in print magazines, catalogues, and TV excerpts.

You see, there is a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent serious time inside a secondhand bookshop or a record store, when you pull something from a shelf that the world seems to have forgotten about and feel, instantly, that it matters. And then understand that forgetting where to look for the treasure was the problem, not the thing itself. In fashion, that moment is increasingly happening online before our very eyes. At least the eyes of us who live online.

Because online, a growing community of archivists, researchers, and collectors is doing something quietly radical: rescuing the overlooked instead of chasing the new. Fashion devotees, armed with flatbed scanners, multilingual library cards, and a near-stubborn devotion to specificity, are building digital repositories of fashion history, deeply personal but also genuinely public. They are the visual historian of our times.

We spoke to three people working at different edges of this world—Joseph Patrick, a fashion researcher, Katie Irving, an industry strategist, and Nash Hill, the co-founder of the Archive PDF platform—to discuss what keeps those involved in the unearthing of fashion treasures uncovering.

From what I felt doing these interviews, anyone who does this work seriously knows what the hardest part is: the physical and the epistemic. Nash Hill, who co-runs Archive Pdf, a platform dedicated to scanning and surfacing forgotten fashion publications, describes the process in enlightening detail:

“The most direct challenge is the actual acquisition and storage of physical materials. The prices of old magazines, lookbooks, and other physical publications are quite high, and it becomes a legitimate investment. Then there is the labor of scanning these materials, which can easily take hours upon hours depending on the quality of the machine. After that, you must digitize and edit the scans, and so on. It’s intensive but rewarding.”

For Joseph Patrick, a researcher whose work focuses specifically on Belgian and Japanese fashion from the late 1980s through the mid-2000s, the challenge is less logistical than archival. It’s defined by a constant battle against the noise of bad information and false criticism compiled online.

Patrick flags the recycling economy that has sprung up around archival imagery. Research and visual media produced by serious archivists, he notes, “often gets skimmed and recycled into surface-level clickbait in increasingly cynical ways.” Not surprised at all. In a media environment that prizes vitality and thus shareability, depth is always at risk of being stripped away during transmission. It’s often the price we have to pay for being online.

Kate Irving, a strategist and consultant with two decades in the fashion industry, has watched the role of the archive keeper transform almost entirely within her professional lifetime.“In my experience, the most helpful archive partners are iconic vintage collectors, e.g., What Goes Around Comes Around, Archive Collection, and One of A Kind. When I started in the industry (20 years ago), most of these were appointment-only and working directly with brands. Now, most of these archives are open to the public with inspiring retail spaces, e.g., Desert Vintage. They’ve evolved into a form of tastemakers within the industry.”

“In my view, this area has evolved from strictly ‘archive keepers’ to ‘tastemakers’. Instead of just acting as a living library for a specific designer or era, these archivists are curating their collections to make statements about where fashion is now, and where it’s headed. This has evolved the practice of archive keeping from a ‘trade secret’ of the fashion industry to a public-facing statement maker, which has been a huge win for the industry. This follows the broader macro shift within fashion from gatekeeping to democratization, which is a welcome change.”

Irving points to an emerging tier of ultra-niche community archives—superfans who have dedicated their platforms to a single brand, era, or aesthetic code. “This creates the opportunity for a new level of fandom in fashion, connecting with consumers who have been priced out of true luxury due to the price hikes of recent years, but still value particular designers and eras of fashion.”

If there is a single theme that all three voices hit despite arriving from very different corners of this world, it is the primordial joy of discovering the invisible thread. That is, not being focused on the object itself, but on the relation between objects. The way a research trail, followed far enough, stops being about one thing and becomes about everything societal.

Nash Hill reaches for an analogy from music to describe it.“For me, I find the reward to be similar to finding an obscure record in the bottom of a record store bin, tucked away in the basement, listening to it and going, ‘wait a second— something is happening with this music.’ Then you get to share it with your friends, and maybe they know the band and can recommend another project the guitarist played in, and there’s all sorts of connections that you can make from this single record, which otherwise would’ve been hidden in that basement forever.”

Hill’s most striking recent discovery arrived through exactly this kind of lateral thinking. He describes that while researching Nicolas Ghesquière’s early tenure at the largely forgotten Italian label Callaghan, he turned up a print advertisement created by the French design duo M/M Paris. Around the same time, he had been listening heavily to Björk’s album Vespertine.

Joseph Patrick describes his work as a practice that begins with physical media and often generates genuine surprise, a kind of uberproductive accident built into his methodology. “One of the joys and importance of a practice that begins with physical media is that you are always accidentally discovering new things. These can turn into rabbit holes, and are often a generative part of what I like to do. I will find a breadcrumb of something mentioned in a magazine or book that I wasn’t even looking for, and I will try to pursue it to its logical end if I think it is interesting and under-discussed.”

His case in point is Véronique Branquinho—a Belgian designer he describes as “critically under-studied and under-discussed.” Patrick’s visual research uncovered that she had created a third line, called Complice, which ran for three seasons, and that one of her collections was inspired by David Lynch’s Lost Highway, a detail, he notes, he has never seen discussed anywhere else.

When I started writing this feature, the word “democratization” floated through every conversation about the digital archives online or personal. I still have both enthusiasm and sheer suspicion, sometimes within the same breath. All three voices here engage with it carefully. They are acknowledging the genuine need for expansion of access while noting what gets lost when barriers to entry fall.

Hill frames it as a structural trade-off: “I think democratization, like all other movements, has both its benefits and drawbacks. The obvious point to be made here is that giving more people access to information, skills, education, etc., is going to raise the floor, whatever the context may be. But I do think that one of the growing pains that surfaces from this process is that the ‘barrier for entry’ is lowered. Naturally, what follows is a lessening in the overall quality of work, and more importantly, a lower threshold for what is considered to be ‘good’ or ‘meaningful’ art.”

Patrick notes that the crisis marks a specific failure of context, an ecosystem in which images circulate with increasing velocity and decreasing meaning.“The bad is that anyone has a platform, there is little barrier to perceived authority, and even less so to the usage of materials like scans and images. One of the most frustrating things about the current fashion media and ‘archival’ ecosystem is the constant regurgitation of images with less and less context and meaning. People use them advantageously to astroturf their commercial and marketing ambitions, rather than contribute something new and important to our understanding of culture and history.”

Hill speaks of designers using Archive PDF as a reference tool, of university professors recommending it to students. The archive, in this framing, is not a mausoleum but a working library. It’s the satisfaction of showing how fashion’s history is not a series of isolated genius moments, but a web of mutual influence and shared cultural air. “I think we tend to treat designers, artists, or directors as monolithic figures of genius that exist in these clandestine vacuums. But in reality, so many ideas are in motion all at once, and getting to make those connections and share them with other people is very rewarding,” he notes.

That, perhaps, is the clearest statement of what the new archivists are building, not just repositories we all love to browse, but vivid arguments. Arguments that fashion history is more tangled, more surprising, and more worth knowing than any single trend cycle allow. That somewhere in the bottom of a bin, in the back of a magazine, or a fashion catalogue, there is a fashion treasure worth finding.

You just have to be looking for it.

.

Anu Lingala, unbelievable as it may seem, is the reason I find myself reconciling with trend reports. I open Substack from the comfort of my home and enjoy her work, translating today’s cultural zeitgeist into insightful commercial strategy for me and many others — all from the runway to the boardroom. Not surprisingly, Anu has held senior trend and cultural strategy roles at mega brands like Nordstrom and Mejuri, and her work spans fashion, beauty, luxury, and tech. In her interview for The StyleTitle, we spoke about the difference between a trend and what’s “trending(my favorite debate as of recently), why chasing micro-trends is a losing game, and what brands get completely wrong about social media. She knows.

For people who haven’t come across your work before, how do you describe what you do?

At a high level, I research trends and extract cultural insights that I translate into either brand strategy or creative inspiration. My expertise is primarily with fashion, beauty, and luxury lifestyle brands, but I’ve also worked across food and beverage, tech, and financial services.

The core of my work is applying a strategic approach to trend research and forecasting — using that information to identify commercial opportunities to grow cultural relevance for a range of companies.

And what does that look like inside a company, day to day?

When I work in-house, like at Nordstrom or Mejuri, I’ve taken on head of cultural strategy or head of trends roles. In those positions, I essentially design and implement a trend strategy workflow within the company.

I’d start with a big annual cultural trends report and run a workshop with key leaders and stakeholders — at Mejuri, that meant the chief brand officer, the CEO, and the president; at Nordstrom, it was SVP-level heads of creative merchandising and creative marketing. Together, we’d build out a commercial and marketing calendar for the year, informed by what was happening in culture.

At Nordstrom in 2024, the theme we landed on was discovery. Q1 became “discover yourself,” Q2 became “discover the world” — with a more outdoorsy, summer-outside energy. That one cultural thread cascaded down into merchandising, marketing, and even product design and collaborations.

From the theme, I’d develop aesthetic and design trend direction for the product teams — buying, merchandising, design — and then provide creative strategy for the marketing teams. So by the time the holiday campaign was being built, it had a clear narrative thread running all the way back to the trend direction from eighteen months earlier. Everything was connected. That’s the real benefit of having a centralized cultural function: the storytelling is clearer.

Several people I’ve spoken to have told me fashion is now completely oversaturated with trends and micro-trends. How do you cut through that? How do you know what actually matters?

This has been a genuine problem since around 2021, when TikTok fashion trends really took off — all the “cores,” all the aesthetic labels. That’s actually part of why I was brought back to Nordstrom. By 2021, my former boss reached out and said: I think we need to change the way we work with trends.

One of the projects I worked on was a deep dive into Gen Z and youth culture. And one of the conclusions I came to — which feels obvious now but wasn’t at the time — was that TikTok trends don’t operate the same way traditional fashion trends do. They’re not a cycle. They’re a web.

Young people weren’t moving linearly from cottagecore to tomato girl. All of those aesthetics were coexisting simultaneously. People were playing, experimenting, and choosing based on their mood, the occasion, and the season. It was about multiplicity, not a singular trend cycle.

That insight is what made it important to step back and ask: what is actually driving this behaviour in culture? The discovery concept came directly from that — the desire to experiment, play, and explore, rather than follow one definitive look.

And then, of course, quiet luxury came along and wiped the slate clean for a moment. But even that was temporary.

The deeper point is this: trying to identify the next aesthetic is increasingly a logical fallacy. Fashion doesn’t work like that anymore because culture doesn’t work like that anymore. We no longer have a single monoculture that everyone is following. Everything has been fragmented and nichified. So the best thing a brand can do is pay close attention to who their customer actually is, which corner of culture they’re paying attention to, and what’s happening there.

And when you’re talking to a brand the size of Nordstrom — where you have hundreds of brands speaking to completely different customers — how do you make that workable?

That’s where I developed what I call an aesthetic spaces framework. Rather than tracking an endless web of micro-aesthetics, I simplified everything into four spaces: minimal, maximal, classic, and romantic.

The most interesting work — and the most interesting designers — tend to happen at the intersections of those spaces. Classic and maximal, minimal and romantic. But the framework allows you to map different customers, track which trends belong to which space, and make sure you’re not just following the biggest cultural moment at the expense of your other customers.

For a single brand, it’s about honing in on the cultural world of your specific customer. For a large brand like Nordstrom, it’s about tracking three or four customer personas and finding the common thread that connects them, which that year was discovery.

Here’s a question I’ve been sitting with for a while: can a brand actually use trend forecasting if it’s not on social media?

Absolutely. Most of my work has nothing to do with what’s going viral on social. Trends — real trends — should inform your product pipeline, your merchandising, your partnerships, your activations, your events, your out-of-home campaigns. Whatever channels you’re actually in.

But this brings me to something I feel strongly about: there’s a fundamental misunderstanding around the word trend that’s developed in recent years.

A trend and something that is “trending” are two completely different things. The word trending became popularized via Twitter, but it was TikTok’s visual format that caused people to start conflating the two. “Tomato girl is trending” became “tomato girl is a trend.” But in my view, tomato girl is not a trend. It’s a meme. It doesn’t influence behaviour or desire at any meaningful depth.

A real trend is rooted in things driving societal or technological change. It’s about how consumers are behaviourally responding to those shifts — changing desires, changing habits. It’s a much bigger, much deeper thing. And understanding that distinction is essential for any brand, on social or off it.

You mentioned Bottega Veneta earlier — the brand that famously deleted its Instagram. A lot of people said it would never work. And then it did.

It’s been in the back of my mind for a long time. I actually tried — maybe not hard enough, because I knew the answer I’d get — but I suggested several times at Mejuri: what if we just didn’t do social media?

There are a few brands doing something interesting in this space. Dorsey, a jewelry brand, has an Instagram page, but the last time I checked, they don’t really update it. It functions more like a landing page. Which, honestly, is exactly what I was proposing.

Instagram now functions the way a website used to. When someone hears about your brand, they don’t Google you first — they search you on Instagram because they want to see the visual mood. They look at your first nine images. Maybe they scroll for five seconds. That’s it. So what you need is something there that represents you beautifully. Not a content treadmill.

Some brands have figured this out. They have a clean grid, maybe nine to thirty campaign images, updated monthly or quarterly for a new season or launch, and they leave it. That’s the smartest move you can make. Because that’s actually what the customer wants: to arrive at your page and immediately understand the vibe.

But so many brands are still grinding out organic content daily.

And that’s the problem. A lot of brands that launched in the last decade — the DTC wave, the glossy-era brands — are still approaching organic social the way they did in 2015 or 2016, and they’re frustrated by the numbers. But that’s because people are not using these platforms the same way anymore.

If you want to reach, you need paid. Sponsored posts, influencer collaborations, ads — none of that lives on your organic page. That’s separate. Bottega has no social presence, and yet they’re all over my Instagram, because people post about their runway shows, their events, their drops. The brand presence is there; it’s just coming through other people.

The real issue is that a lot of social media managers are being held to engagement metrics that are no longer realistic or even meaningful. It’s not their fault — the platform has fundamentally changed. But the metric hasn’t caught up.

So where should brands actually be putting that energy and budget?

Into the things that will generate content on their behalf. Events people actually want to post about. Influencer partnerships. Creative activations. If you put your money into creating organic social content that the algorithm buries anyway, you’re wasting it. If you put that same money into an experience people want to share, they become your content engine.

And as a broader principle: you don’t have to be everywhere. Trying to be on every platform just means you’re mediocre on all of them instead of genuinely strong on one or two. Be honest about where your brand’s energy naturally fits, and invest heavily there. If you’re Duolingo and you’ve cracked TikTok, double down. If you haven’t, don’t chase it. Find where you’re actually strong.

We used to anticipate fashion month. Curate outfits we would wear, pray to receive invitations from the houses we are infatuated with, and plan to meet up with friends we haven’t seen in a while. But this playful euphoria is long gone.

So, another fashion month ended. The clothes were barely dry on the racks before the verdict arrived: AW26 was the season the industry stopped pretending and started performing. Not loudly as fashion rarely announces its own unmasking, but hidden in the accumulating weight of billionaires on runways, creative directors recycling themselves like musical chairs (again!), and a newfound masked-as-nostalgia lack of ideas sweeping the runways.

But no, the machine had not broken down. It had simply revealed what it was always running on -power. I asked two of the sharpest critical voices working today — Kyle Raymont Fitzpatrick and J’Nae Phillips — to dissect what they saw, what disturbed them, and what, against all odds, enchanted them with its beauty.

What was the overall mood or defining characteristic of the AW26 season?

KYLE RAYMOND FITZPATRICK

The biggest thing to me was that this was the season where many saw the mask of fashion slip — that its true value systems in their current state, money above art, were revealed. This was most obvious in the on-the-sidelines and on-the-runway presence of billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg at Prada was there to sweeten a business deal; Bryan Johnson walking for Matières Fécales illustrated that fashion’s commentary is more performance than statement. Other than that, it mostly felt that the machine is just as bored as we are, given that Jonathan Anderson repeats his own repertoire as Loewe tries to repeat his.

J’NAE PHILLIPS

The AW26 season didn’t arrive with the usual promise of a seismic shift. Instead, it unfolded like a slow exhale — an industry-wide recalibration less concerned with inventing the future and more invested in making sense of the present. Across New York, London, Milan, and Paris, collections suggested a collective mood: fashion is no longer chasing novelty at all costs, but interrogating its own habits, contradictions, and fatigue.

One of the most striking undercurrents was fashion’s renewed fixation on nature. Not as a superficial sustainability gesture, but as a kind of cultural coping mechanism. Runways staged with moss-covered neo-landscapes, raw textures, and organic irregularity hinted at a deeper longing to disconnect from the hyper-digital reality that has dominated the past decade.

Did power dressing make a comeback, and if so, how has it evolved?

KYLE RAYMOND FITZPATRICK

Absolutely — which is more to the suit continuing to reign supreme, as certain designers like Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford seek to question and challenge what their house’s suits actually are. These two are shining examples of what’s working. Both of them, for the second time around, have cranked up imagination and sex appeal in ways that were both fun and fancy, and that seek to evolve, which few were considering. I get why the Chanel Shopping Bag is having such a moment.

J’NAE PHILLIPS

Power dressing did return, though its tone has noticeably shifted. Tailoring was sharper, shoulders more pronounced, the language of authority unmistakable. Yet this was not the aggressive, high-gloss dominance of past eras — it felt hesitant. At Chanel, the suit appeared relaxed, often paired with understated basics that diluted its formality. This was power reframed for a post-girlboss world: less about projection, more about negotiation. Authority, in AW26, is something to be worn lightly, even sceptically.

Is the long-standing tension between minimalism and maximalism still defining fashion?

KYLE RAYMOND FITZPATRICK

It feels like minimalism has won because, even despite wowing moments and shows like Sarah Burton’s Givenchy collection, few were considering anything bolder than greyscale. It felt like we lost the pattern completely — textures remained, but only delivered in sunny creams through midnight blacks. Sure, there were pops of colour: the neon pink ensembles at Matières Fécales, Chanel’s yellow animal tweeds, the fiery columns at Proenza Schouler — but there’s a lack of attraction to the bold. A conservative touch has swept the floor. Loewe and Givenchy were somehow the exceptions, the latter exceptional, the former I continue to hold my breath for.

J’NAE PHILLIPS

The most defining aesthetic tension of the season was actually the collapse of the binary between the two. For years, these opposing philosophies dictated fashion’s rhythm, each rising in reaction to the other. Now they appear to be coexisting — sometimes uneasily, often within the same look. At Jil Sander, restraint and purity remained intact; elsewhere, designers embraced embellishment and theatrical excess, as at Saint Laurent. Clean silhouettes were disrupted by unexpected textures; quiet luxury was accessorised into something louder. The result reflects a broader cultural reality: identity is no longer singular, and fashion is finally catching up.

How did heritage brands approach their collections and the season’s changes in creative direction?

KYLE RAYMOND FITZPATRICK

It felt like every brand settled into their grooves — which was reassuring, even if I wish all of these designers had the licence to do their own thing, free of house rules. But that’s not how the industry or world works. Just ask John Galliano. The winner was Sarah Burton, and the biggest loser — which breaks my heart, less for the designer and more for the brand — was Pier Paolo Piccioli’s hijacked Balenciaga show, which amounted to some very depressing Euphoria sponcon.

J’NAE PHILLIPS

Heritage brands seemed preoccupied with revisiting and refining their own histories rather than pursuing shock value. At Gucci, Fendi, and Marni, collections felt like acts of careful recalibration. In an age defined by reboots, remakes, and algorithmic nostalgia, originality is no longer about creating something entirely new — it’s about recontextualising what already exists with clarity and intent.

Were there any dominant trends or a single defining moment this season?

KYLE RAYMOND FITZPATRICK

Conservatism and succumbing to power while pretending to subvert it, but also a return of the woman, by women. Unsurprisingly, Rachel Scott’s double duty at Proenza Schouler and Diotima had a moment, which we can also say of Sarah Burton and perhaps even Grace Wales Bonner at Hermès. That was the most exciting thing, considering the last fashion month focused so much on the constriction of the female body. Let fashion be beautiful and kind, please. Give me a matriarchal industry, for the love of Pete.

J’NAE PHILLIPS

There were no dominant trends loud enough to eclipse the rest, no single defining moment. Instead, the season felt like a mosaic of subtle adjustments — designers refining their languages, brands stabilising their identities, the industry shifting its priorities. Romance resurfaced, though in a distinctly pragmatic form. Lace, soft tailoring, and historical references echoing Victoriana appeared not as escapist fantasy but as structured, wearable propositions. At Dior and Givenchy, even traditionally decorative elements like peplums were reworked with discipline. This was beauty with boundaries. Even romance, it seems, has become strategic.

What does AW26 ultimately say about where fashion is heading?

KYLE RAYMOND FITZPATRICK

The industry is an accessory to power at this point, and that’s where the money is — that will not change. We’ll see more billionaire types entering the conversation as they define what brands do and don’t do. See: this year’s Met Gala. The traditional luxury houses aren’t leading the conversation anymore. The outsider — Rachel Scott, Eckhaus Latta, even Duran Lantink — continues to show where the edge of our imagination can be. Give me humour. Give me joy. And don’t put Clavicular on another goddamned runway.

J’NAE PHILLIPS

What ultimately distinguishes AW26 is its refusal to declare a singular narrative. The season felt like a post-hype phase: it’s not that creativity has diminished, but that it has become more self-aware. The industry understands its cycles, its excesses, and its contradictions more clearly than ever before. Innovation has moved behind the scenes — into systems, structures, and ways of working — rather than remaining purely aesthetic. As a result, it no longer needs to shout. AW26 was not about spectacle for its own sake, but about layering meaning.

What does it mean to dismantle something? Not to destroy it — but to take it apart carefully, to understand how it was built, and to ask who it was built for. That was the spirit behind Dismantle*, the online cultural studies magazine co-founded by Sara Bernstein and Elise Chatelain. Dismantle seized public attention but creatively gave birth to Dismantle Culture and Media, providing cultural research and people-centered stories.

A former academic turned independent critic, Sara currently writes about fashion, hotels-yes, hotels!- and everyday culture through the lens of power, making visible the systems that prefer to lurk hidden behind the images. We sat down to talk about leaving the ivory tower, the politics of internet trends, and why she is skeptical of the Devil Wears Prada trickle-down theory of fashion

Your background is academic. What made you leave that world and co-found an online magazine instead?

I had a really great experience in my PhD program and my master’s degree — it expanded my way of thinking and my approach to fashion in ways I’m genuinely grateful for. But when I finished graduate school, I felt this nagging sense of a lost opportunity. Academic writing is, at its core, an echo chamber. A very specific language, circulating among people who already share the same perspective and background.

What’s different about fashion, compared to other academic subjects, is that everybody wears clothes. It’s one of the very few things that cuts across class, nation, gender, race — all of it. We all wear clothes. We all navigate this strange thing that is simultaneously physical, a social language, and a position within a whole socioeconomic system. So it seemed like a real shame not to share those ideas more broadly, with the people who are already, inevitably, thinking about this.

And Alyse and I were both committed to cultural studies as a framework, as a way of thinking about power and dismantling unequal systems. That’s actually where the name came from. Historically, cultural studies also began as something that bridged the academic ivory tower with working-class life, adult education, and extension programs. We were disillusioned with the academy, but we didn’t want to abandon the discipline. We’re devoted cultural studies scholars who aren’t academics, if that makes sense.

Can cultural studies actually dismantle unequal systems, or is that aspirational?

Only people can do that. Cultural studies is a toolbox — a really useful one for understanding how power has worked historically and how it operates now. Because power works best when you either don’t notice it, or when it feels so immovable that there’s nothing to be done.

What cultural studies does is give us a language for revealing things that prefer to stay invisible. Things that function best when no one examines them.

That makes me think of internet fashion trends — the ones we dismiss as frivolous, but that are actually saying something much deeper. The mob wife aesthetic, the clean girl trend...

Completely. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Longreads about the then-pervasive trend of earth tones, mushroom hues, fungi-inspired everything. To me, that was a perfect late-pandemic response — people not quite ready to re-emerge, still processing, still composting, in a sense. Fashion sits in this extraordinary space of being simultaneously personal, social, and political all at once.

That’s also partly why I’m more interested in what people are actually wearing out in the world than in what high-end designers are doing. I’m skeptical of the Devil Wears Prada trickle-down theory of fashion. I don’t think that’s really how it works. I’m more interested in what percolates up. In the micro-cultures that people build around mass fashion, the local translations they make.

So designers are responding to the culture as much as shaping it?

Yes — and to each other. People who work for large design houses with significant media and advertising influence are obviously going to shape what we see. But they’re also living in the same world, responding to the same conditions. I wonder, honestly, whether the gap between high fashion and what people are actually wearing and thinking about is wider now than it’s been before. The polarization of the moment makes me think so.

Which brings up sustainability and ethics. There was a real cultural conversation building around the fashion industry — exploitation, waste, environmental impact — and it seems to have quieted.

I feel that too. A couple of years ago, that conversation was genuinely gaining momentum. Now I see more of what I’d call good old-fashioned luxury influencer content dominating. We’re doing a project on hotels right now — applying many of the same cultural studies methods to hospitality — and one thing we keep seeing is that large hotels are converting more of their portfolios to luxury. There’s this K-shaped economy where wealthy consumers are thriving and spending, and everyone else is being quietly priced out. High-end brands are chasing the top of that curve. And the culture follows.

That aspirational pull is hard to resist, even when we’re aware of it.

It is. I understand why people want that aspirational fantasy — the beautiful images, the idea that you could, theoretically, go to the Amalfi Coast or buy the Chanel. It feels good, even as a thought. But it’s a much harder sell to say: what if instead of consuming aspirational imagery, we talked about mutual aid, or building community, or the fashion that already exists around us?

That’s always been part of my project — thinking about how fashion can work as a form of connection, as a way of building coalitions and bridges, rather than as an individual quest to have the best stuff.

I don't know about you, but I love big, labyrinthic department stores. The bigger and more chaotic, the better. I love getting lost in their departments, browsing anything from underwear to perfumes, anything that catches and caresses my eye. Sometimes I even shop -but that’s not the original aim.

I go there for the show. the sensory experience of seeing, touching, and feeling. And I am certain that many readers share the same guilty feeling or aimlessly wandering inside the ocular experience that is a department store, be it Saks or Harrods. And still, if we read the news, the collapse of major department stores and multi-brand luxury retailers has become one of the defining stories of modern retail. It’s time to ask why.

The statistics are telling: in January 2026, Saks Global, the parent company behind Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after an unsustainable debt pile crushed its business.: It was not an isolated incident. Saks’ filing was the latest and largest in a string of bankruptcies by luxury retailers that have left the industry reeling and forced some small brands to shut down

MatchesFashion ceased operations in March 2024, while South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang acquired Farfetch.Then came the SSENSE bomb. Once a four-billion-dollar-valued powerhouse of indie designer fashion and disruptive e-commerce, SSENSE filed for creditor protection in August 2025, joining that same wave of luxury platforms that collapsed under the weight of tightening margins, legal pressures, and retail system shifts. As one analyst put it, the Saks bankruptcy was not really about luxury's decline — it was about the department store model struggling overall.

According to the Fashion Law, ” Some companies proceed directly to Chapter 7 liquidation and disappear altogether. Others use Chapter 11 to engineer going-concern sales or emerge leaner, only to refile years later under similar pressures. Parallel dynamics are visible in the U.K., where administration has served as both a rescue mechanism and a pathway to asset realization amid persistent strain on the retail sector.” Rather dystopian sounding for someone like me who loves to fake buying super expensive clothes just to get the feel of the fabric on me inside dressing rooms.

I don’t get it, but it seems that what was once a symbol of aspiration and cultural sophistication is now, in many cases, a cautionary tale about hubris, overexpansion, and a failure to adapt to the bright, now digital world. It seems the question is no longer whether these institutions are in trouble, but why, and whether anything can survive the wreckage.

For the insiders, it’s no secret that the structural vulnerabilities of these businesses run deep. Ben Hanson, a fashion technology specialist and the EIC of The Interline, points to a crisis of identity at the heart of the problem. “Department stores and multi-brand retailers, offline and on, have had one consistent currency for centuries: curation. The promise made by a department store that focuses on luxury and premium products is that the assortment you will find, as a consumer, has been editorially selected based on taste, domain expertise, and a keen understanding of who is going to come walking through the physical or virtual doors.”

The problem, Hanson argues, is that this promise is no longer exclusive. “The common challenge in the last decade, but in the last couple of years in particular, has been that every other channel is also making the same promise. Marketplaces like Amazon ‘know’ you in a very crude but effective way, and they blend it with a level of convenience and value that hides the fact that blunt category/attribute recommendations are not genuine personalisation.”

That’s why he believes brand-owned online and physical stores have now been pretty universally retooled to do a much better job of narrative in their own focused lanes, doing collections and assortments much more effectively merchandised and story-told. I’d agree that megabrands are guilty as charged.

Eugene Rabkin is a fashion critic and the creator of The StyleZeitgeist, and has written extensively about similar fashion phenomena. And perhaps that’s why he is more blunt about the structural failures at play. On the burning question of whether this is a debt problem, a business model problem, or both, he is direct: “I think the Saks Global problem is specific to the malaise of predatory private equity practices.

“Most department stores, though, he continues, have over-expanded, and they don’t offer anything exciting to a consumer. If you go to the American periphery, the branches of major department stores are bleak spaces with basic merchandise. There is nothing elevated about them. The problem in retail is always the same – overexpansion driven by hubris.”

But I want to look beyond the balance sheet(which I must admit i dont often get) and understand the cultural and psychological dimensions of this decline. Rabkin places today’s failures in a longer arc of gradual deterioration. “If you have studied the history of department stores as I have over the past couple of years, you would know that today’s department stores, even many of the so-called luxury ones, are pitiful when compared to the golden age of department stores that had stunning interiors, excellent merchandise, cultural programming, and incredible service.

Today, most department stores offer no point of view. They are simply transactional places that are, by and large, absolutely banal. This does not mean that the rich don’t shop there. I think the current luxury retail downturn cuts across all categories of luxury retail, including department stores.”

In a retail world that is becoming rapidly digital (and I am also equally guilty of it), this raises the question of what the multi-brand retailer can still offer.

Hanson asks that, but sees a narrow window. “In that context, what does the multi-brand retailer have to offer? My steel man argument would be that they can potentially do clienteling and personal shopping to a level that only the top-flight luxury labels can manage on their own, but my straw man would say that this is an edge that’s going to be eroded by AI in pretty short order. In the medium term, I do believe that editorial curation is going to be a sought-after skillset and something that luxury shoppers, especially, begin to reprioritise the human touch and to seek out authenticity.”

The problem still is that department stores and multi-brand retailers are heavily burdened with existing inventory, that is, excess product stored, and this limits their ability to survive.

“They can try to shift that inventory,” notes Hanson, “and slim down their assortments quickly, but this kind of discounting also dilutes the value of the stock and the brand, and turns them into something closer to outlets by another name.”

The question of what emerges from these bankruptcies is perhaps the most pressing of all: who’s going to survive? Hanson is cautious: “I suspect that some multi-brand retailers will survive, and that they will be narrative and curation-driven to an extent that few, if any, currently are. For the rest, it’s a much trickier proposition and a much more precarious outlook.”

Rabkin, for his part, sees glimmers of a different model already taking shape. “The only source of excitement in luxury retail I am seeing today is from well-curated multibrand shops, some of which are pretty big, but not nearly as vast as department stores. It is in such shops that a customer does not feel utterly overwhelmed by meaningless choice.

Department stores can do this, but they will need to embrace a curatorial mentality, and they will have to invest in their staff. A salesperson used to be a profession, now it’s become a job for college kids, and that’s not how luxury retail should operate.”I cannot help but agree.

It takes a unique type of scholar to conceive, let alone fully write, a book that is an homage to the innumerable efforts at staving off the ineluctable demise of all digital memories. Specifically, Ruby Thelot’s work has focused on Checkpoints, an emergent behavior which occurred in the comment section of a YouTube video from 2012 to 2021, where users, when algorithmically recommended the video, would write a “checkpoint”: a personal life update.

He has also ventured into perhaps the most talked-about trait in the meta-internet: taste. His collection “A Few Essays on Taste” covers fashion, trends, and culture. And in his recent essay for SSENSE, he calmly calls looksmaxxing for what it is, simply a movement that radically proposes the virtual is not enough; we must actually look like our avatars.

But then again, Ruby Thelot isn’t your typical scholar. He is an artist and cyberethnographer based in New York City whose work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology, and the implications of being online. He writes about virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence.

Moreover, Ruby is an adjunct professor of Design, Media, and Technology at New York University and a keynote speaker who has given talks to industry leaders, executives, and academics on technology, artificial intelligence, new media, and the metaverse. And it is this unexpected combination of seemingly unrelated topics, finally finding their place together in his essays, that explains the digital world that made me want to interview him in the first place. I was honored he accepted. We discussed social media, taste (of course), and why, in his own world theory, memory is the radical act we have left.

To what extent do you think social media doesn’t just reflect taste, but actually actively produces it? Is there such a thing as a preference that forms outside of collective validation?

The answer is yes, of course. Whether that be the act of going by yourself to visit a museum or listening to music you haven’t been recommended, I think all these things can help you form your own sense of taste and appreciation outside of collective validation.

What I’d like to talk about specifically in that context is randomness. I think randomness is actually a response to algorithmic recommendation. To form your preference outside of collective validation, often this means going to a record store, Metrograph, or any place where you engage with culture, and doing the thing that another person has selected to put there for some reason. The clerk at the record store who placed that record there, or the unique taste of a highly specialized individual, like a film programmer in the case of Metrograph or a film festival, or a museum curator.

Do you see algorithmic trend cycles as a form of crowd behavior closer to contagion than choice? If so, what makes digital crowds different from historical ones?

I don’t think there’s anything particularly different about digital crowds. I like to talk about what I call mass psychogenic events. These are disseminated events, much like the dance craze of the 15th or 16th century — la danse macabre, the dance of death — when people could not stop dancing and it became a social contagion in the medieval era.

The only thing the digital affords is distribution. It is distribution accelerated by digital technology. But for the most part, social contagion has been happening throughout history. If you look at one of my works, Why Aliens Love America, I talk about the alien phenomenon as another form of mass psychogenic event, another form of social contagion — and that was in the 1960s, before much of this digital distribution existed.

So it has an additional affordance in distribution, but this has been happening for a long time.

Fashion has always involved imitation, but do you think something fundamentally changed once imitation became quantified through likes, views, and virality?

This is one of my main concepts. I talk about it in my essay, The Content Creator as a Folk Artist. There has always been mimesis, the Greek term for imitation, and it is fundamental to human sociality. We see what other people are doing, and then we copy. In the words of Hannibal Lecter: what does he do, this man you seek, Clarice? He covets. This triangular desire, as expressed by René Girard, is very important here.

Now, what likes, views, and virality do is take a cultural object — an image, a piece of clothing — and add to it a dimension that was previously hidden. That dimension is the social response. What this implies is that every image now, and fashion specifically, is a visual medium that exists not only as a standalone image, but as what Nathan Jurgenson called a social photograph. The social photograph is the image plus likes, views, and so on — the total whole of the digital object, which includes the image along with its social reception.

This pushes the image into a space where it now has two phenomenologies, two forces exerted onto it. The first is audience capture, where the creator — the artist, the folk artist — is responsive to the metrics they see on the platform. The second is algorithmic capture: the way in which the creator is influenced by how the algorithms respond to the work, whether or not it gets shown in the first place. These two forces are exerted on fashion.

If mass psychosis is characterized by a loss of shared reality, what would reality in fashion even look like right now? Craft, longevity, silence, loneliness?

It is the opposite, if you think about it. Mass psychosis is characterized by the advent of a new shared reality — we can no longer stop dancing, but we’re all dancing together. Similarly, when I talk about aliens as a mass psychogenic event, suddenly we share this alternative reality whereby these entities, these creatures, exist.

It is not about the loss of a shared reality; it’s about the fracturing of reality. But these could be fairly large communities in and of themselves, each sharing different realities. And the question I would push back with is: was there ever a shared reality in the first place? Or is the shared reality a chimera? Was it an imagined state, almost like Rousseau’s state of nature? Is it a confabulation of the nostalgic mind to believe there was such a thing as a shared reality? That’s the question I would ask you.

Is the speed of trend turnover dulling our capacity to develop taste over time?

It only does if you care about trends. If you’re going to see your fabric person, your tailor, your alterations person down the street — shout out Antoinette in Ridgewood — then I don’t know that any of this actually matters. You can opt out. You can choose to refuse. This is very important to me. It does not matter how fast trends move if you don’t engage with them.

Your role as a person immersed in culture, be it producing, consuming, or commenting on it, is to be discerning. To choose what you want, what you want to do, and what you don’t. Goblincore, cottagecore, Russian mob wife, quiet luxury, all of these things. It doesn’t matter. What do you want to wear? When do you feel sexy? When do you feel hot? When do you feel powerful? What kind of shoulders make you walk into a room and feel like you own it? What sweater makes you feel like the coziest bug? That’s all that matters in the end.

When you’re touching that sweater in the store, when you put on that tight tank top, when you slide on loose-fitting jeans — who is that girl? Who is that man? That is your taste. The person you’re trying to become, the fabrics you love, the designs that make you go — that’s how you develop your taste. The trends are on screens. Go put on a pair of pants and tell me if your ass looks good in them. That’s what I care about.

In July 2022, Bernard Arnault filed a four-page document with France’s financial markets regulator, the AMF, which received almost no coverage outside the specialist business press. The document described a restructuring of Agache, the main holding company of the Arnault family — the vehicle through which the family control 48% of LVMH’s capital and 64% of its voting rights, and therefore 75 of the world’s most powerful luxury brands. So far, it doesn’t sound interesting enough to be in a Substack blog.

And yet. The restructuring gave each of Arnault’s five children an equal 20% stake in the holding company, but crucially, the document also stipulated that no one could sell their shares for thirty years — until 2052 — without the unanimous agreement of all five siblings. And after that thirty-year lock, the shares could only pass to direct descendants of Bernard Arnault. From what I’ve found, a regulatory filing also confirmed, in dry legal language, that no partner in the company can come from outside one of the five bloodlines.

In short, the Arnault family is writing a legal guarantee that the world’s largest luxury empire will remain theirs, for at least three generations to come.

This is not a random move, though.

Across the four families that control the global luxury fashion industry, the same pattern repeats with striking consistency: founding events tied to old-money European social networks, complex legal structures deliberately engineered to prevent outside acquisition, and next-generation members positioned across multiple houses simultaneously surpassing other more qualified candidates.

Fashion isn’t simply financially gatekept, it’s being governed by members of the very same dynasties in full exluding every outside entry. Here, we will try to trace how their genealogy is merged into their acquisition of power, and perhaps map the specific mechanisms by which they are ensuring that power does not leave the family.

This is not a story about doing business in high echelons. It is a story about blood.

Dynasty I · The Arnaults

The Arnault case is the most transparent of the four dynasties because LVMH is publicly traded and therefore subject to disclosure requirements. I give them that. What those disclosures reveal, though, is extraordinary: Bernard Arnault brought his children into LVMH offices as small children, had them accompany him on Saturday morning store tours across Paris from a young age, and referred to their upbringing as an “MBA since birth.” He assigned each child a specific mentor from among LVMH’s senior non-family managers — essentially an apprenticeship within the empire — before placing them in leadership roles at individual houses.

The most significant legal detail in the Arnault structure is the 2052 lockup, openly securing that the shares cannot leave the bloodline. Arnault’s legal advisers have effectively written a corporate document that very much reminds the legal mechanism that prevented English landed families from selling off their estates, ensuring estates passed intact to the heir. Would you expect to find such solid feudal logic in a French regulatory filing? But hey, it’s fashion, and those practices are THE NORM among the four bloodlines.

Dynasty II · The Pinaults

Fasten your belts because the Pinault dynasty has the most dramatic origin story of the four. It reads like a bad French mélodrame: François Pinault left school at sixteen with no qualifications and entered his family’s timber trade in rural Brittany. He took the company public in 1988, pivoted systematically to luxury in the late 1990s, and stayed tuned, acquiring Christie’s, the world’s most prestigious auction house, in 1998 for $1.2 billion. In short, he tapped what has always been the primary source for first-class money laundering. In 2003, he handed control to his son over dinner at a Paris restaurant. The Monday after that dinner, François walked into his father’s office to find new furniture and his father sitting at the desk.

The Pinault succession mechanism is the most personally dramatized of the four dynasties, but, if we stay focused on the underlying mechanism, we will find that the outcome is identical: the business stays in the bloodline. What makes the Pinault case structurally interesting is the Artémis holding company’s portfolio. Beyond Kering’s fashion brands, Artémis owns Christie’s (art market), Château Latour (Bordeaux first-growth wine), Stade Rennais FC (football), and a majority stake in CAA, aka the world’s largest talent agency, representing the most powerful names in Hollywood, music, and sports. Over time, the Pinaults have built, through a single generation, a holding structure that spans luxury fashion, art, wine, sport, and entertainment. We need to understand here that this is not simply a fashion company but rather a culture-making machine, an empire over taste itself.

Dynasty III · The Wertheimers

The Wertheimer case is the most extraordinary of the four dynasties, and surprisingly, the least discussed. Alain Wertheimer once told the New York Times, “We never talk. It’s about Coco Chanel. It’s about Karl. It’s about everyone who works and creates at Chanel. It’s not about the Wertheimers.” This quote epitomized their principle not to appear in the front scene, and they have kept it with remarkable discipline. In over a century of ownership, the brothers have given almost no interviews and have never appeared publicly on behalf of the house. And when they attend Chanel shows, they drive themselves in an unmarked car and sit in the third or fourth row. The article’s headline photo has managed to catch one of them sitting front row with their partners in crime.

Their story isn’t quiet, though: The Wertheimer family’s relationship with Chanel began at the Longchamp race course in 1922. Their grandfather, Ernest, had already invested in Bourjois cosmetics; they had the logistical infrastructure Coco Chanel needed, and their 70% stake in Parfums Chanel was acquired for the price of financing its production and distribution. Sounds legitimate enough.

And this is where the drama starts: When Nazi occupation regulations mandated that Jewish-owned property be transferred to French-Aryan hands, Coco Chanel attempted twice to use those regulations to seize the company from the Wertheimers. She even wrote to German officials arguing that Parfums Chanel was Jewish property that had been “abandoned” by its owners and should legally be hers. Hmmm. The Wertheimers, being the business minds they were, anticipated this and had already quietly transferred control to an Aryan industrialist, Félix Amiot, who held the stake in trust. After the war, Amiot returned it. The Wertheimers won, again.

The Wertheimer family’s power is therefore structured in their social foresight, legal counsel, and personal connections to execute a complex protective maneuver in a war zone while safely fleeing to another continent. The family had been masterfully navigating elite social structures for generations, doing what else? business. It’s by no coincidence that Pierre Wertheimer’s wife was a great-granddaughter of the founder of Lazard, one of France’s most powerful private banking dynasties. Some cash in the family never hurt anyone.

Today, the family’s total fortune is estimated at approximately $115 billion. Chanel remains entirely private. Their holding structure, Mousse Investments Limited, is domiciled in the money laundering paradise, the Cayman Islands, and, mind you, does not publish financials. After all, it’s their own business, not ours.

Dynasty IV · The Dumas-Hermès Family

Nine members of the Hermès family currently work at the company, including Bertrand Puech (uncle), Etienne Puech (watch division), Amélie Puech (saddle division), Guillaume de Seynes (EVP), Julie Guerrand (corporate development), Pascale Mussard (petit h division), and Maria Schaeffer (special orders). Additionally, over 100 family members own shares through the H51 holding structure.

Hermès is the oldest dynasty in this investigation by nearly a century, and perhaps because of that, its so-called succession story is the most elaborately documented. In juxtaposition to the other three families, it is publicly celebrated rather than carefully concealed. The house’s official history traces six generations with pride, and Axel Dumas has even given interviews on the philosophy of dynastic stewardship, a move that would be impossible to imagine from the Wertheimers. But don’t be fooled by the change in image making-the structure beneath the rhetoric is identical to the others: family control, family succession, and legal architecture designed to prevent external acquisition.

The corporate structure at Hermès is called a Commandite par Actions — a limited partnership in which managing partners with operational control are exclusively family members, while public shareholders hold economic rights but no voting power. It’s no surprise then that analysts have described it as the “Fort Knox” of corporate governance, tough and focused. When Bernard Arnault secretly accumulated 22.6% of Hermès shares through equity derivatives between 2010 and 2014, he did it through a James Bond-like stealth acquisition that triggered a legal battle and regulatory investigation. As expected, the Hermès family rallied, used the H51 holding structure to concentrate their shares, and forced Arnault to divest. They won. How could he defy the bloodlines!

As for today? In late 2024, Axel Dumas told the Financial Times he did not want to “die in office” like his predecessors and was actively planning his own succession. CEO. Of course, the question is not whether a Dumas-Hermès will run the house next. It is which one?

Sources: All biographical and financial claims are sourced from public records, including Wikipedia, Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Forbes, Business of Fashion, WWD, Spear’s Magazine, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, SEC and AMF regulatory filings, Hermès Universal Registration Document 2024, and official family and company statements. Net worth figures are estimates from public indices and vary by source and date.

I like strategists when they actually have something to say. Like, not just frameworks, boring metrics, and positioning matrices. Can you offer t a genuine, all-inclusive philosophical point of view on the world, a vision of where culture is going and what role brands play in it? Then I like you.

Viktor Wendt is my kind of strategist. Working full-time at a design agency while running his own newsletter, Substanz, Viktor sits at an often uncomfortable but fascinating Deleuzian intersection: the brand insider who is also a culture obsessive fan, the person who builds the illusion and simultaneously sees through it. We caught up to talk about fads(think: Labubus), authenticity, Supreme, and why most brands are simply too afraid of silence.

How would you describe what you do?

I’m Viktor, a brand strategist currently working full-time at a design agency. In parallel, I write a newsletter called Substanz, where I explore the information overload we’re experiencing in our feeds and how culture is typically integrated into brand communication—something I’ve grown increasingly fatigued with.

I’m searching for what truly constitutes a good contribution to culture and exploring ways brands can contribute without it feeling forced. I want to see a genuine synergy where both brands and culture benefit. I approach this through the dual lens of being a brand strategist and someone who’s been deeply plugged into culture since my youth.

I came to it through various disciplines, especially fashion. I got into fashion via brands like Supreme, which were already known for their constant collaborations with photographers and artists. Through Supreme and the constellation of magazines and blogs in the streetwear world, I was introduced to multiple fields of culture. So it’s always been this interplay—being both a fan of culture and a brand strategist.

Which means you have a double vision of things. On one hand, you have to be critical as a consumer, and on the other hand, you have to be the one who’s creating the illusion, if I may say so.

It’s always a bit of a dilemma I have within myself as well. I love when brands create these big universes or these illusions and dreams—it’s absolutely one of the things that gets me excited the most. But recently, I feel like sometimes this dream has just turned into an illusion and gotten completely distracted from reality, where the brand’s communication is not really in touch with itself. Brands are losing their voice and getting a little bit fuzzy. I always switch between those two perspectives—what makes a good, cool brand?

Still, why do brands lose touch with their consumer base, aiming to create super wide worlds that don’t eventually make sense? Is it that they’re actually hopping on trends without critically thinking if they’re made for them, if those trends are actually doing something for them?

I think it’s partly rooted in the fact that brands want to be part of every conversation that’s out there. With the current feeds and the current speed of media, there are so many micro-trends that for some brands, it might not make sense to try to be part of every conversation because it’s just not true to your core brand identity.

I always feel like there are probably some people who believe you, but the very core of the consumers—the very important consumers—they’re not as easily fooled. They immediately recognize when you try to be liked by everybody and when you try to be part of every conversation. I think that’s mainly the reason why.

I think this is more prominent with mega brands. A niche brand is easier to pinpoint their audience somehow. But when you have a mega brand, like Hermès or Chanel, they do have a defined consumer base, but it’s really difficult to create that much content every day without feeling a bit alienating.

Hermès is pretty well-known for being very exclusive, just selling its stuff in very select stores. But for a new brand, it’s very important to have a very coherent brand core and maybe be niche in that sense, because I feel like you first have to have your own voice to dabble into all these different fields. If you start a brand, you have to have a kind of niche mindset if you want to be credible, especially with the hyper-fragmentation we have of all these different consumer groups.

Some trends aren’t even real. Something that lasts one week can’t even be a trend. We used to call it slob culture in previous conversations meaning something that keeps changing but doesn’t influence anything. Do you think brands actually contribute to this array of slob culture?

I think so. This reminds me of your conversation with W. David Marx—he writes a lot about this. I don’t know if it’s a term he coined, but he calls them fads. In one of his newsletters, he wrote that trends these days aren’t really trends—they don’t have any substance to them, they’re just fads. They’re not subcultural fashion cues rooted in context, subculture, or brand heritage. Instead, they’re just novelty—popular simply because they’re new content feeding the constant speed of information we crave. We need something new every day, every season.

Some fashion trends are exactly like this. He pointed to Labubu culture as the perfect example—no history, no context, just existing because it’s new and pretty. Brands contribute to this too by hopping onto these fads. Even though they’re extremely fleeting, brands end up diluting culture by giving visibility to trends that arguably aren’t even worth the attention. At the same time, they dilute their own brand identity. It’s a lose-lose situation.

My favorite question to brand strategists is: Okay, I agree with you, but a brand is a mechanism that is governed by finance and aims to make money. How can I trust that something that comes from it is genuine? We talk about brand identity and creating genuine culture, but how can I trust something that’s genuine when it comes from the money-making aspect?

That’s always the problem, right? As a fan of a brand, you can immediately tell whether something is genuine or not—sometimes it’s just a gut feeling. Of course, we all live in a hyper-capitalistic system, and everything a brand does ultimately has to make money. Very few brands have a degrowth aspect tied to their core at this point. Most are just within the system, meant to grow and sell in the short, mid, and long term. But you always have to judge it case by case—does it make sense for the brand? Does it align with the identity I have of the brand in my head?

I agree on the gut feeling. That’s how I often evaluate something myself.

Take, for example, Our Legacy. I think it’s a brand that’s doing really great right now. They recently did this collaboration with Goldwin. They just did this really nice short collab, which is a perfect fit for their very unpretentious, very clean brand identity. Those material brands like Our Legacy are doing a really great job right now, and consequently, they’re also doing very well financially. I feel like they’re really strong right now, while some other brands are struggling, where everything doesn’t really match up.

Can you name a brand that’s trying too hard and it shows?

It pains me a bit because, as I mentioned, Supreme is one of the brands that got me into streetwear culture. When they were overexposed during the Louis Vuitton collab, it felt inevitable—nobody can stay on top of youth culture forever. But they continued to do pretty great afterwards. Recently, though, especially after Tremaine Emory left, I feel like they’re diluting their brand identity. They’ve kind of lost me as a consumer.

They were really known for featuring new people or established icons in their photo tees. In the past, they had these incredibly influential collaborations—the Daniel Johnston one, for example—where they introduced a new generation, myself included, to whole niche subcultures. Now it sometimes feels like they’re chasing the conversation rather than creating it. That said, the product is still really good, and I loved everything Mirko Borsche did for them. It’s still a brand I love—I’m still wearing my Supreme boxer shorts. It’s always a love-hate relationship. To critique anything, you have to be a fan of it as well.

Exactly. It’s a relationship of having invested something emotionally, and then at some point they do a collaboration—say with Louis Vuitton, for example—and you feel betrayed. Then it all comes back when they do something really nice. It’s like a toxic relationship.

Yeah, it’s a toxic relationship. But at the same time, everything just comes in tides. A brand’s actions don’t resonate with me for one or two years, and then they have their comeback, and they’re doing interesting things again. The waves are always switching.

Still, with all this social media frenzy, would you advise a brand to stay out of social media or off a certain social media channel the way Bottega Veneta did, for example?

For them, it’s a very bold move, and I think not a lot of brands can really pull that. I sometimes see it with new brands like Auralee. I mean, they’re active on socials, but I feel like this is a brand that’s very centered around having this in-store experience, touching the clothes. While they certainly exist on social media, social is not driving the brand. The brand is rather driven by this in-store experience. I find that really exciting. I’ve never seen their products in real life, I have to admit, but to me, from the outside, it feels a bit like this.

Being completely off social is a very bold move. A brand like Bottega Veneta can do it, and it probably makes sense for them to double down on exclusivity and still be relevant to their most important consumers. But for a new brand, it’s very difficult. You can still be on social and not do all this cheesy social stuff. You can have your social reflect your brand identity which can be very helpful.

I agree with you. I’m a fan of social when done right. The only social media channel I can’t bear right now is TikTok because I feel it’s the source of insanity. The root source of insanity. But for young people, it makes sense.

Even on TikTok, there’s sometimes great stuff. I’m not active on TikTok, but I feel like in general, TikTok really fuels this fad dynamic we were talking about earlier—having all these superficial trends that are just there for a week and then disappear into the endless ends of the internet It’s a whole other world.

There is a person I admire very much: she flourishes in cultural diplomacy, goes to every Parisian party that matters, and drinks tea with Elon Musk’s mother. She is also the first person who secretly told me about how deep Epstein's reach has been inside the fashion industry, with details that will make every X conspiracy theorist nudge. In short, what you have in your wildest imagination is just a piece of the depravity pie-there’s so much more with details that brought me the chills. And yet the fashion industry hasn’t yet addressed the (huge indeed) elephant in the room.

Let’s start from the very basics: the fashion world gave Jeffrey Epstein something invaluable, something no amount of money alone could buy. It gave him a globally trusted, easily accessible mechanism for identifying, approaching, and transporting vulnerable young women. His connection to the modeling industry wasn’t incidental but rather structural, deeply financed, and most of all, deliberate. In short, Epstein has built a model recruitment pipeline dressed in the promise of success in the ultra-glamorous yet strongly gatekept world of fashion.

The documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice under Dataset 11 provide the most granular detail yet of how this apparatus actually worked: There, I found emails between Epstein and foreign modeling scouts, correspondence forwarded directly to his personal address, and financial arrangements tying him materially to agencies operating across multiple continents. I’m no research expert, but what I see emerges is not just a pattern of abuse, but a total system chillingly methodical, international, and hidden in plain sight.

At the center was MC2 Model Management, a New York and Miami-based agency that Epstein personally financed. On paper, everything looked legitimate. The agency’s client roster included Nordstrom, Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Target. Major American retailers. So far, all’s fine. Real contracts. Real bookings.Nothing to fret about.

But as I see it, respectability was a key point sold, meticulously maintained. and advertised through contracts with the biggest fashion media outlets. According to court filings from 2014 and 2015, Epstein provided up to one million dollars to launch MC2 and personally paid for the visas of models brought to the United States to work for the company. Not out of charity, though. Epstein’s funding gave him access to the agency’s entire talent pool and created a relationship of financial dependency between the women and their benefactor. In short, they owed him.

The man running MC2 day-to-day was Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout with decades of industry experience. And while Epstein provided the capital, Brunel provided the fashion access, that is, the networks, the contacts, the sourcing channels across Europe and Latin America. Together, they built something that operated seamlessly at the intersection of fashion and exploitation, not under the radar but open for everyone to see. The whole fashion industry knew, my source tells me.And i believe her.

And there’s more: Brunel was later named as an FBI co-conspirator alongside Ghislaine Maxwell. He was arrested in France in December 2020 on charges of rape and sex trafficking of minors. He, like many others implicated in the case, conveniently died by suicide in Paris’s La Santé prison in February 2022, before his trial could proceed and before he could comment on what the court filings describe him as doing: having supplied Epstein with “over a thousand” girls and women. Gross already.

The newly released documents reveal something even more disturbing than Epstein's opportunistic abuse methodology. They showcase a meticulous administrative operation methodically designed and operated specifically to place Epstein in physical proximity to young women at the highest levels of the fashion world, thus enabling him to scout and recruit for his parties. And whoever has seen Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut masterpiece of a film can imagine what was happening thereafter.

His personal staff, aka Lesley Groff and Margaux Rogers, maintained what can only be described as a targeting calendar. In one email, Rogers sent Groff a message with the subject line: “RE: List for JE only from now till Sept 23!!!!!!” This was no random email; behind it seems that there was a centralized calendar tracking major fashion events, openings, and fundraisers compiled exclusively for Epstein’s use.

The method was easy: every single event was tagged with specific markers much like the way we bookmark emails or create Gmail categories: “Exclusive Mix,” “Social Patron,” “Fashion Industry,” “Arts Patron.” The primary focus was on identifying events marked “Invitation only,” and ensuring that Epstein maintained access to the industry’s most exclusive and, most importantly, least monitored spaces. He needed the exposure as much as he needed the privacy. And it was all hidden in plain sight.

The events tracked via his email accounts expose the fashion industry to its core. Think Kids Fashion Week. Petite Parade Opening Day. Couture Fashion Week. Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week showcases designers such as Cynthia Rowley, Prabal Gurung, Zac Posen, and Carolina Herrera. Epstein would systematically attend events where young models, often aspiring teenagers, would be present, available, and surrounded by the presumed legitimacy of the fashion world. Easy prey. And again, EVERYBODY KNEW.

Now, among the most uncomfortable revelations in the released documents are approximately 25 pages detailing supermodel Naomi Campbell’s contact with Epstein spanning from 2001 to 2016 — including years after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.

In 2016, eight years after Epstein’s conviction, those emails released show Campbell repeatedly requesting the use of his private plane. An assistant wrote to Epstein: “Naomi is following up on using the plane... she said she spoke to you about this and hopes you can call her soon... she needs to know.” A later message adds urgency: “Naomi has called back twice now, saying she doesn’t have any back up plan as she really thought from you this would work.”

Campbell invited Epstein to high-profile events throughout the years, even those following his conviction. Events such as her 40th birthday party in Cannes in 2010, a fashion for Relief charity show that same year, and a Dolce & Gabbana party in Paris, also in 2010. No chance encounters or brief photo opportunities here. She knew him personally enough to PERSONALLY invite him to private celebrations and high-profile fashion events.

Court records contain troubling connections to victims as well. One alleged victim stated that Campbell was present at a party at Epstein’s New York mansion when she first met him. Another alleged victim said Epstein told her he could get her modeling work with Victoria’s Secret because “he knew Naomi Campbell.” The implication was clear: Campbell’s name carried weight, and Epstein used it as currency in recruiting innocent souls for a route to hell.

From her side, Campbell has repeatedly denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. In statements following the release of the documents, she called his behavior “indefensible” and said she stands with the victims. In a 2019 interview, she said: “I’ve met thousands of people at events and been photographed with them — there are pictures of me with everyone.” Whether Campbell knew the full scope of Epstein’s activities remains an open question. Still, what is documented is a pattern of access, connection, and sustained contact that extended well beyond his conviction. If she didn't know, she was at the very least an unsuspecting accomplice to one of the largest rings of pedophilia operating inside the fashion world.

The operational model, as described in the DOJ files, functioned in multiple modes. Direct agency financing gave Epstein structural control. But there was also what the documents call “scout network activation.” That is, women who came into contact with Epstein were subsequently recruited — or coerced — into becoming scouts themselves, almost brainwashed to become abusers. One passage from Dataset 11 is particularly explicit: “Models from Russia and Belarus not only came to him — they became his scouts, searching for new girls in return for him paying for their education, travel, and publications in fashion magazines.” The victims became vectors. And silence, comfortable silence everywhere.

The clearest testimony about MC2’s true function came from the accusers themselves. Virginia Roberts Giuffre stated in a 2014 court filing that MC2 was, in her assessment, a cover for sex trafficking. In a 2015 affidavit, she alleged that Epstein boasted to her that he had “slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s girls.” She also identified Brunel directly as one of the men Ghislaine Maxwell directed her to have sex with when she was a teenager.

The golden question here isn’t why this ring existed, after all, predators and child abusers operate in all social cycles. It’s why it took so long to be revealed, and this is where the fashion industry played a crucial role in concealing. None of this would have been possible without an industry whose standard practices created those near-ideal conditions for exploitation. The modeling industry, particularly at its lower and mid tiers, routinely places young women, often foreign nationals, often teenagers or in their early twenties, in situations of profound dependency.

Imagine their situation for a moment. They arrive on visas sponsored by agencies. They live in agency-controlled housing. They work toward contracts that may or may not materialize, accruing debts to the very organizations that control their legal status and economic survival. The promise of a breakthrough career is the mechanism that maintains compliance. And all of this is standard. Normalized. Industry practice.Accepted by everyone.

Some might think the fashion world would be shuttered after those exposions. Issuing apologies. Creating boards to regulate how aspiring models are being treated by fancy, super-big model agencies. Suprise! The industry’s response to all of this has been near silence. The innate structural vulnerabilities that made the fashion industry a perfect playground for human trafficking remain intact, only because no one in the fashion crowd dares to speak out the truth. WE ALL KNEW BUT LET IT HAPPEN.

Ask around about William D. Cohan, and they will tell you it’s the award-winning journalist and bestselling author who spent 17 years as an investment banker on Wall Street before becoming one of the most respected chroniclers of finance and power. For me, he was something of a sacred totem of financial knowledge, which he aptly applied to explain the rich and powerful that shape our times. I so far knew culture wasn’t made in hidden, humid laboratories hidden behind unsuspicious-looking storefronts, but, as Bourdieu and Deleuze knew best, it is a direct derivative of the commoditization of the cultural means of production. That is, whoever has the money has the cards.

I first read Cohan’s critically acclaimed book House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, which examined the collapse of Bear Stearns during the 2008 financial crisis and got enchanted, if this is the right word, in the insightful manner he explained even to the untrained mind (mine) how secret financial forces can expand their influence into everybody’s everyday life—yes, and mine. A former senior Wall Street correspondent for Fortune and a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, Cohan’s deep insider knowledge and investigative ‘nose’ have made him a singular voice in understanding how financial capital shapes culture, business, and society.

Never short of inspiration in today’s turbulent world, Cohan also wrote Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, and The Price of Silence, about the Duke Lacrosse scandal. And there’s more—his forthcoming book explores Apollo Global Management and its transformation of Wall Street. Until then, though, he gave me the privilege to sit down and discuss all the above—and some more, for The Style Title.

Given your Wall Street background and coverage of finance, how has finance capital reshaped what gets produced culturally? Do corporate mergers and consolidations affect what gets made?

Finance is like an octopus—it has tentacles everywhere in every aspect of society. Every company needs capital, whether debt or equity, so Wall Street and finance work their way into everything. There are social media companies that influence culture directly, and they are obviously financed by Wall Street or investors. But there are also plenty of companies that influence culture that you don’t even think about, that also have to get their money from Wall Street. Is the company that makes the refrigerator in your apartment any less influential on your life than OpenAI or ChatGPT? It simply doesn’t get as much attention, but where would you be without your refrigerator?

Outsiders like to criticize Wall Street and finance because they feel it is an easy target. The people there make a lot of money, probably more money than they should or that they otherwise would be entitled to, especially since they may not take nearly as much risk for the reward they get. But can you imagine a world without Wall Street, without the capital that Wall Street provides? You wouldn’t have refrigerators, you wouldn’t have flush toilets, you wouldn’t have souvlaki—you wouldn’t have any number of things that you take for granted. It’s just the way our current society works.

Are there any brands we don’t know about publicly that play an important role in shaping culture?

Of course there are. I can’t, for obvious reasons, sit here and rattle them off, but there are millions of companies. Some of them have their own influence on our culture, and some we know and recognize, but many we don’t even know at all. They simply might be private companies we don’t even know of their existence.

You’ve chronicled extreme wealth, from ultra-rich summer colonies to impossible-to-join golf clubs. How has the visual language of luxury changed? Are the rich more or less ostentatious than in previous eras?

It has definitely changed like everybody else’s dress; it has become more informal, and people don’t wear suits as much. They don’t wear ties as much. Now everyone is into athleisure and designer sweats and things like that—and even rich people wear that kind of stuff. And it doesn’t look great, but that’s just my opinion.

Take Wall Street, the firm leaders generally continue to dress in business attire, though in a much more relaxed way. Most of the leaders and executives still dress up. But it’s acceptable to wear more casual, sporty attire if you’re not seeing clients or are just sitting at your desk working on your computer, and there are no meetings. In that sense, I think it’s acceptable to dress down. But no, you are not going to be able to wear sweatpants or jeans.

One of your books is titled House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. Are we currently living through a tale of hubris and wretched excess?

That was a book about the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008, how and what happened. I would say that we seem to be overdue for another financial correction. The markets are at or near all-time highs. Investors’ disregard for risk seems to be as acute as ever. So I do worry all the time that we’re heading into another period of financial recklessness—and not only.

You see, it always looks great before the storm occurs. Nobody rings the bell at the top of the market and says, “Okay, now’s a good time to sell everything.” People in general have short memories and forget that everything has a process, and thus they carry the optimism that everything is going to work out, it’s going to be somehow different this time. And it never is different.

What is your opinion on AI? Some say it’s a bubble ready to burst, some say it’s the next big investment.

AI is a very interesting tool to use, like the internet search the same way the internet was a very interesting tool and remains an important tool. But I do think the valuations of the companies have gotten completely out of hand. It doesn’t mean they won’t continue to go up—that is, before they go down. That being said, if you invest now and it doubles or triples, you could indeed make a lot of money. But in a very risky, very pricey way.

I think most investors, unless they are willing to lose their money, should stay away from it. But it won’t happen because mass psychology has proven people get caught up in the euphoria. They think they can make money quickly—but it’s not that simple, never was.

Can you comment on the recent bankruptcies of some major retail and fashion brands in the US?

I totally understand the capital structures and bankruptcies in question. It was clear from the start that companies had too much debt and that their operations were going to be challenged. There’s been a secular decline of the department store industry that’s been going on for decades. If you put together two department store chains and you lever them up with too much debt and make all these wild claims about how the companies are going to do financially, and they aren’t able to do that, then it’s not really a surprise that they go into bankruptcy. To me, it was entirely predictable that they would end up in bankruptcy, given their capital structure and how much debt they had amassed.

What are you currently working on?

I research a lot of things at the same time. My new book, coming out later this year, is about another Wall Street firm named Apollo Global Management, which is in the process of changing the way Wall Street operates. The book is about the firm, its origins, the people who started it, and their experiences spanning the last 30 to 35 years. I think it’s an amazing story to tell.

In financial journalism, you’re drowning in data, filings, and sources. How do you extract signal from noise when everything seems significant?

Isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do? To figure out, to parse what’s important from what’s not important. As for me, I am a former Wall Street banker for 17 years, which makes it a lot easier to figure out the gem inside the stones. This is, I feel, what gives me an advantage over other people who cover the same field.

Have you ever had any ethical dilemmas? For example, something that you knew was important, but for some reason you couldn’t expose?

I’ve certainly been in situations where my editors wouldn’t let me write something. Truth is, unless you do a Substack or something similar and be on your own, there’s not really much you can do about that. You cannot get everything you want out sometimes. Because when I get sued, I’ll be on my own to face it.

During our pre conversation, you recommended a book—can you repeat the title for The Substack readers?

Yes, it’s called The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm. A must-read indeed.

It’s true, fashion loves easy digestible creation stories. Think: Chanel freed women from corsets, Dior gave us the New Look, Saint Laurent put women in tuxedos. These stories are, in most parts, true but tidy and easily marketable to a mass audience eager to consume myths and clean-cut narratives.

Valentino Garavani didn’t play by these rules. He kept a manner of work often uncomfortable for an industry obsessed with obvious hype marketed into ‘revolution’, and yet, his influence proved more enduring than those designers who chased novelty and social media stardom like addicts.

Valentino, if we are to call him what he was, was a soft innovator. One who pursued pure beauty so relentlessly that he involuntarily changed how women dressed without ever pretending to reinvent the wheel. While his contemporaries were busy deconstructing and ‘disrupting’, Valentino was doing something far more subversive: perfecting couture-like tailoring to enhance the inner beauty of the women he dressed.

Red as Intellectual Property

The origin story of Valentino Red has the weight of legend. A chance meeting with an elderly woman at Barcelona’s Opera House, draped in magenta velvet, burning through the visual noise of safe colors—white, black, navy—touched something deeply personal, almost archetypal in young Valentino’s psyche.

“Among all the colors worn by other women, she seemed unique, isolated in her splendor,” he recalled. “I think a woman dressed in red is always wonderful; she is the perfect image of a heroine,” he noted. And he never forgot the revelational encounter. Later on, when he opened his first atelier in 1959, that Barcelona vision became a philosophical doctrine, an idea of ideal beauty standing still within a rapidly changing world.

He introduced his Valentino red, not scarlet, not crimson, but a cleverly calculated mix of carmine and scarlet with a hint of orange via a strapless cocktail dress in draped tulle. Since then, the shade didn’t just appear in his collections but rather became as much a signature as any logo. Valentino Red served as an indelible mark that forced the fashion world to reckon with a radical idea: a designer could own a color.

Through his sophisticated use of it, he subversively nodded to classicism as a sort of ethereal provocation, linking ancient divinities and mythological creatures to pleated silk dresses, connecting Roman matrones and queens to airy tulle skirts. He understood that in an age of mechanical reproduction, true ownership wouldn’t come from silhouettes anyone could conceive, but from sensory experiences that bypassed the brain and struck the gut. The sound of organza, the movement of tulle, the sensory overload of velvet-that was Valentino.

Couture Standards in a Ready-to-Wear World

The 1970s and 80s saw fashion houses gleefully cutting corners to meet ready-to-wear price points and increase production schedules. The industry was learning to think more like manufacturers and ‘creative directors’, not designers. In reaction, Valentino committed to what theoretically should have been a commercial suicide: couture-level finishing in prêt-à-porter.

Opposed to this radical industrialization, he chose hand-finished seams where no one would see them, elaborate hidden interior construction that took hours, and intricate embroidery reserved for one-of-a-kind pieces destined for department stores. Think of the exclusive budellini technique alone: long strips of sheep’s wool hand-rolled into tubes, wrapped in silk, stitched together. In short, Valentino employed total luxury as a rebellion against the very transformation of fashion into a fast-paced mode.

An Unapologetic Aesthete

What I feel is his strongest legacy, though, is that Valentino never pretended to be anything other than what he was. “I love beauty, it’s not my fault,” he declared in The Last Emperor, the documentary that laid bare his world of cute pugs, super yachts, and elaborately decorated châteaux. When asked about being called The King, The Emperor, The Icon, his response was magnificently unbothered: “I am Valentino. I live in my own world.”

That world—one that “shuts out all that is not beautiful,” as Matt Tyrnauer, the director of “Valentino: The Last Emperor,” observed— set a standard of the designer, the couturier as a fellow aristocrat, a part of his tasteful audience. Most importantly, he ranked alongside Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld as one of the last designers of a generation who truly designed and owned their silhouettes before fashion became an industry run by financiers and marketing executives. For Valentino, consistency in one’s vision reads as true radicalism, a personal refusal to evolve past one’s vision in an industry that fetishizes change.

Valentino’s most important innovation wasn’t in what he made. It was in how thoroughly refused to make anything else.

During Christmas vacation, the X community caught fire with a manifesto asking for the hardest of things: a new aesthetic theory. Patrick Collison, the Stripe CEO and co-founder of Arc Institute, posted a link called “A Call for New Aesthetics” at newaesthetics.art. You’d click it, submit your own proposal on how 21st-century aesthetics ought to be shaped.

Let’s admit it, how many times have we wished there was a similar call for fashion? What we don’t often take into account is how difficult such a thing is, and Machiavelli knows it.“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” he notes. And it’s true.

Still, there is another observation to be made about this well-meaning call for new aesthetics: it fundamentally misunderstands how and why new aesthetics emerge.

You Cannot Order Aesthetics Without Ethics

Can you order an aesthetic without caring for the ethics behind it? Nietzsche says we can’t. Otherwise, any “new” is just manifesting novelty for its own sake, simply surface without substance, style without belief.

Today, fashion is rooted in fads. As David W. Marx notes, talking about the latest Labubu frenzy: “Culture is now built around this tension: There are engaged, paying consumers of Labubus (and an army of resellers), and there are sour, reluctant consumers of the Labubu narrative. The actual consumer economy, of course, is going to move towards people who pay the real money, and the second group works as a hype machine, even as they’re wringing their hands.”

We’re witnessing a shift to the act of noticing, of choosing your attention and deciding, “I like this ugly thing, thank you very much.” When a generation is overwhelmed with polish and now slop, they simply crave things they see online, afraid they will be late in the trends’ bandwagon.

The Performance Trap

Until we relieve ourselves from the FOMO that keeps us plugged online, we’ll continue mistaking performance for truth. As Nuck Susi and Matt Klein suggest: “None of this would matter if we treated the online as an entertainment stage, a series of magic tricks, a dreamworld. But reality becomes strange when we continuously mistake performance for truth and pass it around as insightful cultural signal.”

We scroll through fashion media looking for signals, for the next thing, for proof that we understand what’s happening. But what if nothing is happening? What if the constant churn of content has replaced the slow accumulation of taste, the patient development of a point of view?

Own Your Point of View

A new aesthetic cannot be crowdsourced. It cannot be voted into existence through a Google Form. It emerges from people who have committed to a set of values, who have chosen what they care about and what they’re willing to ignore. As such, aesthetics are first and foremost a point of view.

A brief example: Consider the recent photograph of Maduro's capture. Within hours of the image circulating, people were flooding e-commerce sites asking where they could buy the hoodie he was wearing, and then skyrocketing the hoodie into a fashion best seller, so Pete Roberts, the ORIGIN brand founder, had to post an X acknowledgment of it. There are people out there who saw the image and chose not to process the geopolitical implications or empathise with an individual in distress. They just wanted ‘the fit’.

And that is why I suggest you make 2026 the year you consume less fashion media. To not be one of them.

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