In this episode, we speak with writer Rachel Tashjian about the distinctions between style and taste, fashion’s complex relationship to novelty, and the function of criticism in post-internet culture.

Podcast produced by Ryan Leahey
Original theme music by Kasper Bjørke
Photographs by Clement Pascal

Landon Metz:
Hello.

Rachel Tashjian:
Hi.

LM:
Hi, Rachel! How's it going?

RT:
Great. How are you?

LM:
Good, thank you. Where are you?

RT:
I'm at my apartment in Cobble Hill.

LM:
We're neighbors.

RT:
We are.

LM:
How long have you lived over there?

RT:
I've lived here for five years, in the same apartment. I'm not a big mover. I actually don't mind moving, but I like being in the same place.

LM:
Moving is among the most stressful, terrible things a person can do, right?

RT:
Yeah, avoid it at all costs. I think there's a story that comes out in the AP every six months that says so - and the second most-stressful thing is, like, your spouse and whole family dying. [laughs] But ahead of that…

LM:
Yeah, but putting all of your shit in boxes, though.

RT:
Yeah. I mean, it's a lovely place to live. It's a great neighborhood. I would say it's a classic New York neighborhood.

LM:
Totally.

RT:
Although what's not a classic New York neighborhood at this point?

LM:
Fair enough. Are you working in the city?

RT:
You know what? I work only from home now - which I thought I would be terrible at, but I'm actually I'm really good at it.

LM:
Do you have a dedicated space at home? Or are you going to cafes and hanging out?

RT:
No, I'm not precious about those things, because I have to be really productive, so I can sort of write anywhere. I can't write on my phone. I meanm I can sort of do it if I have to, but I usually just write on the couch. Sometimes I sit in bed and I'll edit something.

LM:
You can still fall asleep in that place?

RT:
Yes. Yeah, well. Do you guys know Adam Charlap Hyman?

LM:
I don't think so. Who is that?

RT:
So he's an amazing – well, I’d have to ask him what he would call himself - but he has an architecture firm called Charlap Hyman & Herrero. It's interior design, but it's way beyond interior design. Like, he can find you like the coolest rare lamp from the Bauhaus era. He has this incredible knowledge of antiques, and the first apartment that he had in New York was in New York Magazine because it was sort of modeled after Proust’s home and salons in Paris.

LM:
Wasn't his room lined with cork or something, because he hated sound?

RT:
Yeah. He told me, “You know, one thing that's really important - when you live in New York City, especially - is that every space in your home should be somewhere that you can enjoy relaxing. Your bed should be a place that has more functions than just sleeping and having sex.

LM:
Because of square footage concerns?

RT:
I think so, but I also think it's a mindset thing, right? You need a place to actually go unwind for a little while, because otherwise you're just always on. Like, don't you like the idea of like sitting in bed with a pipe and you’re reading?

LM:
Yes! I definitely have fantasize being able to smoke harm-free. That would be a wonderful.

RT:
Yeah. Actually, my husband and I have a big Christmas party every year, and the most exciting thing that came out of the Christmas party this past year was that three guests in the kitchen had an idea to invent a non-harmful cigarette.

LM:
Yes.

RT:
I'm still thinking about this. I’m like, “Actually, I’m going to start a group chat with these people who have never met each other before, but this is how we make our first million, because there's a huge market for this.” [laughs]

LM:
I feel like something like that has to exist, right?

RT:
I mean, there's the candy, like bubble gum.

LM:
Oh my God, yeah. My first foray into smoking.

RT:
Yeah.

LM:
Cool. So you're mostly working from home. Do you have an office that you get to go to from time to time to connect with people, or are you entirely remote?

RT:
There is an office for the Washington Post in D.C., of course, and I materialize there every so often, but I've only been once so far. I mean I only started at the end of April.

LM:
Cool. How was that transition?

RT:
It's been really great. I always wanted to work for a newspaper - not even as my ultimate goal, but it's a totally different pace of working and writing than it is to work for a magazine. I really like that all of my friends who work for magazines are closing their September issues right now, and I'm not having to deal with that. I remember last September, when I was at Harper's Bazaar, I profiled Nicolas Ghesquière, who's the womenswear artistic director of Louis Vuitton. I finished the piece in June or something, and I remember thinking, “God, what if something happens? What if he changes his mind about everything he does?” So this feels like much more of a natural pace to me.

LM:
It’s fluid. It's more immediate. Like, you're working on these stories, and they're coming out effectively in real time.

RT:
Yeah.

Christopher Schreck:
Do you have a sense of there being a different audience at the Post than other places you’ve worked?

RT:
Yeah, definitely. With the first couple of pieces that I published, it felt like the reception to them for me was like getting like an enormous bucket of cold water thrown in my face. [laughs] In a good way, but like a terrifying way, too. You know, there are commenters. I've never had commenters before.

LM:
Terrifying.

RT:
I've always worked for fashion magazines, right? So someone is reading that magazine because they want to learn and read about fashion - but if you’re a puzzle piece in a larger kind of news organization, I think readers, especially in D.C., which is not a big fashion city - although it's always like, “We're not a fashion city,” which is like, “Well, that means you're a huge fashion city.” Like, you’re protesting too much. But there’s a lot of like, “Oh my gosh, should we be reading this? Are we allowed to be reading this? Should you be covering this?” There's a lot of conversation that happens in the comments. I mean, obviously, that's not the conversation that happens with my editors, but that happens a lot. There’s this sort of existential crisis about whether or not it's okay to talk about clothing, or anything that’s coming from culture, that happens a lot in the comments, which I actually find really fascinating.

LM:
What is it about this particular source of information that would lead people to believe talking about clothing was not significant or important or useful?

RT:
Really what it comes down to is sexism. I think fashion is associated with women, but I think a lot of people tend to have a lot of self-consciousness about what they wear, and it can be difficult to realize that when you're walking down the street, everyone in the world is looking at you and creating an image of who you are in their mind based on what you're wearing. That can be very overwhelming to people, especially in a very digital age where you don't really have that happening to you a lot, or you don't really think about that happening to you a lot. So it makes you quite self-conscious, and then it becomes this thing that gets associated with consumer culture and wastefulness. People attach on to those kind of negative qualities about it, rather than focusing on the fact that this is something that a lot of people find fascinating, and these are tools that we all use every single day.

I always find it so strange that no one says this about the sports page. You would never be like, “Why are we talking about the new coach of this team?” You would never say that, but people will say, “Why should I care who’s the designer at Louis Vuitton? No one buys this stuff.” And it's like, actually, a lot of people buy this stuff: the chairman of LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton, is at any given time the first, second, or third-richest man in the world. So in fact, yes, a lot of people are buying these things. But you don't think about sports as like, “Why are we covering this?” Like, there are so many scandals with concussions on the field and people using steroids, but somehow that doesn’t happen, and the primary reason I can see for those two different reactions to those kinds of coverage - and I don't just mean the Washington Post or newspapers, I mean in general - is because one is a women's interest and one is a men's interest.

LM:
Do you feel like this shift in context has altered your own perceptions in any particular way? Are the things about yourself you've learned, or things about context that have changed since you started this new project?

RT:
No, actually not. I think people like good, interesting writing. Part of why I say it was like a bucket of cold water being thrown at me is that younger people just understand that fashion is interesting, especially Gen Z. To them, it’s almost like, “Why would you talk about sports? That's so boring.” Everyone talks about clothes like that. I was recently walking down the street in our shared neighborhood, Landon, and I passed these 11-year-old kids, and they were talking about how much their Supreme t-shirts would sell for and which sneakers they were thinking they would buy - whereas when I was that age, a group of boys probably would have been talking about sports. So yeah, I think there's this shift where it's like, “Well, of course this is something that we talk about,” and that's very interesting. I think about that audience a lot. Then I also think about how there are a lot of people who, at six, seven, eight o'clock in the evening, are sitting down with their phone or at their computer or their iPad or whatever, and they're like, “Okay, I just want to read something that's interesting and about something I don't really know about but I'm curious about, and I want the story told in a really interesting way.” The people who read the Washington Post are really well-educated and really intelligent and curious, you know? So I'm thinking about those two audiences primarily, and that's very motivating to me. But I always push myself. It's not like I'm like, “Oh yeah, what I'm doing is just totally working and that's great.” You want to keep evolving, but I think it's about evolving towards those two opportunities, rather than being like, “Oh, yes, this is silly or dumb, so I have to make this appealing to someone who agrees that this is silly or dumb,” because I just think that’s a wrong opinion. (I know opinions can't be wrong.)

CS:
Along those lines, it was cool to see you take a position at the Post, because I remember reading that one of your influences growing up was Robin Givhan. To my mind, she covered fashion from an interesting angle, in that she approached political coverage from a fashion lens, talking about what are people in government are wearing and what that tells us. It seems like she found a way to bring the discourse into that non-fashion conversation despite people's pre-existing judgments. I wonder if that factored into your decision to join the Post, the fact that Robin had been there and that you’d followed her growing up?

RT:
Definitely. Yeah. I mean, Robin is like the greatest of all time. She's won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s interesting with fashion journalism, that some of the greatest and most interesting journalists have covered fashioned. Robin is really a celebrated critic, and she's so sharp and so original. And I mean, you're right: When she won the Pulitzer Prize, one of the pieces that she won for was about Dick Cheney wearing that parka to the inauguration and why that was not appropriate. One of the columns that had a big effect on me when I was first becoming interested in fashion journalism and criticism was a piece that she wrote about how Michelle Obama Michelle Obama wore this pair of shorts when she was on vacation, and Robin said, “This is kind of a breach of decorum, it's too casual. She shouldn't be wearing shorts like that.” That had a huge effect on me. When I got the job, she was the first person to reach out to me. I mean, I'm sure art criticism is sort of the same, where there are these great legends in fashion journalism, and they're all still working. Like, Cathy Horn has done it all, but is still writing this incredible, world-class criticism at New York Magazine; Robin’s on book leave and she's coming back to the Post early or middle of next year; and then of course you have Vanessa Friedman and people like Rhonda Lieberman and Judith Thurman, all of these incredibly great role models for thinking and processing all of the things that have to do with fashion. But definitely, Robin was a huge attraction for coming to the Post, for sure.

CS:
Are there any contemporary writers that you follow closely now?

RT:
In terms of writers I follow, I would say I tend to read more fiction than critics per se. I'm a big LRB reader and New York Review of Books reader, and was a big Bookforum reader. I love Madeline Schwartz and Molly Young and Alexandra Jacobs and all those sorts of people. But like, I just read Emma Cline's book The Guest maybe two months ago, and that's the book I keep going back to. I really love her writing. It's funny, the first book that she wrote was all about women, and I liked it quite a bit, but it's almost like she's way better at writing about grotesque men than fun women. [laughs] That's her real muse. I think she and Odessa are in a “Who can gross us out the most?” battle.

CS:
Yeah, that Emma Cline book seems to be the book of the summer. Everyone I know has read it. I haven't read it yet, but it’s on my list.

RT:
It’s great. It’s like you can't put it down, but you like you really need to because it's so horrendous – not the writing, of course, but what's happening on the page.

CS:
Yeah. Do you know Duncan Hannah, the artist?

RT:
Yeah!

CS:
Have you read 20th Century Boy?

RT:
Yes.

CS:
I've been making my way through it from day to day, but it's been a great read so far. I really like his work, too.

RT:
I think that's an underrated way to read. You can do that with that book, and the Edie biography that Gene Stein did, and Lipstick Traces, where you just read a little bit at a time. Bob Colacello's book Holy terrorist is like that, too. That one's really good. The Warhol Diaries is another one, where it’s almost like an encyclopedia.

CS:
Oh yeah, definitely.

LM:
So you were just in Scotland, for your honeymoon?

RT:
I was just in Scotland, yes.

LM:
What did you bring to read on your honeymoon?

RT:
So I actually converted to Kindle reading…

CS:
Woah.

RT:
[laughs] I know, I never thought that I could, but it's so much better if you travel and you read fast. I read really fast – like, not in a good way. It’s gross, it’s like binge reading. It's not healthy or elegant. I'm just like, “I can't wait to like see what happens next.” So I was used to having a big stack of books when I travel, all stuffed in my carry-on, and this has just made things so much easier. But let me look at my list, because I keep a list of what I'm reading. So, I read on my honeymoon. Okay. I read The Guest, and then I read this book that came out last year called Deliberate Cruelty, about Truman Capote's sort of twinship with Ann Woodward, who was a former showgirl who married a millionaire and then shot him in the middle of the night.

CS:
Right.

RT:
Then I read the Dominic Dunne novelization of that piece of history called The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. And then I read Ada Calhoun's memoir, Also A Poet, which was incredible, and then I read a tell-all by Doris Duke's nephew (I think) called Too Rich, which was outstanding. And then I read this really disturbing and bizarre book called Revenge of the Scapegoat.

CS:
Oh, what's that?

RT:
It’s this really strange book about a woman who hates her family and believes that they made her the scapegoat for all of their problems, and wakes up totally disoriented in the middle of a field of what appears to be an upstate art museum that's sort of a combination of the Private Museum, the Glenstone Museum, the Bruce Museum and Dia Beacon, and she declares herself to be the milk maiden of this artist residency and it just gets weirder and weirder from there.

CS:
Wow.

RT:
Yeah, it was great.

CS:
So I was reading the latest Opulent Tips, and specifically the part about the “coastal grandmother” trend. You said something there that really stuck out to me, which was that “most trends nowadays are not bottled at the source, and that's why we must encounter them all with skepticism - even if we eventually accept or embrace them.” That really resonated, and to that point, something that I've always really appreciated about your writing is that it’s so grounded in research and historical reference. I feel like there's often a temptation to focus on novelty when writing about fashion, but you're great at pointing out historical precedence and, more to the point, showing how acknowledging those precedents can actually invite a richer experience of what's in front of us. It makes me wonder what you see as the actual role or value of newness in fashion. How important is originality compared to, say, a timely revival or a thoughtful reinterpretation?

RT:
That's such a great question. I mean, I think that fashion is not really about newness at the moment. To me, what seems to be happening is that it's merging with the entertainment industry, which is a funny thing to say when it appears that the entertainment industry is falling apart. But what I've seen over the past year is a kind of emphasis on spectacle and performance, making the fashion show into a sort of experience. I'm actually surprised to see that more fashion designers and brands haven't emphasized in-person shopping as being this kind of experience. I think that some brands are doing that - for example, I would say that's what Bode is so great at - but I have heard anecdotally from other editors and writers that have told me, “Oh, I'm really sick of shopping online, I really have been enjoying going into stores and actually like seeing the things and trying them on that way.” But I think what does happen as a result of this enmeshing of fashion and entertainment and celebrity is that when something is new, it seems even crazier to me. Like, I was really blown away by Balenciaga's couture collection, which is kind of a continuation of what Demna's done for his last two couture collections. He’s only done three. This is something he’d wanted to do before the pandemic, but then it was pushed back and pushed back, so I think he showed the first one in 2021 and then summer 2022 and then again a couple of weeks ago, and it was so strange and so extremely original that I went back and looked on the Vogue Runway app, which is how most of us in the fashion industry will look at these shows if you're not at the shows in person, and it made everything from the days before look really dated, which is something that fashion has always done. When we think of the archetypal fashion experience, thinking of it as being this European elitist thing, what we're thinking is like, everyone's wearing a mini-skirt, and then some designer says, “Actually, skirts should be long,” and instantly, everyone wearing a mini-skirt feels like an idiot. That’s actually what Demna’s collection accomplished, and I found it really shocking, in the environment we live in, that that he could pull that off. He’s also doing an interesting about-face – and not just because of the scandal that happened with the two advertisements last fall, where there was this online cancellation that happened of him because there was this Q Anon pile-on that somehow the brand was promoting child pornography with this very ill-advised ad that they had put out with children. (I'm just catching everyone up, in case you forgot about this - but there's a great New Yorker piece about it if you haven't read it.) I don't think that this about-face is only influenced by that, although I would guess that it probably is in part, but for a while, he really embraced celebrity in this major way, and you might even say he cemented this era of fashion-as-entertainment. I mean, he did this incredibly hilarious show where the runway was actually like a red carpet, and you had people arriving in looks, but that was actually the show - and then we all sat down, and there was an episode of The Simpsons directed by Balenciaga.

CS:
Yeah!

RT:
It was amazing, and this was like 2021. And then, of course, he dresses Kim Kardashian for the Met Gala as this void. So he's really embraced celebrity, much more intelligently than many designers, and now he’s, like, couture. He gave this interview shortly after the couture show in a French newspaper where he said, “You know, I don't understand why I'm associated with Kim Kardashian, when she’s only carried two of my bags once in a while.” I would say he’s being a little disingenuous there, but it is a way for him to sort of throw down the gauntlet and say, “I'm not about this anymore” - which I always think is really interesting, when a fashion designer makes that kind of decision and says, “Okay, I'm turning a new page, and I'm headed in a new direction.” And not just fashion designers, but creative people in general. It’s like saying, “I'm not painting anymore, I’m just doing sculpture now,” or, “I'm not making comedies anymore, I'm making the Truman Show,” or whatever.

CS:
Do you think part of the problem is that some people might not know whether or not their ideas are actually new?

RT:
Do you mean the people who are making the ideas?

CS:
Yeah, it could be it could be the designers, but I think it could also extend to customers and maybe even sometimes critics.

RT:
Yeah. I think this an issue you run into as a critic, when you want to either rave or take down something, is figuring out what are the precedents for that work or that collection or that movie or book or whatever, because I think a lot of times the reason why we really respond to something is that it feels different, but that doesn't necessarily mean new. I actually wonder increasingly if the reason we respond to things is because they just sound familiar? That actually seems like kind of a defining thing of our time.

CS:
I’d agree.

LM:
Going back to your earlier notion around fashion leaning towards the spectacle in presentation, is part of this related to the way information is being disseminated? The cultural context in which things are created now is very dislocated and malleable. It moves around very quickly, and we digest it in our own unique ways. So is part of this a desire to create a break in that mode of engaging with culture, where it's a shocking experience that pulls you out of that?

RT:
Hmm. I think that's like the best-case scenario in fashion. I would say so, but I would say the way that I've that I've seen it used in fashion is more cynical than that. A lot of it is like, “Okay, look, we have to put on a fashion show and it's very expensive.” So, especially for smaller brands, it’s like, “How do we break through the noise of the larger brands to get people to look at what we're doing on the runway?”

LM:
Do you think this sort of historical mechanism of seasonal collections for a young brand gets in the way of the creative output? Having to keep up with the rate of performance that’s necessary to always be having new content - not even necessarily for presentations a few times a year, but also just for social media and just the way people are used to consuming information now - is that rate sustainable? Especially for a smaller or younger brand who is working towards something new, creating something genuine and authentic, having a vernacular that is entirely their own while indebted to some sort of precedents - is this pace really possible to maintain while still doing that?

RT:
Well, I think a lot of like these smaller and especially American brands are feeling like what you just articulated, which is that it's not sustainable to do the number of collections that Louis Vuitton does in a year which can be like a dozen collections or shows.

LM:
Yeah, it's crazy.

RT:
Yeah. So like Luar, which is a really buzzy emerging American brand designed by Raul Lopez, who was one of the co-founders of Hood By Air, he only does one show a year. He continues to produce products throughout the year, but it's just one fashion show, and that's his big expense, and that's really working for him. Emily Bode does something similar. I think she's only shown once a year for the past several years, and she shows in Paris - not necessarily because the majority of her audiences in Paris, but I think because she feels like it's a cool branding opportunity for her. I hate that phrase, but I think that's what it is. It feels more elegant, it's refined. There is an American Men’s Fashion Week, but it's much more controlled than what's happening in Europe, in a way. So yeah, I think like there are younger and smaller brands or designers who are thinking it doesn't really make sense, and it'll be interesting when people who are now 25 or 30 are 40 or 45 and they're running one of these big fashion businesses, to see how they’ll do it. Will they feel like they have to put out that number of products? I mean, the funny thing is Virgil Abloh was Gen X, but he was so millennial. Like, he was really, really millennial. He put out more products and projects and ideas than anyone else, so I don't know. I mean, a lot of brands used streetwear as a cover to make more stuff. They were like, “Oh, this drop model that Supreme does is really great. That's how people want to receive products.” But it quickly revealed itself as just a way that brands could give people more stuff all the time.

LM:
I don’t know. I feel like there's a saturation level where “more, all the time” starts to feel watered down and less significant somehow. I mean, we're talking about newness in fashion, and I think historically, fashion has really encouraged that amongst designers - but also, from a historical perspective, fashion is a form of design, right? The human body sets the scale and sets the parameters; obviously there's wiggle room (no pun intended), but there's still a certain role and function that fashion has to conform to or operate within. Maybe there are historical standards that you also find really beautiful and worthy of celebration. Maybe it doesn't have to be all new, all the time.

RT:
Well, what's funny is actually this idea of fashion and newness. I think it's a misconception. I would say there were two genuinely new moments in fashion. One was in the 1920s, but even more significantly in the 1930s, when you had designers who were deeply and tightly in conversation with the movement of modernism, and so this idea of pushing away everything historic was very interesting, almost to the point of a sort of nihilism. You have Coco Chanel creating clothes that have no corsetry - and again, she's taking existing things and recontextualizing them, but you do have actual moments of genuine invention and newness at that time, where it's just about complete and total originality. You have like Coco and Elsa Schiaparelli with a number of other very interesting couturiers who are creating things that are incredibly and wholly original. Like, what is happening in the ‘40s and ‘50s, which is a golden age of haute couture, where Paris becomes this huge international spectacle of fashion - that's all recycled and reinvented ideas.

Then the other moment of genuine originality was in the 1990s, where you have people like the Antwerp Six and Hedi Slimane starting to emerge, Raf Simons is starting to emerge, Martin Margiela is building his brand. So other than those two periods, each of which is probably eight to ten years, everything else has been like, “Look at this again, but in slightly different way.” That’s what Karl Lagerfeld was really good at: he was a king of recontextualizing. 

LM:
And Virgil, too.

RT:
Yeah. I think that this emphasis on newness is like, is that really what we should be talking about fashion not having right now? I'm not sure. Fashion is not something like art, where there's something to be protected from the point of view of moral creativity. I don't know. If you really believe in fashion, and you believe in what it's about and what it represents, you kind of just have to let it go and let it do its thing and spin away like a crazy top or something. But of course, what that means is that something like Shien is the zenith of fashion, because it's constant novelty all the time, unstoppably. It’s like if someone were to open your mouth and shove it with pearls or something. [laughs]

So yeah, it's interesting to think about. It seems like a lot of people in fashion, who are observing fashion, feel like there's something wrong with it, and feel like it's moving in the wrong direction, but I don't really know what the answer to that is.

LM:
I mean, as someone on the outside, I look at someone like Alessandro Michele or Emily Bode and I see this sort of reverence for historical precedence, but also for the storytelling in the materials themselves and the way that’s situated culturally in a broader context outside of just the world of fashion. I don't know how to articulate this, and I don't know entirely what they’re thinking, but it feels from the outside like “retreating” is not the right word, but it's moving in a different direction than newness. I don't know entirely what that what that direction is, but it feels like some part of that creative impulse is metabolizing something like Shien, that’s just like fast-paced new content. It feels rooted in slowness and in history and in a much more human mode of storytelling. It's not necessarily, intrinsically tethered to fashion itself as much as it seems to be about these bigger human narratives. I think without Alessandro, it maybe has something to do with this family and growing up and being Italian and the cultural context that those pieces held for him - and maybe similarly for Emily. It seems to me like some designers are working in different directions.

RT:
Yeah. I think that storytelling element is really interesting, and it does feel like a lot of especially American designers and younger designers make clothing in this kind of autobiographical way, which is such an intriguing shift. I think it also makes sense to see that happening in the era that we live in now, because fashion design for such a long time got its inspiration from something feeling different or foreign, and that often resulted in a kind of appropriation, or even a sort of backwards xenophobia. Now that's not really available to designers, and so some of that mode of creation is a sort of course correction. I mean, while he was at Gucci, Alessandro was making these very pointed course corrections, because in the first several collections he did, there were moments like, you know, there was a Dapper Dan jacket that he basically ripped off, and a lot of that storytelling idea that sort of emerged in his later collections was from him learning from that and saying, “Okay, then. How do we approach historic or significant garments and actually explain them and present them to people?” Virgil was really good at that, too. He would put out these crazy booklets with every collection that were constantly updated, and it was like a dictionary of all of his terms. They would email you this book with the press release, and it would be like 234 pages, where some of the terms were just totally made up and some were like “postmodernism,” and here's the definition of postmodernism. So I do think that the experience of shopping as knowledge-gathering feels like a big frontier to me. In a way, it is kind of entertainment, you know? It’s like going to a museum and seeing the placard on the wall - which I think Emily is so good at. Those tags that tell you the whole history of this garment or the silhouette or the material, it’s very similar to going into the Madden and reading the little description of what what's happening in this painting.

LM:
It also anchors the experience in something historical. You feel connected to a larger story through the garment.

RT:
Definitely.

LM:
You can literally, physically wear that, which I guess does become a kind of form of entertainment, right? It’s an embodiment of experience.

RT:
Yeah. Well, I wonder too, what will happen when fast-fashion brands catch on to this idea. Like, “This garment is based on what Cardi B wore to the VMAs into 2019.” [laughs]

LM:
Yeah. I have no idea what answer to this question is, but I wonder if there's some sort of bizarre disconnect between these bigger cultural narratives that are happening online with someone like Shien and the way people are considering outfits or new styles through Instagram or TikTok or whatever versus putting something on in a place like New York City walking down the streets. There's such a difference. You’re on trial in a place like New York, in real time, in a way that you would never be in a more performative space online.

RT:
Yeah. There's this whole conversation happening on TikTok about how to actually find things that you like, because someone who uses TikTok is so used to just being presented things by an algorithm that they don't really know how. A lot of young people have told me this as well. Like, “Okay, I saw this clip from this movie. How do I find other movies that I like?” Or, “I'm being shown all of these products by Shien and Boo Hoo (which is another fast fashion retailer), and I'm being told, ‘Okay, this is on the homepage, so this is what's cool.’ But how do I actually find clothing that I that I like, that like I think is interesting?” I think it's really fascinating that it’s happened so quickly, but I also worry about the paucity of information that's available to fill that void. It is actually really hard to find those things when you look things up on Google. I don't know what's happened to Google, but it almost feels like it's like broken or something.

LM:
I think a lot of information has moved to social media platforms. I think that's actually part of the issue with Google or just the internet, the old internet now. Ye Olde Internet. So much of that content has moved to hashtags on platforms like TikTok or Instagram. It's not going to show up in a Google search.

RT:
But it’s then hard to find on social media, to navigate to things that are actually really interesting. It's going to show you what it thinks you want to see, or what it thinks most people want to see. Like, there's a great account that I follow on Instagram, I think it's called NYC Looks.

LM:
Oh yeah, I follow that.

CS:
Me too.

RT:
It's just street style, and it's crazy. It's crazy stuff. Like, there's this kid who I found on there who is wearing pointy medieval shoes with tights over the shoes and the shorts, and to me, it’s like, “This is what I moved to New York for. This is really great.” [laughs]

LM:
That’s kind of what I'm saying. It’s like, remember in the ‘90s, when you would find a store upstairs and it was the fucking shit? You had never seen anything like it before, and it’s just like, “I just had an experience that I've never had.” It seemed much more viable before the internet, to organically discover things and decide what felt good - which also means you had to put it on and perform it in public. There’s a vulnerability in that. There's tons of tribalism in that. You have to assume an identity all the time and really stand behind it - and especially in a place like New York, where you're not hidden in a car, your outfit is your house, effectively. You’re in public all the fucking time. The way you present has to be pretty real. You have to stand by it. You have to really believe it.

RT:
Yeah, but I think in New York, you're rewarded for that originality.

LM:
Totally.

RT:
I like “Your outfit is your house.” That's really good. [laughs]

LM:
Yeah. I mean, I'm not necessarily concerned. I know that in New York, there's always been this thing about “I miss the old New York” or whatever, but I just hope that moving into the future, that new generations creating culture in a place like New York feel free, and feel like they're still making those discoveries organically, and that the narrative is unfurling amongst their peers in real time and in real spaces. I grew up in the punk scene, so did Chris, and I always remember that feeling of hearing a new sound, metabolizing it, making something because of it, and then going back to that space and sharing it with your peers in person. That feedback loop of art and artists and audience, and how the hierarchy between those three things can become neutralized when they become a symbiotic relationship - I think that is the real beauty of cities and places like New York, where you can put something on, go outside with it, see someone, see something, have a conversation, go get a coffee, go out to dinner, meet a friend, whatever, and maybe over the course of those eight hours, your interpretation of that presentation has evolved. Maybe there are things about it that you want to magnify, or things about it that you want to change. That’s happening all the time, every time you walk around. My favorite Ramones lyric is, “I want to walk around with you. I don't want to walk around with you.” [laughs] To me, that's the whole cultural experience, is just walking around with somebody, taking it in, and being vulnerable enough and humble enough to change and ask questions. I just hope that that can continue in a post-internet page, and also that there's still room for criticism. Like, if everything goes and everyone's just pandering to the algorithm, someone still needs to be critical somewhere in the world. We need someone to ask real questions and to have historical context to really push back against something and make culture meaningful. Sorry, that was a long tangent. [laughs]

RT:
No, I love it.

LM:
What is your relationship to criticism? What do you think the role of criticism is now in a post-internet age?

RT:
I think it’s to provide context, and also to open up something that is happening so that the person reading the criticism comes away with a larger understanding of that subject. I'm never trying to convince someone of my point of view, although there are a couple of times where I’ve been writing something and I'm like, “I feel really, really strongly about this,” and I hope that someone comes away and is like, “Okay, I agree with that.” But most of the time, when I'm writing something, I'm just hoping that the person who reads it comes away saying, “Okay, I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's an interesting way to think about it,” or, “I hadn't considered it in that way,” or, “Wow, it seems like there's more going on here than I thought,” or, “I saw this and I was confused by it, and now I feel like I get it a little bit more.”

CS:
I don't know if I've ever read a purely critical piece from you – “critical” as in criticism, as opposed to criticality. A negative review, essentially. Given the professionalization of the fashion industry and thus fashion writing, the concerns vis-a-vis advertising and partnerships, etc., how do you feel about publishing a negative review and its implications on a business level?

RT:
Well, I mean, I’ve published some negative reviews when I've been at fashion magazines that had a lot of advertising. I wrote a piece about this brand called Coperni that's based in Paris, which has done a lot of these spectacle shows. They did a show where Bella Hadid walked out and then two people sprayed a dress onto her, and I hated it. I really hated it, and I wrote a very negative piece about that. I requested to go to their show the next season and they didn't give me a ticket. I didn't ask, “Hey, is it because I wrote this negative review?” It could have been, or it could have been that they just didn't have room for me, I don’t know.

LM:
That presentation sounds indebted to the Alexander McQueen robot arm thing.

RT:
Yeah, but it's interesting, because a lot of the people who defended this presentation said, “Well, it's good because it recalls that.” It was a lot of younger people who were saying, “You know, we're kind of denied these experiences of totally inventive and disruptive fashion, and this was a brand attempting to do that, so we should defend and praise them for doing this.” But I'm not sure that’s a valid reason for someone to be praised for creating something, to attempt to revive the feeling of an earlier work.

RT:
Like a gesture could be more significant than the vehicle.

LM:
Mm hmm. It was also just really misogynist, I thought.

CS:
Yes.

RT:
Making a woman walk on stage and then spraying her with something that's really cold and potentially an unsafe, untested chemical? Not good. But I have to say, I've been really careful in my career to gravitate towards editors at magazines who understand what I do, what I say, and why, and are supportive of that. I don’t know if it's the same way in art criticism, but there’s this demand among younger people, where they’ll often say, “Oh, we want we want more critical coverage, too many fashion critics aren’t just saying something's bad.” And I think people actually are saying that things are bad, or not as good as they could be, but with age, you simply have a kind of nuance, where you've seen a lot of things that are really bad, so rare is the thing that you're going to see that's worth saying, “This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.” [laughs] So to be honest with you, I've never really worried about it. I also think like fashion designers are people, too. Someone like Maria Grazia Chiuri, who's the women's designer at Dior, is someone who Gen Z and some millennials really dislike. She started in I think 2015, and her earliest collections were not well-reviewed by the big critics at the time. Cathy Horn didn't like it, Robin didn't really like it; I don't recall what Vanessa wrote, but I don't think she was super fanatical about it, either. But young people are always like, “Why aren't critics tearing these collections apart,” and it's like, well, first of all, they are. Kathy has written some really negative stuff, even recently. But also, you have to think about the context. Like, it's Dior. It's an enormous corporate brand. It's not there to be provocative and enthralling, it's there to be a behemoth that sets the agenda for what luxury looks like to a mass global consumer.

LM:
Which is a skill set in his own right, right? It's like writing a pop song instead of something super avant-garde or whatever. There's a certain skill set required to deliver to the masses as well.

RT:
Totally.

CS:
I wonder, along similar lines, if there’s anything that you've written about in the past - be it a collection, a designer, or a broader trend - that you've since changed your mind about, and have said so publicly?

RT:
Wow, great question. There has to be, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Do you guys feel like there's anything that you wrote about or felt really passionately about that you changed your mind about?

LM:
All the time. That's all I do, every day. There have been times where I’ve said, “I'm only wearing blue for the rest of my life.” [laughs] I change my mind all the time, but I also think it's really important as a person to be able to hold conflicting truths simultaneously. I think it's really a blessing and a gift to have the capacity to know oneself deeply, and to know what one feels in a given moment intuitively, and to trust that wholly, and have the capacity to make decisions in real time, in the moment, based on that intuition, but also to be humble enough and curious enough to receive new information and change that perspective, again in real time, and to have the empathy to be able to hold conflicting truths and to feel what you feel and know what you know, but still have an awareness for opposing ideas. I think it creates a better, more fluid experience as a person. It also leaves you with a lot more capacity for growth over time. So yeah, I think I always feel whatever I feel in the moment very passionately, very strongly, but always open to changing my mind even seconds later, if someone can convince me otherwise.

RT:
Yeah. Like, I love new information.

LM:
Yeah! I would love to receive new information, all the time, as often as possible.

RT:
Yeah. I really love new information, and I love anyone who thinks something that I don't think or that's different from what I think. I love dialogue.

LM:
I also like being with people who trust themselves and have a certain self-appreciation to know what they feel and to actually know what they want. So, you know, it’s like TikTok trends versus discovering oneself. And that could just be like a coming-of-age moment, with the demographics of people on TikTok slowly inching towards adulthood, but I think it is a true luxury to know who you are, to know what you want, and to be able to express that articulately. I think it's really a gift, but I also think it's really important to be open to change over time. You can't be so concrete that you stop evolving.

RT:
Yeah. This idea of finding yourself, I feel like people don't really talk about that anymore. My mom was a big reader of self-help books in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and a lot of them were about very broad things, like how to be a good person or how to discover what you really want, or what you want to be in life - whereas now, it seems like a lot of self-help books are more like, “How to survive in this economy.” [laughs] I mean, I’m talking purely anecdotally, but like it seems like a lot of the advice now is about optimization and becoming more efficient, rather than how to be happy or how to accept yourself.

LM:
I think we live in a gross, motivated world. It probably has a lot to do with Big Tech. The models that young people are growing up with is like, “Growth at all costs,” so efficiency and optimization become imperative in that mindset, instead of just being who you are, being in the moment, being present.

RT:
Yeah. My mom had this pillow that was like, “Life is what happens when you’re busy living.” I wonder what the embroidered pillow of today would be. It’s probably just, like, “#Goals.” [laughs]

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