In Doomed Fashion
Scatter my ashes off the California Coast, at Jean Paul Gaultier, or in Club Confessions
—Along with my scattered thoughts. It’s the middle of summer which means I took an impromptu trip to the North Bay to see my relatives, which constitutes something of a “vacation” for me, which also means I compounded all my writing assignments into a sort of furious, self-punishing jag upon returning to L.A. I figure none of you are looking at Substack anyway because you’re too busy doing something glamorous in Fire Island, Provincetown, Europe, or somewhere else I think I would rather be until I’m actually there. And with that said, I want to thank the new subscribers who’ve joined recently. Go back and see what kind of bullshit you’ve signed up for on the homepage. Since I’ve been away, today’s newsletter is free. I will have some recommendations in the paid edition later this week.
If Madonna Calls…
Well, the bitch did it. As I’m sending this out Madonna has achieved her tenth #1 album in the U.S. with Confessions II. It’s been a rare pleasure watching word of mouth spread, from rumors, to the rollout feedback, to a reappraisal of a lot of her earlier work—albums like Erotica, Ray Of Light, and American Life have been re-entering the conversation of late—and ultimately to the release and the reviews. (I can’t stand alliteration, it was an accident, I swear.) I’ve noticed that a lot of people who might be inclined to dismiss a new Madonna record have been persuaded to give this one a chance based on the recommendations of people with taste, and they’re telling me they’re hooked on it now. That’s probably why the positive reception feels so authentic to me, which is rare in the music industry right now. A lot will be analyzed and discussed about what made Confessions II such a success (trailblazing in ways), and there is a lot to applaud in terms of the decision making that led us here. You might think an artist of Madonna’s stature would be guaranteed a top-selling album in 2026 but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s worth keeping in mind that it was very much not a given. So this is a big deal. And if you were ever a Madonna fan, you have the opportunity to live through an iconic Madonna moment, to paraphrase Mel Ottenberg, which, to the pop-minded individual, is priceless. In a new episode of Bandsplain with Yasi Salek, I second-mic my perspective on whether or not the album has Grammy potential. It should surprise no one that I think it absolutely does. It feels like the most opportune time we might get to honor Madonna both for her entire decades-spanning run and for a record that actually deserves the award on its merits. It might even be the final opportunity to do so, some are saying. (Knowing her, it absolutely won’t be, but her inevitable awards campaign should lean into that talking point regardless. “Honor the phenomenon. Honor the woman.” Or something.) Listen to the full episode:
It’s Gaultier, Sweetie.
I always enjoy the sociology of a fashion season, the way it resonates (or repels) the denizens of my group chats, sends social media into a state of vitriol, or causes general dispute among the Ones That Care. What I don’t like is when the discourse around a collection reverts back to clickbait, especially clickbait from the previous season, clickbait that has already proven to have worked, unoriginal clickbait, ran-through clickbait being employed by certain commentators. It feels desperate to me. But I suppose the fashion crusades are long, the eight-plus times a year that they happen. We have to forgive fashion writers for running out of things to talk about and lowering themselves to replay the hits. Maybe analysis of a collection within its own context—that of the house and the designer—is boring to them, unless they spice it up with some reductive indictment of fashion writ large, and what it’s doing to women! Or even more commonly: what’s the point of it all!
(I really enjoy listening to Tim Blanks unpacking the shows on the BoF podcast, which feels like the way it ought to be done, in my personal opinion.)
There was a time, culturally, when most people were not glued to industry trade publications. Even if you imagined yourself a cinephile, policy wonk, or fashion fanatic, you likely weren’t spending time browsing Deadline, TechCrunch, or Women’s Wear Daily on a constant basis. Somewhere along the line, social media accounts sprung up whose entire existence is based upon scanning the trades all day and aggregating rumors and news, which became the way that a lot of breaking information actually reaches people. And from there, out sprang a million business-obsessed spectators, newly trained on the behind-the-scenes goings-on of their favorite companies, record labels, fashion conglomerates and film studios. It became like a spiderwebbing operatic effect, in which discussion of mergers and acquisitions replaced conversations about the product or output itself. Feeding this hunger, Puck launched its business newsletters, applying a bottom-line mandate to not just politics and tech, but also entertainment, art, fashion, media, and sports. Now, it seems, everyone has adopted a certain vocabulary when discussing things like the Haute Couture collections, and it’s memetic in nature. It centers V.I.C.s, stakeholders, and share prices. It’s tinged with fear and hysteria, and it hinges on existential peril and total annihilation.
A couple days ago, the writer Tim Noah published an article in The New Republic labeling this tendency as “doom porn,” asking, “Is There Any End To The Atlantic’s End-Ism Fetish?”, which addresses this precise trend. I found this litany particularly amusing:
In fashion, as in every other business segment, endless growth is the only option. Anything short of it is deemed a cataclysm, even if your business is bringing in €6 billion annually. Not only that, but the disaster is now announced and called out on sight, before any revenues have even been reported. It can taint a designer’s collection upon arrival and communicate to the fashion-literati that to support XY brand is akin to getting onboard a sinking ship. “They’re not thinking about the client,” goes the common refrain whenever a designer is seen to have taken too much of a risk, or pushed a brand into a genuinely new direction. It seems that some alleged fashion lovers cannot wait to express concern on the behalf of, presumably, individuals like Noura Bint Faisal Al Saud, Queen Rania of Jordan, Ivy Getty, or whoever else is regularly purchasing $80,000 dresses—or even getting $16,000 embroidered cashmere sweaters from Chanel. There’s much less hand-wringing over what resonance a garment has as an idea or an expression, how it filters into the rest of the brand and informs other product ranges, or what it communicates.
So of course, the designers first in line for the guillotine are always the ones who work within a high-concept framework. I used to refer to a certain type of person as a “luxury hog” back when I worked at V magazine. The industry is filled with people who are into fashion for aspirational, rather than artistic, reasons. You can hardly blame them. In many ways, fashion is built to attract and exploit the shopper. These people see fashion’s function as helping them create a wardrobe or craft an image, to project onto the world that they are a connoisseur… a highbrow person who appreciates nice things. When it comes to perennially conceptual designers like Rick Owens, Rei Kawakubo, or Junya Watanabe, the luxury hog politely tolerates their presence, as it comes with the association of being among the flock. But if you’re a designer with a fresher face and you attempt to do something avant-garde, it’s not long before the knives come out. Into this scenario walked Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier.
When Jean Paul Gaultier emerged onto the scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s he was known as fashion’s “enfant terrible,” due to his instinctive perversion of classical tailoring and his willingness to shock or even offend. Gaultier was a constructor: his designs came from the scaffolded approach of suiting, corseting, bustiers and brassieres. His gowns were deceptively complex and often embedded with elements of camp. To me, Duran is cut from the same cloth, albeit from a distinct and original angle that separates his work aesthetically from Jean Paul’s. He’s astutely mining the Gaultier archives for elements that suit his own sensibility, rather than trying to curve his sensibility to fit the existing expectation for the brand. The way he referenced some of Gaultier’s more maligned collections, like Autumn/Winter 2013 haute couture, with its voluminous, Eiko-Ishioka-inspired tendon coats, felt like a logical throughline to his own protruding, anatomical specimens. It also might have been an embrace of work from his predecessor that he feels was misunderstood and warrants reconsideration, albeit in shapes that are hyper-exaggerated and bear their own opulent, fearless lunacy. (Duran’s iteration is here for reference). What emerges from this alchemy is a shock of newness you sadly don’t often see anymore.
Citing Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV as inspiration, this season Duran takes a deconstructionist approach to the idea of haute couture, dismantling and questioning the utility of timeworn formalities like bustles, crinolines, and protrusions of tulle. His faucet silhouettes, Frankensteined leathers, and contorted bodices ridicule the standards and practices of what constitutes highborn status in design. It’s a primitive, theoretical exploration not unlike the hypotheses of spiritual forebears like Hussein Chalayan and Martin Margiela. (Even Kanye West, with his obsessive minimalist removal of layers, shoes, undergarments, and even clothing itself has some anchor in this same iconoclastic, blow-it-all-to-smithereens and start-over approach.) Whatever you think about the collection and how it pertains to actually being wearable, is, to me, beside the point. There are plenty of covetable daywear and eveningwear looks within the collection from which you could see entire ready-to-wear propositions being formed. Many houses are, right now, relying primarily on an excellence, and even an overwroughtness, of craft as their couture proposition, from Chanel to Dior, Fendi, Armani, and even Balenciaga. It takes a certain audacity, if not spiritual cauterization from outside criticism, to put forward a genuinely interrogative artistic statement in 2026, even within the walled-off category that has historically intersected with the avant-garde (see past collections from Thierry Mugler, Schiaparelli, Alexander McQueen, Margiela Artisanal, or John Galliano for Dior). What Lantink’s harshest critics are missing is that couture doesn’t have to be about beauty, luxury, politics, or even sales. It doesn’t have to dictate the way that anyone ought to dress—one thing does not negate another. Sometimes it’s about asking questions. If someone is given the opportunity to do so, wouldn’t it be depressing if they didn’t?
“Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick?”
Paraphernalia rule #1 is always meet your heroes. It’s impossible to be disappointed by anyone, in my experience, as they always give you something to come away with, even in the worst instances. Luckily, there were no such instances when I interviewed the legendary Joe Eszterhas for Interview magazine’s Summer 2026 issue—the Madonna Interview, you might call it. The screenwriter behind movies such as (but not limited to) Flashdance, Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Sliver, and Showgirls is still in an echelon of his own, in terms of how much money he’s made on script deals. He’s also defined pop culture with his scorched-earth dialogue and penchant for erotic, tabloid voyeurism. I can’t believe I got to meet him. He inspires me endlessly and is a charming, lowkey, genuinely nice guy. Check it out.
Do Yourself a Favor
And if you’re in the vicinity, planning a trip up or down the state of California, take fucking HIGHWAY 1. I do the drive alone, tacking hours onto the duration I might instead have on the hellish Highway 5. Every time I do it, I pull the top down on my Jeep Wrangler and listen to a playlist I’ve now had for many years, named after the vortex I like to call the “California swirl” of Big Sur. Communing with the most beautiful coastline on earth to bands like The Wake, Lansing-Dreiden, Cocteau Twins, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Brian Eno, Wild Nothing, Soft Kill, the Mary Onettes, Private World, Narrow Head, Nothing, Pure X, Big Star, Craft Spells, This Mortal Coil, Weekend, The Cure, DIIV, the Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunnymen, Deafheaven, Ariel Pink, and Yves Tumor just does something to me I can’t really explain. It’s supernatural and it yields dividends. I ask for things and they come true. It’s where spells are born and my soul gets reset. Besides, where better do I have to be? Free playlist for everyone. Do the drive with the windows open and thank me later.
PARAPHERNALIA #014
Call it trance, call it house.