We are in the midst of fashion month again. All I can say is that this menswear season and couture inhaled ART and exhaled FASHION. Though it wasn’t the first season of shows to occur ‘post pandemic’, it’s certainly the first that has mattered. My favorite shows included: Y/Project x JPG RTW and couture, Schiaparelli, Valentino (my personal favorite of Couture Week), Viktor & Rolf, Loewe, Hermès, Kenzo, Bianca Saunders, and Lukhanyo Mdingi. I hope Women’s RTW later this month follows suit. Pun intended.
Book Club #011
Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin- (5/5)
An instant cult classic and undeniable tragedy. The book is a collection of journals as written by an anonymous lesbian narrator as she makes her way through one of Taiwan’s most prestigious universities in the years following the end of martial law. Her experiences are interwoven with allegorical sidetones about the lives of crocodiles within Chinese and Taiwanese society and the dangers that they are perceived to pose. At the end of the day, the crocodiles just want to enjoy their pastries and congregate, but neither they, nor the narrator can allow themselves to breathe freely long enough to do so.
The Idiot, Elif Batuman- (5/5)
This is a book that I admittedly put off reading because of the extremely varying Goodreads reviews. However, once I picked this book up I could not put it down.The narrator Selin, seemingly floats through her first year at Harvard passively observing life around her, experiencing her first love, and mulling over which experimental film classes she should take. The Idiot is an excellently paced internal monologue filled with incredibly well-read references and razor sharp quips. Undoubtedly a great book to prove my expectations wrong and kick off the reading list in 2022.
Perfume, Patrick Süskind- (3/5)
A Dickensian paced tale of the senses. A German man saw me reading this and told me he considered this book to be canon to the entire country of Germany, which is quite high praise. The murderous tale was definitely entertaining and felt like a folk tale was being told to you instead of you reading a novel yourself.
Can Big Brands Get It ‘Right’?
Authenticity is undoubtedly for hire, but it can rarely be bought. Almost every campaign that sprouts from a large luxury brand, whether it be under the umbrella of Kering, LVMH, Estée Lauder, etc., is pre-planned, pre-budgeted, and at the end of the day, deeply inorganic. Brands such as Gucci and Balenciaga don’t necessarily have issues in creating in-demand ‘it items’ of the season to sell, however, the amount of content production that goes hand in hand with the selling of said it item is usually where their faculties fall short in artistic creativity.
Images often roll one into the next presenting blank models with interchangeable bags, influencers all modeling the same shoes on the second Monday of the month after embargo is lifted, or a placement from a cover feature rarely breaking through the noise. Obviously there are exceptions and it’s unfair to equalize all creatives in the industry under one standard of mediocrity. For example, British Vogue’s cover spread, featuring the Loewe SS22 collection broke through the noise and probably is the best editorial use of the collection to date. On the other hand, when the largest pockets (luxury conglomerates) voices have the most ubiquitous ad space, it becomes and endless montage of commercial monotony.
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