SS26
Volume 1: Dario, Demna, Duran, and Demonology
For those of you with access to the playlist (upgrade to paid if you’d like it), I hope you enjoyed a weeklong dive into the career-spanning works of Stuart Price. This week we are back to regularly scheduled programming. Also, the GROUP CHAT has been fixed (my fault), and should be accessible to all subscribers now. You have gossip and opinions: stop withholding them from me.
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.