My Retro Career Melted

Prada, Trecartin, Bieber, Chanel, Euphoria, and uses of nostalgia in a collapsing reality

As I fumble around in the dark on Substack, I am arriving at a two-weekly-posts-with-one-of-them-paywalled format. The paywalled ones will necessarily go much more in depth. I would love to encourage everyone to upgrade, and I am happy to see how many people have already made use of the Paraphernalia Soundtrack (open to paid users only). And if we are friends in real life, or otherwise already acquainted, I am open to a comp-swap. Thank you to Zoe Latta for showing me how! Zoe’s Substack, Rotting On The Vine, is peak taste as you can probably assume.

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.

I’m not in Palm Springs. Don’t get confused.

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

I’m a firm believer that televisions belong on wheels, connected to as few cables as possible.

Don’t let dark devour.