Vogue Paris is not an uncertain magazine

"As much as I love your blog, it does make me nervous that you and others are exposing the "secrets". Fashion is fashion when the mass public can't see the workings"
Anonymous post on TI

The above quote was a response to Rad Hourani forwarding his Reference Library of favorite films to TI, which I promptly posted. The assertion made me think a lot this weekend , not only about TI but about the state of fashion in a digital culture . Despite the advances in digital photography and the attendant rise of hyper-manipulated images in post-production, there is something about the fashion industry that wants to stay...how do you say...defiantly analog. Much of that is understandable. Fashion is a tactile proposition...the feel of fabric , the touch of the glossy magazine, the sense of skin and sex and self that makes it all tangible . The means of production behind fashion also have a very certain way of working with ideas of restriction, quality control, elitism and strategic limitation all conspiring to create that expensive cachet around the product. I don't mind any of that, because I understand its the way the game is played.
But the thing is, the world has changed. The internet is a force of nature, quite unnatural to editors of a certain generation, but a force that has completely changed the nature of information. The world no longer waits two months for an editor to decide what's new, now or next. The kids want to know NOW. They want it faster than fashion has been willing to give it to them. It's kind of been my personal challenge since TI started, which is to try to think of a fashion that is faster, harder, stronger than what it has been in the past. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the past but I think to be a good "editor" or to use a more Jamaican variation on the word, to be a good "selector" you have to know how to ride the rhythms of your time.
Not everyone in fashion remains analog. There are a set of designers who understand the clever thing is to engage this public fascination and manipulate this voracious attention . Karl Lagerfeld is ahead because he understands that need of the public to see the inner workings. I suspect this is why he felt comfortable shooting the FW 08 Fendi campaign in the full blast of public view, in the middle of Manhattan. We've all seen the model, the stylist, the wig, the bags, the props. There is little mystery left to the visual direction of that campaign. Has Fendi become any less fashion for it? Is Mr Lagerfeld less mythic after his dance of the veils in "Lagerfeld Confidential"? . When you watch Marc Jacobs slog through fittings for the Marc Jacobs show in NY and bag meetings for Vuitton, does that ruin the cachet of MJ/LV? Are less bags sold because the public has seen the process involved in their making?
Hollywood long ago discovered that the "behind-the-scenes" and the "making-of" is a clever form of advance PR to get them into their seats at the movies. I have the same hope for the fashion industry, which I can finally confess I truly love. You know the way some people love the greasepaint, the clap trap, the kleig lights of the "theatre" . Well this is how I love fashion.
That is why I think it is so great for the young designers I've met through this blog like Rad and Shayne at Hood By Air to share and embrace and involve. I think to sell clothes these days, you also have to sell a taste point that expands to music, movies, clubs, books, art gallaries. Let's face it. There is no shortage of clothes in the world to choose from. What I buy when I shop these days is not just a designer's idea, or cut or fabric ( or for that matter his status shopping bag). I want to know how his world is made up. Not only do I need to respect his creativity but I need to feel moved by his tastes. This is why I currently love in fashion, the clothes of those two very different newcomers Rad and Shayne. In terms of The establishment, I fetishize Rick Owens and Yohji Yamamoto's Y3. My favorite fashion magazine these days is Vogue Paris because it is built along a very certain taste. The pages thereof boldly say," this is what I love. You are not obliged to love it too". Labels on a shopping promenade have long been an empire of signs. Now I have come to believe in the empire of taste. Feel me?