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It also reminded me of a favorite editorial during my V Magazine days, shot in 2015(!) by Eloise Parry, styled by Akeem Smith, featuring Chiki.

Speaking of the algorithm, I’ve been thinking today about how profoundly I love and appreciate existing in sadistic gay culture. Whenever a hot guy pops up anywhere in the world, like Aphrodite from the surf, he rockets onto many a “For You” page, and the gays (writ large) report for immediate duty with a dossier of personal information. It happens so irrationally fast, it’s head-spinning. They reveal his identity, who he used to date, who he’s dating now, how many guys he’s fucked, how many guys he’s currently fucking, how open he and his partner are (or not), how big it is, which supplements he’s taking, even what he’s been arrested for and in what state and county and when. It’s a breed of cyber-gang-stalking I’ve earned the privilege of witnessing due to being a certain kind of gay guy online. When one pours over the disclosures being volleyed, one can’t help picking up on a certain tone of resentment and envy, masked with nonchalance, including attempts to discredit the subject outright—”he edits his photos"—which just makes the whole thing even more entertaining. It exposes the pathos of the obsessed as much as the background of the obsessed-over. And being obsessed and obsessed-over feels really in style right now. It’s a sickness and an open wound, a symbiotic relationship in which both sides are victimized and both sides win. Stop perceiving me / Don’t look away.

We all know that the attention economy rewards bad behavior—anything that gets people heated rises up the invisible charts. It’s nothing new, but it’s mutating slowly into an extreme parody of itself. I’m willing to speculate that maybe it’s only happening on my algorithm…but somehow, I doubt it. Lately, pop stars are waging proxy wars against each other with their respective fandoms, which only increases engagement with their music. Accusations of copying, who did what first, who’s authentic, who’s pretentious, who’s niche, who’s lying, and who stole what from whom have all emerged as a present-day lingua franca in all manner of creative spheres. Often, attacks are leveled behind “Close Friends” filters or on burner accounts—direct confrontation would, presumably, be too hot to handle. But the reflex to attack one’s “opps” now extends beyond pop music and into such far-flung corners as professional sports, fashion design, graphic design, algorithm coding, substacking, OnlyFans, and every other conceivable sphere of influence. Once I found myself immersed in X postings by a long-COVID activist in which she was expressing a battered, jealous rage over how much attention the Budibungyo Ebola outbreak was getting, I knew I had hurled myself headlong into the spiritual abyss. (Did I choose to extricate myself from it? Of course not.)

I’ve been sitting on an idea for a Costume Institute exhibit and Met Gala theme. It feels timely, and like it could take innumerable academic and analytical directions. Since I don’t know who to speak with about it, I’ll just drop it here. (Andrew Bolton, call me?) The exhibition would be called Copycat: The Art of Influence. The show would deconstruct the very concept of the reference, tracing garments back to their earliest, crudest origins, and demonstrating the myriad ways in which designers have iterated on iterations in order to arrive at novel, boundary-pushing fashion within a historical framework. Chinatown knockoffs, deliberate homage, unusual collaborations, trademark infringements, not to mention the core business model of new designers taking over storied houses and interpreting their codes—all would be grist for the delirious ripoff mill. Virgil Abloh’s “remixing” approach to Pyrex Vision, for example. Or Dapper Dan’s influential luxury pastiches. Think of all the Gaultier, Galliano, Comme Des Garçons, Vaquera, Moschino, and assorted Demna collections that embody this idea—clothes by designers with irony and humor finally being considered in a corrective, diagnostic context. It would explode conceptions of the idea itself—what is an idea, where does it come from, who owns it, and to what end? Finally we can put the delusion of idea-theft to rest, having acknowledged its primacy in the very concept of fashion itself.

For the carpet, the theme would be “knockoffs only.” Designers could dress their guests in reinterpretations of looks by other designers. Imagine the Prada guests all wearing Miuccia’s fantasy of Versace, or Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent doing a spin on Christian Lacroix. H&M or Zara, who never stay away from this promo opportunity, could tap Jeremy Scott and go completely insane. Let Alaïa collaborate with Hervé Léger! Something happened after the tragedy that was Diet Prada’s rise where everyone lost their ability to consider fashion from multiple angles or through a postmodern lens. The Internet’s outrage became too personal and nasty, and designers retreated into a mode of luxury over modernity. It feels like we’re still on a path back to sanity, and it’s perfect timing to poke holes in the all-too-sacred—and ludicrous—notion of “originality” in an industry that has sustained itself on trends in the first place.

I’m going somewhere with all of this.

I’ve noticed that the resort collections have been trickling out and garnering responses that are overblown. Something always happens during the pre-collection season in which brands more easily seize the spotlight than during the Paris or Milan shows. Part of this is because the presentations aren’t all clustered together, so brands get at least 24 hours of undivided attention where they often split it with several others. They also, often, take the form of extravagantly staged destination shows, stuffed with celebrities and V.I.P.s., which create more of a “moment.” This can result in an imbalance where more attention is paid to the pre-season collections than the more fashion-forward seasonal ready-to-wear (or couture), despite the fact that pre-seasons are designed to be more commercial and less of a fashion proposition. These collections are meant to be judged on a curve: how has the designer expanded upon what was proposed in the previous collection, before the next one pivots to something else? Instead, the Internet flattens them into the same category. On some level, the brands prefer the pre-collections soak up the lion’s share of the attention because those clothes make up the bulk of what’s in the stores. But from a fashion perspective, they’re just not as interesting. Unless they’re designed by Nicolas Ghesquière.

When the Louis Vuitton women’s Resort 2027 collection hit the runway at the Frick museum a few weeks ago, I was surprised by the outcry. The very same people who police originality are likewise repulsed when confronted with the real thing. Louis Vuitton is as blank a ready-to-wear canvas as you can dream up with a heritage brand—it’s fundamentally and historically a luggage purveyor. When Marc Jacobs became Vuitton’s creative director in 1997, he created its first ready-to-wear line ever, which debuted for Fall 1998. Austere and minimalist, it emphasized a blank slate. It would take until 2001 or so, with the first Sprouse collaboration, for its identity to begin to take flight. By the time Jacobs exited in 2013, he had put forth landmark collections like Spring 2003’s Murakami Minnie Mouse, Spring 2008’s Richard Prince nurses, Spring 2010’s afro-puffed Mark Ryden-esque nomads, Spring 2013’s escalators of twinning mega-mods, and his grand finale, Spring 2014’s midnight-black tribute to Miuccia Prada, Rei Kawakubo, Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, and a litany of other “showgirls” who inspired his work. Jacobs had effectively created the template for Louis Vuitton’s fashion line, exploded it, made it into pop culture, and lovingly torched it on his way out the door. But more crucially than those hit collections, each a spectacle in their own way, Jacobs established a wardrobe and an attitude that in many ways defined the aughts, from the metallic jewel toned crop tops to the Olsen-esque sunglasses and swingy, desecrated handbags. What was once associated with ‘90s grunge took on a post-electroclash layer of glitz.

By the time Ghesquière stepped into frame, in 2013, he only had one predecessor to look to, and part of the reason he was hired was to skip past that reverential early-season backward glance that often comes with a new appointment. His 15-year tenure at Balenciaga was considered, by all accounts, nothing short of groundbreaking. In their statement announcing his hire, Vuitton stated that Ghesquière would bring “a modern creative vision to the House’s women’s collections, building on the values of refinement, savoir faire, and extreme quality.”

His debut at Vuitton delivered on that promise, with a slick treatise on ‘60s modernism by way of forward-looking hybridized leathers. From there he continued to establish something of a signature approach: he casts a hook line of nostalgia, only to pervert, mutate, and subvert it into something alien, expressive, and entirely new. He takes what’s familiar, evoking often outdated or naff ideas of glamour, and twists it into something hallucinatory, unfamiliar, and unflinchingly progressive. Where some designers focus on the body, creating clothes that beautify a woman, Ghesquière creates artifacts that draw attention to their own singularity. To his dissenters, this can be at odds with the wearer. To his faithful, it’s a fleeting opportunity to ride the lightning.

Personally, I look forward to a Ghesquière show more than I do almost any other designer, because the work is unfailingly novel and reveals itself in layers. What at first can be discordant or repulsive reveals something fascinating upon closer inspection, and continues to morph with each successive glimpse. His Resort 27 collection, inspired by a sort of absentee dissection of uptown/downtown street codes, is dizzyingly anticonventional. There are the leather ankle-boots sculpted to look like Foamposites, the belted socks, the asymmetric back-brimmed bucket hats, leather-trimmed denim ruffles that seem to explode from the groin like a cabbage patch, Edwardian-by-way-of-Amish ruffle-shouldered dress shirts, neoclassical Greek column handbags, Gaultier-inspired tromp l’oeil jeans (Jean-Paul Gaultier was Ghesquière’s first boss, and the job that first took him to New York), and a psychoactive remodel of westernwear filigree that expands and hangs off jacket lapels or the bottoms of miniskirts. Perhaps the ugliest dress of the year, worn on the runway by Alana Haim, boasts what appears to be lacquered puce hair extensions snaking over a black lace dress with a hot pink lining. The more I look at it, the cooler and more insane it becomes. Boxing shorts in charcoal satin, liberated motocross jackets, bitchy zebra belts—it’s 1980s by way of the 2000s in the 2020s, before the Chinese-takeout-boxes through a Judith Lieber filter, or the aggressive Keith Haring prints, even enter the equation. To mine ideas of raunchily bad taste, offend thousands of Gen-Z internet commentators, and push fashion ahead in ways that many are too close-minded to take notice of is a ferocious blessing to behold. This is what Nicolas does. I hope he never stops. And Zendaya agrees with me.

PARAPHERNALIA #012

New York cares.

I went and voted in Franklin Village yesterday, and then watched the (bad) results trickle in with the same ambient, noncommittal amusement with which I receive most pseudo-consequential information these days. But it’s been brought to my attention—viciously, vociferously, and unforgivingly—that I’m not like most people. There is nothing wrong with being vocally politically engaged, it’s just not something I’m interested in. Maybe it’s because so many other people are. I always feel better after speaking to friends of mine who work in politics, or whose work revolves around political organizing, in general, because their point-of-view tends to be rooted in a sort of world-weary, straightforward rationality. I was talking to my friend Amber, who succinctly brushed off my anxiety saying that the Los Angeles mayor is, generally speaking, constitutionally powerless. “L.A. has a horribly byzantine political system by design.” This clear-eyed attitude rests in opposition to the histrionics on social media, people who seem eager to betray their lack of bonafides or perspective via sheer volume and ferocity of nonstop mongering. To use my friend Greg’s favorite expression, it’s a full panic. And after the culturally destructive, artistically bankrupt, socially deleterious waves of righteous indignation that accompanied both Trump presidencies, I’m unfortunately noticing a disturbing pattern.

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If you don’t care about any of this, I’ll be back to regular scheduled programming shortly.

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• Did everybody stand in line and buy their SALEM Supreme collaboration pieces this morning? Did you gawk at the cataclysmic campaign film directed by SALEM and Tommy Malekoff? I’m fascinated by the few people in Supreme’s Instagram comments who don’t know SALEM’s work, or who lack the superfluous, byzantine knowledge to genuflect appropriately. Maybe you should start with the most comprehensive and dizzying Google Sheet ever conceived and get up to speed on the scope of this band. The body of work is peerless.

• Vaquera announced their first fragrance in collaboration with Comme des Garçons Parfums, called Classique Perdu. Coming on the heels of their Melted Aviator sunglasses, they’re having what industry experts academically refer to as a hot streak. Per the description (CAPS LOCKS theirs):

  A NEW SCENT THAT FEELS LIKE A PERFUME YOU ONCE KNEW, THEN FORGOT. YOU HAVE JUST STUMBLED UPON IT IN THE BACK OF A THRIFT STORE SHELF. INSPIRED BY THE SCENT OF PERFUME ADS IN 90S FASHION MAGAZINES, THE SCENT OF FRESHLY DRIED HAIR AFTER A SHOWER, THE SCENT OF YOUR CHILDHOOD CAR’S AIR CONDITIONING, AND THE METALLIC SPARKLE OF A SUMMER DRINKING FOUNTAIN—WOVEN WITH MYSTERY, NOSTALGIA—CLASSIQUE PERDU INVITES YOU TO REDISCOVER A FRAGRANCE THAT FEELS BOTH FAMILIAR AND FORGOTTEN, AN ICONIC SCENT LOST AND FOUND AGAIN.

  It’s available now.

• I’m not in Cannes (I’m in Paris) but I wish I was. I miss it. I crave and desire it. It’s where I belong, etcetera. There’s nothing like seeing the most galvanizing selections from the coming year of international cinema and going into all of it totally blind, in one of the most beautiful places on earth. The lineup titles are so unknown to me, that I am lazily obsessing most over the Cannes Classics section, consisting of newly restored prints of beloved films. This year’s selection is dedicated to the memory of production designer Dean Tavoularis (the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Zabriskie Point, Bonnie & Clyde, One From The Heart, Rumble Fish), the sort of gesture that always gets me where it counts. The lineup includes 4K restorations of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Moonlighting (1982), Giuseppi Patroni Griffi’s Metti, Una Sera A Cena (1968) co-written by Dario Argento, Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960), and others from Luchino Visconti, Roger Corman, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, and a strong Studiocanal lineup. This is good news for everyone, because it means these 4K restorations will be distributed on Blu-Ray or programmed internationally in the near future. If you’re on-site, definitely check out the Cinéma de la Plage schedule, it’s always fun to watch a movie on the beach with a bottle of Veuve. It’s called being alive.

• Harry Nuriev’s The City physicalizes the hyper-obsessive consumerism (and attendant waste) a lot of substacks are evincing of late. I missed it in Paris, and I guess then it was in Berlin? Whatever, you get the vibe. Spiritually, I relate to the idea.

• MADONNA CONFESSION II WORLD PREMIERE TRIBECA FESTIVAL JUNE 5TH DIRECTED BY TORSO. Torso was subsequently “unmasked” as David Toro and Solomon Chase in the press release for this, which also revealed a post-screening Q&A would take place, hosted by Jimmy Fallon. David and Solomon have never kept their identity a secret but being press shy and using a joint pseudonym has confused more than a few people. You might know their work as Torso across music videos, campaigns, and films for the likes of Dior, Courrèges, Jean Paul Gaultier, Luar, Mugler, Telfar, Charli xcx, etc. Or maybe you’ve seen their editorials in RE-EDITION, Carcy, Dazed, i-D, Buffalo, MYTH, CR Fashion Book, or Interview. They’re also one half of DIS. I happen have it on good authority that this Madonna film is going to be extremely headless. I’m using this as an excuse to post a personal favorite video of theirs:

• I finally read Famesick, and it really is as startlingly frank and genius as everyone says it is. Lena Dunham’s memory for detail is so lucid and phenomenal, it operates as a sort of a breathless, comedic, stream-of-consciousness—while somehow remaining disarmingly unpretentious? Each recollection buzzes under the looming threat of drama, each detail is painful and perfect, each admission takes a scalpel to her own private cadaver of flamboyant self-oblivion in the wake of her own success. It’s totally addictive and I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s better than it needed to be, which is remarkable and warrants acclaim.

• David Sims shot Apple Martin for Chloé. I heard she was not the original casting for this campaign, an example of when the second option turns out to be the best option.

• IDEA and Dover Street Market London are launching a book edition of “the original dyke zine” KUTT. The launch is part of Photo London. Some of my friends collect those zines, the book seems like an automatic yes.

  

• Fashion editorial is not dead. I’m not linking to all of these—take it upon yourself to seek them out. I’m big on Johnny Dufort and Suzanne Koller’s collections story for System Collections Issue No. 3 Autumn/Winter 2026-2027. They’re three for three over there. Anders Edström and Jodie Barnes have the best Chanel story this season in Double. In fact, every story in the new issue of Double is really good. Dexter Lander and Charlotte Collet have a really good story called “domestic troubles.” Michella Bredahl and Lotta Volkova shot people in their homes, getting dressed as outré performance. Nothing’s more indulgent and luxurious than Alasdair McLellan shooting a chiseled youth with a perfect flat top (hair by Kim Rance). Mark Kean and Robbie Spencer’s story in U Repubblica is glamorous and sick. Giampaolo Sgura’s cover story for this season’s epic conglomeration that is Arena Homme+ is fucking stink. It’s a wristwatch story, by the way. I think it’s important to draw attention to these things. The future of our creative existence cannot simply be measured in Instagram likes, can it? Say something, you cowards.

• Quick sidenote: in another timeline, Pedro Pascal would have shot the cover of BUTT with Terry Richardson or Wolfgang Tillmans, styled by Mel Ottenberg, and all would have been right with the world. But, evidently, his Fantastic Man cover by Ethan James Green and Carlos Nazario is the next best thing.

• Have you been attending the screening series at Metrograph curated by John Early of important films that inspired his forthcoming directorial debut Maddie’s Secret? Phenomenally embarrassing if not! Death of a Cheerleader is a core text for me. The first time I saw it, I was on acid in Palm Springs. Do the math. I recently had the opportunity to meet Tori Spelling and praise her performance, and her head doubled back on a swivel because she couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth.

• What do you mean there is a documentary about Jocelyne Wildenstein produced by Ronnie Bronstein and the Safdies premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, what do you mean Alissa Bennett is in it and so is Michael Musto and so is Amanda Lepore? Are you fucking kidding me?

• How do I secure myself a staycation at the Pocketbook Hudson Hotel and Baths? The bathrobes are by Eckhaus Latta and the bathhouse rubber seating is by Rich Aybar. Can’t any of you hook it up? I really just need a spa after this trip. (I should also do my obligatory annual pilgrimage back to New York, the city that made me, and the forever home I avoid.)

• Have I talked to you all about Night Flight Plus? It’s the greatest streaming service (except for Kanopy). They’re celebrating their 45th anniversary—long story, they used to be a cable access channel—with a newly restored 4K screening of Lou Adler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982), a celluloid punk classic. If you’ve never seen it, it sounds like now is the time.

• This week I’m back on Bandsplain with Yasi Salek, talking about Madonna for almost four hours. Grab a Celsius and join us.

PARAPHERNALIA #008

To quote the evil bitch character who Claire Danes was trapped in a Thai prison with in Brokedown Palace:

You like? Go take. 🤭

Let’s keep it brief, as I am OOO.

I attended the preview week for the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Biennale in Venice as a tangential participant of the Danish Pavilion where artist Maja Malou Lyse presented Things To Come, an interrogation of how images and fertility can potentially intersect in a rapidly advancing, artificially intelligent, virtual reality atomization of erotic lonerism. I had written a loose script for a film by Lyse and DIS, featuring Brazzers porn stars working in sperm labs and engaging in verbal humiliation toward the, presumably, beta male participants. I loved the exhibition staging by Common Accounts, which included an adjacent installation of cryogenic sperm containers and a new fertility ritual of “sperm races,” designed to foment rivalries between men online over their own virility. Apparently declining birth rates are on everyone’s minds? The Japanese Pavilion also featured a show on the subject, Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies, in which 200 lifelike babydolls cried through amplifiers, hung from scaffolding, lounged in chaises, slid down ropes, and basically exploded from every angle of the pavilion’s surfaces. They all wore printed onesies and reflective sunglasses, giving the proceedings a taunting lunacy. Both exhibitions were favorites (I’m biased), not because I share their alarmism but because they both made supposedly catastrophic global concerns seem ludicrously funny—such is life.

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When you create a Substack, it allows you to choose two categories your publication can live within. If I recall correctly, I chose Fashion & Beauty and Music — apologies to Culture and Film. People who caught me storming the Fashion charts might be a little bit dismayed that I haven’t posted more about typical fashion detritus or become one of those godless shopping newsletters, but I think this all pertains to what I consider fashion to actually be and why it interests me in the first place. And it has nothing to do with shopping. Most of the time…

When I first became a fashion editor, it was by default rather than design. I had begun my career writing about music, and took a job as a stylist assistant with my first fashion boss, Nicola Formichetti, out of pure desperation (a running theme, you might be noticing). At that point I had already been contributing as a writer at magazines like Dazed & Confused and i-D, and knew I wanted to work in magazines. I loved the art direction, their niche cultural access, their seeming elitism, their world-building, and their panoramic view of creating an infectious lingua franca for the likeminded… whether or not I had the language to articulate this at the time. Once I made the leap to being an editor, the snowball of my fashion instincts began to gather momentum. I rarely talk about it now, but I got to spend my twenties doing interviews with celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears, and photoshoots with people like Mario Testino, Hedi Slimane, Karl Lagerfeld, Nick Knight, Inez & Vinoodh, Mario Sorrenti, Bruce Weber, Steven Klein, and Terry Richardson. I was living in a sort of fashion delirium, simultaneously dead-broke and imperiously lording over my own glamorous fiefdom of independent downtown publishing — in my own mind, anyway. Part of me wonders if I was a bit of a nightmare back then. Another part of me wonders if I’m biding my time until I resume course.

ANYWAY. My primary interest in fashion back then was cultural — how it served the subjects of the magazines and created conversation around them. I then became preoccupied by the people in fashion, who are epic, to understate things, and to whom I remain more or less tethered for life. Ultimately, I settled into a particular fascination with image making and branding: the full fantasy of styling and photography, design and packaging, marketing and distribution…the complete vision that gives a product its context, birthing it into the world. By this point, what fashion designers communicated from a wholesale creative standpoint became more important to me, in many ways, than what they were actually trying to manufacture and sell.

Some people come into the fashion world as models, which can influence their perspective on things like styling, design, and photography and take them down those pathways. Others enter the business as shoppers — if you can fucking imagine — their wealth and consumption habits giving way to a sort of vulturous outlook when it comes to product and the evolving premise of “luxury.” And then there are the celebrities, whose interest in fashion orbits the gaseous star of the self: communicating one’s own image factors into the way one views and judges fashion overall. Celebrities consider, for example, whether they would wear something, or, if the designer is nice to them, which is fundamentally subjective and a little beside the point. But every angle is important to understand — some of them might even be valid! My personal one, though, is that I see fashion as a multi-headed hydra, one that must build upon the past, escort us into the future, introduce concepts, spark fascination, seduce, inspire, and make a recognizable impact on the way people actually dress. Whether I think a designer succeeds or not has nothing to do with what I like or even what I would wear. It’s mostly about context and what they’re saying or doing and where it exists in the wider situation.

This brings us to now. It’s May 4th, which means we are firmly ensconced in SS26, a season that announced itself as historic with massive personnel changes atop 15 different houses in New York, Milano, and Paris. By now, some of those newly installed designers have shown two, three, or in Jonathan Anderson’s case at Dior, seven distinct collections (and his next is in less than two weeks). I’m taking this moment as an opportunity to give a sort of free-association on what I think about some of what’s been working or not working across this new wave of fashion — this season, last season, next season, we’re not keeping score. I’m making this first edition of what I hope will become a series, free to all subscribers. That way, when the next one is paywalled, you’ll have some arcane concept of what you’re missing.

I think it’s clear that Dario Vitale has emerged the victor in the last year with his immediately legendary standalone collection that revived Versace, to the stunned surprise of everybody with sentience and a pulse. From the morning the collection showed at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, last September, it’s felt seismic. I think what’s made it land is its emotion and personality: it has a self-assured fagginess, from the show notes by David Rimanelli to Spencer Singer’s styling, to the designs themselves which evoke an eroticized, mondo assemblage of ’80s and ’90s South Beach trashola. Dario’s ideas veer closer to the spirit of Gianni’s originating impulse — and beyond that, the now long-established clientele — than anything the brand has put forward in the last 20 years. The campaigns, which have unfurled with an almost possessed clairvoyance that they might be Dario’s only expression at the brand, have gone for broke, a nonstop essential assault by Blommers & Schumm, Tyrone Lebon, Steven Meisel, Frank Lebon, and Tania Franco Klein. This one collection has achieved something that was pretty unanimously considered impossible before it happened: it’s actually made Versace cool. Our attitudes around this brand have shifted so rapidly that we’ve already forgotten how miraculous it is that it happened at all. (Remember the H&M collaboration? We used to live in hell.) Dario’s swift and immediate firing by his former bosses at the Prada Group still throbs like a black eye, but it’s also had a sensationalizing effect. He put forth a one-and-done statement, a moment frozen in amber like a matinee idol dead too soon, instantly catapulted into the pantheon of myth. It is the River Phoenix of fashion collections. What he accomplished either props up his successor — Pieter Mulier, fresh off his superlative run at Alaïa — to jump into the hot seat with a more open reception on the part of the cognoscenti, or it sets him up for failure, giving him shoes too big to fill when he might have more impressively tailed Donatella. (By the look of things, whatever is happening with the marketing is already jumping off a cliff.) I will say that Mulier’s run at Alaïa deserves all the recognition it’s gotten: he created a future where it was difficult to make heads or tails after Mr. Alaïa’s death. I think, without Pieter, the label would have folded in on itself. I’m sure some people will say they would have preferred as much, but I wouldn’t have. That newly vacant job is now perfectly teed up — Mulier gestured Alaïa into the future with deliberation and respect, allowing someone else to step in without upheaving the entire operation. In Tim Blanks’s writeup for BoF, he quoted an attendee as saying “It’s like leaving the keys on the counter for the new owners when you sell your house.”

Pierpaolo Piccioli has the opposite issue. Balenciaga is a house that is reeling from a very different exit, and it feels a little too haunted by the spirit of the living. Balenciaga would have been a nightmare for anybody to take on post-Demna, but it’s a woe to the republic sort of an experience to watch it collapse into desperation and irrelevance the way that it is. Demna’s remodeling of Gucci is, conversely, a scream. The verdict is out on if his decision to shoot his own pre-collection campaigns on the heels of standouts by Catherine Opie and Blommers & Schumm is the right idea, but having Jonathan Glazer direct the film half of it signals nothing if not naked ambition. He still has a level of audacity (there’s that word I love again) that just makes you sit up a little straighter in your chair.

The glamourpuss arrival of Demna’s La Famiglia warm-up collection (his antipasto?) felt like an intentional crowdpleaser, harboring more than a little of Alessandro Michele’s prior vision of Guccified Hollywood artifice. Blissfully, his follow-up dug its nails back into the flesh of provocation with its exaggerations of physical beauty, pushing sexuality to some uncanny, cartoonish extremes. I responded to the collection’s slithery minimalism, which heralds a novel system called “consumer-oriented design,” prioritizing proportion over sizing for the brand’s clientele. It’s a relief that Demna has returned to a willingness to alienate, to do something that is at once self-indulgent, subversive, and unapologetic, especially after his ludicrous Satanic panic controversy at Balenciaga. (The company went too far in complying with the Qanon contingent in accepting responsibility for something utterly ridiculous and generally faultless). Corporate terror and consumer pandering is an unfortunate element that comes with doing business on a mass luxury scale, but for those of us who saw through both sides of the mutually dishonest charade, it was unnecessary and came across suicidal. Artistically, it interrupted a generationally unrivaled creative flow and took the wind out of the sails of one of our preeminent artists. Who knows, ultimately, what we lost in that period of atonement? I sense that some reticence toward Demna’s Gucci remains rooted in the ripples from that event, which feels…contemporary, I guess. At first I wanted to say that it’s depressing, but maybe it’s beneficial. If people aren’t offended, you’re probably doing something wrong — the bar for impact has never been lower. I hope Demna pushes Gucci even farther. We need designers like this. Otherwise, what? We languish in self-made prisons of visual austerity, too insecure and bludgeoned into mediocrity to allow ourselves to entertain any shred of a fantasy, a momentary rush of perversity, of discomfort, of humor, of menace? Don’t you want to eat shit and live?

Haider Ackermann also went extreme at Tom Ford. In a word, immaculately. Too much so, if you talk to some people. The rigor, the layers, the fetishism — not fetishwear, but obsession with ordinary garments pushed to the limits of strictness — and the merciless yuppie-ness was like a rush of blood to the head. The way the models glowered at the audience, approaching them with formidable inquisitiveness, verging on predation, like jungle cats let out of the zoo cage, made me think of Nicholas Roeg’s The Witches, as well as the previous season’s inspiration, Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. This level of theatricality feels a little condemned to the past. They don’t do it like this anymore! Etc. One hardcore dose of it is enough to invigorate the devoted for a long-sustained period. It doesn’t take much. All we want is a little devastating glamour once in a while. I hope it’s a world without end.

Who else am I into? I think Jack and Lazaro are performing well at Loewe. People seemed to expect one of two things going into that proposition: more of the same old Proenza or a continuation of Anderson’s approach at the brand. Instead, they brilliantly showed up with neither. Arresting, ultramodern, technically astonishing — they might have the most impressive debut of the season in their own context. They’ve managed to subvert expectations, push boundaries, deliver a shock of novelty, and psychedelically tap into all of our most neglected pleasure zones. To be honest, at some point, I felt like Jack and Lazaro lost the will to really push anymore. Maybe years of running their own, scaled fashion business took the wind out of their sails. Maybe they weren’t sure an opportunity like this was in the cards for them. To see them reinvigorated like this is electrifying to the point of being abruptly life-affirming. Their appreciation is infectious and you can feel it in every choice. It’s kind of major. You never know when opportunity will come knocking, or who will answer the door and with what.

I can complain about the way Jean Paul Gaultier’s brand has been handled over the years but why bother? It’s been nothing if not entertaining. First they got rid of the ready-to-wear in favor of only doing couture, now they’ve gotten rid of couture and are only doing ready-to-wear. It feels consonant with Gaultier’s sort of animating, topsy-turvy logic, and Duran Lantink is the right designer for the brand for that reason. A debut received as cheap and lurid? A follow-up with imaginative, masterful construction? Cone bras re-recorded and remastered? How are you going to argue that this isn’t JPG in the marrow of its bones? It stands to reason Duran isn’t working with the world’s most expansive budgets, and there is only room to grow. I think if people can lighten up a little, it finally will.

I’ve noticed there’s already backlash to Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel. He makes sense for Chanel, and I get the decision for him to be there. Chanel plays the long game. It’s a brand build on consistency and associations that don’t naturally allow for the most thrilling or adventurous prospect from a design standpoint. Karl Lagerfeld was able to infuse Chanel with a sort of Warholian, postmodernist irony which enabled him to bombard us with a cacophony of replicants season over season. Blazy’s work at Bottega eclipsed his Chanel work for me, maybe due to its elemental variety and insistence upon unique characters over established silhouettes. Menswear being a part of the proposition contributed to this concept in nonchalant, richly charming ways. At Chanel, Blazy has a different mandate. I find I am strangely responding well to the nostalgic pieces that evoke some of Karl’s Biarritz moments in the ‘80s. In terms of materialization and craft, it’s obviously on another level. I think there is enough lurking within these collections to break apart into something groundbreaking. Now that he’s established a language, let’s see if he can learn to abuse it.

Maybe the real story this entire time has been Jonathan Anderson’s Dior. It’s not for everyone, it takes risks, and the idea of it as a contemporary wardrobe feels fraught with confusion. Celebrities are having trouble wearing it. I think this is all really cool? For years I’ve favored Nicolas Ghesquière because of the way he takes subconscious associations, re-renders them, perverts them into something alien and propositional, confronts us with them exuberantly, forces them into being, and infiltrates the design logic of dozens of other designers without making any sort of fuss about it or claiming it for himself. Anderson feels like a different strain of fungi that’s been grown in the same petri dish. He fuses classicism with historical costume with streamlined technique and bursts of madness. It seems like he is really getting the point of it all, even if everyone else isn’t.

PARAPHERNALIA #007

Ciao.

Moving on: the Universal Pictures Michael Jackson movie is a phantasmagoric, multi-sensory, spectacular issue for me. And that’s fine. I’m simultaneously ecstatic that it’s happening, fascinated by the peculiar dimensions of its architecture, and cynical about its intentions. All of these feelings can and should coexist if we are watching movies in good faith, and if we care about films and pop iconography (and in my case, rifling through the personal debris of other people).

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It feels, increasingly as if everything has turned into a zero sum game, which has me questioning if we’re depriving ourselves of certain indulgences. Certain mysteries, theories, or analyses. I think a symptom of living in terrible times is a sort of ambient extremity in temper. People want certainty, and they want to know where everyone stands. Flare-ups shoot up like flames in a burning building, windows blown out almost out of nowhere. Even the BBL influencers are running each other over with their cars. Everything is either incredible or heinous, we’re either obsessed with it or we hate it and it’s fucking over and it’s embarrassing. You either condemn someone or you condone them, and actually, you’re probably complicit. I’m guilty of this often. I hear the things coming out of my mouth and stop dead half the time because I can’t believe I got got! Like a sucker, like a fucking mark. So I issue the quick rejoinder “unless…”

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Some quick plugs:

• I will be attending the Venice Biennale the week of May 4. If anyone is going, hit me up.

• Last week I moderated the Q&A for the U.S. debut screening of John Early’s Maddie’s Secret as part of the emerging and impressive Los Angeles Festival of Movies. I think the movie is a masterpiece and advise everyone to keep it at the top their lists in case any screenings pop up. It comes out in theaters later this year.

• This week I appeared on Bandsplain to talk about Hole’s “Boys On The Radio,” a sonic trojan horse through which I got to smuggle out my unleashed thoughts on indie snobbery, dope fiend mentality, ambition, jealousy, female rage, pop subversion, California punk, and Courtney Love’s unforgettable Hollywood rise. This is the kind of thing that gets me cooking with gas, so to speak, so have at it. Courtney even gave us a nice review in the comments, even though I used the term “gutter snipe” at one point. Hey, you either get it or you don’t.

It’s been interesting reliving the Celebrity Skin era in preparation for that podcast, as well as Madonna’s entire career for another project, and thinking about ambition in general — how it’s perceived, glossed over, covered up, defended, excused, demonized, ironized, celebrated, totally ignored, or widely condemned.

It feels like we’re living in a moment of widespread desperation across the board.

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I also want to compliment Eckhaus Latta on their comms strategy of late, which resulted in a highly entertaining e-blast last week containing a personalized Scene Report by David Lê wearing EL’s BUM BAG. I’d link to the e-mail itself but it doesn’t work like that. I assume it’s the sort of thing you had to be on the mailing list for and if you missed it, it’s lost to the tides. I think that kind of idiosyncrasy and no-frills communication of what it’s like to wear a product, by someone who actually wears the product, and who represents a brand’s real and intended customer, is either extremely smart or just the only way to do it now. No one really has the time or patience for fake shit anymore.

That isn’t to say that something like the Jordan Wolfson Prada ads aren’t working. I think the opposite is true—theirs might be the most honest fashion campaign of the season. Ever since Prada launched its Fondazione Prada contemporary art museum, the brand made a quiet attempt to keep fine art and fashion distinct and segregated to their two business arms (this was even explained to me when I once took a gig working for Prada as a consultant with 2x4). I noticed a small shift in this approach when they did a campaign for their Galleria bag with Scarlett Johansson by Alex da Corte, in 2023. Recently they collaborated with Anne Collier, but the Wolfson follow-up feels like a galvanized leap forward in allowing the two spheres to merge, especially since it’s now happening in concurrent seasons. What I like about Prada-Wolfson is the sterility of the beige-carpeted, white walled spaces and Oliver Pearch’s photography, which feels uncomfortably digital and affords a vacuum of texture within which Wolfson’s fearsome, digital fauna can haunt the young Hollywood stars, petrified in the foreground of the image. It reflects the ambient, collective distrust of artificial intelligence that decorates our present, and lands almost like a cruel, Kawaii taunt.

While at Balenciaga, Demna mined a similar DIS Magazine approach, creating campaigns that commented on the flattened economy of post-Internet images, in a way that felt both plugged-in and affectionately ironic. It’s possible you haven’t yet laid eyes on Ryan Trecartin’s ASICS campaign for Kiko Kostadinov, which is still being unveiled in chapters. Ryan went to Japan and created a girl group, creating songs with the help of A.I., and shot films that fit squarely within the riotous vocabulary of his work. Both subconsciously familiar and unnerving in their aesthetic stretch, the videos demonstrate how some fashion designers are continuing to push the boundaries of taste and refinement into audacious, exploratory new directions.

By contrast, Chanel’s hiring of Michel Gondry to re-create his landmark Kylie Minogue music video for “Come Into My World,” (a video we all once owned a copy of on DVD), ostensibly using more state-of-the-art postproduction techniques than the practically-shot original, landed like a runaway chainlink fence. I thought of Mark Fisher’s oft-repeated quote, “the slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” He also said “those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.” In the years since Fisher abandoned us to seek out our lost futures without him, these sentiments became calcified into a sort of populist disdain among creative thinkers for any and all nostalgia—in music, fashion, entertainment, advertising, or elsewhere. Sometimes I think about “my failed career”—I leapt off the sinking ship of print media into what some say is the sinking ship of Hollywood, and I wonder what draws me to these classical formats and why I can’t give them up. The simplistic answer is because I still believe there is beauty and potential in them. Fisher’s critique of nostalgia made sense 12 years ago and still holds some water today, but my anticlimactic opinion is that the merits of nostalgia boil down to style and application.

What else can explain the audacious intimacy and conceptual originality of Justin Bieber’s Coachella performance? Ever since his startlingly liminal Grammys number, I’ve felt the pied piper-magnetism of Bieber’s movements working me over. The segment of his show this past weekend, in which he sat at a laptop, surfing through his career-spanning videos, ad-libbing to his old hits was both clever in its memory-pilled fan service and formally novel. He gave nod to his own emergence from within the YouTube platform, performed a common ritual associated with intimate nights with friends around LCD screens, and delivered it in a way that suited his own impulses, while eschewing all artifice. Even the stage design was profound—the expanse and scale gestured toward spectacle while also insulating him from the record-breaking crowd in attendance. Having been through the ringer of the corporate pop machine, his insistence upon performing in a way that prizes self-satisfaction over cynical market expectations felt uncannily iconoclastic and humane. It made some of the other big performances look instantly passé.

Not The xx’s though.

Do Yourself a Favor

And watch The xx’s next Coachella set live this Friday, at dusk, in person or at home on a large television, with the sound turned way, way up. Their production design and live direction is so devastatingly perfect, watching it last Friday made me feel both euphoric and jealous. For a brief moment, I even reconsidered getting back into creative direction for musicians.

I often repeat to people that jealousy is my favorite emotion. My sarcastic follow-up is that it’s because it happens so rarely. More accurately, the more you are in tune with jealousy and the higher regard you hold artists in, you start to notice it happens a lot. I think people have a tendency to misuse their own jealousy, or have less of a grip on it than they ought to. The inferiority it can highlight can make one angry, or cause you to lash out. It’s important to be aware when you’re jealous so you can swap that type of reaction for the more appropriate one: admiration. I’ve become such a maniac that I can’t even say the words “I’m jealous” without smiling.

It bears mentioning that Nine Inch Noize was flawless too. The collaboration between Boys Noize and Nine Inch Nails feels like an object lesson itself in using nostalgia to create something seismic and new.

And without getting too much into it, so does the new season of Euphoria, at least based on the first episode. I’ve long wondered what it is about this series that provokes a knives-out response from viewers, critics, and fans in spite of how excellent it is. I think Sam Levinson’s conceit of exploding the experience of drug addiction into a widescreen critique of trafficking and exploitation is surely ambitious, but it’s so spectacularly directed that the ambition is validated. It’s a show about chasing a high and the ways in which the chase can shove you down a rabbit hole into an underworld you can’t escape from. Levinson plays this all in a sort of heightened, Looney Tunes register that knowingly conflates danger with a kind of classic Hollywood slapstick. The opening set piece of season 3 instantly made me think of Wile E. Coyote, an apt stand-in for the central character of Rue, who repeatedly masterminds her own self-destruction, whose potential villainy is offset by an irresistible, hapless charm. I love television as an art form because of its inherent durational nature. You can’t really dissect or analyze a series until it’s over, and by that point, the conversation has moved on. This results in a frustrating experience for the consumer that I find hilarious. Apart from Euphoria being the most cinematic show we have on TV at the moment, something I find great about it is the way it puts the general public into a headlock whenever it airs. People who would never be drawn to this type of tone or material have an almost begrudging obligation to behold it, lest they feel out of step with popular culture. They can’t be honest with themselves and leave it alone, even if they know it isn’t their thing. The popularity of the actors has them in a vice. They resent having to experience it, and all they do is complain. What’s not to love?

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

I’ve tried to get into buying art instead of clothes, and both have led me to the conclusion that I am not rich enough. But if you’re considering buying some insanely high-priced piece of clothing, contemplate a photograph from a legendary photographer instead. Here are some favorites coming up for auction:

• A Bruce Weber poster at Weschler’s.

• Wolfgang Tillmans’s Faltenwurf (Blue) at New Auction.

• Four Martin Parr photos at Roseberys London.

• Larry Clark’s Teenage Couple from Teenage Lust at Sotheby’s.

• Juergen Teller’s Versace Heart campaign, also at Sotheby’s.

• And Nan Goldin’s J. and Richard in Bed, Chicago, Ill. At Sotheby’s.

PARAPHERNALIA #003

Don’t let dark devour.

In this issue: diagnosing a mass delusion, illusory truth effect and fan fiction reality replacement, and the debut of the Paraphernalia Soundtrack, breaking down new music you should know about as a Chic Normal Adult Person in 2026.

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Am I really doing this? I’ve been asking myself this question lately, as I’ve somersaulted through an internal spin cycle over whether or not to “have a Substack.” I am, at times, extraneously aware of my own undiagnosed personality disorder which renders me all-or-nothing when it comes to any sort of personal commitment. I’m typically thrilled to selec…

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