Karl Lagerfeld was one of the—no. He was THE grandmaster of fashion. Complete shitlord. Did what he wanted, NFG. Master troll. Didn’t capitulate to terrorists or PETA anti-fur weirdos or anyone, really.
Basically he was the complete opposite of the fashion pack mentality.
Karl has been judging my bulletin board since 2009
The man was a force of nature. He was of the same era as designers like Yves Saint Laurent, but unlike YSL who eventually gave up and died, Karl kept living. He ran creative for multiple high-profile brands at once, actively did photography, and never gave the fashion media what it wanted.
The more I think about it, the more I appreciate how much Karl carved out a space for himself in fashion using villain tactics, along the same lines of Trump and Cernovich.
These tactics include, but are not limited to, the fact that he:
Created a look for himself that was immediately identifiable and almost impossible for anyone else to pull off. I’m reminded of Alice Cooper, who also used the villain trope.
Always, always shipped. (See: “Real artists ship.”) The man worked.
Gave the something to talk about. Whether it was the Wookie Suit or the Vulva Scarf (see above), he created news cycles.
Karl’s death has left a huge void in fashion.
The only two people I can think of who might be able to step up and fill it are John Galliano or Marc Jacobs. Both are creative enough. Galliano has already fallen from grace once, and Marc Jacobs is a known troll.
Anyway. Weird things happen when there’s a void. We shall see.
Some days I’m productive. Some days I get lost in research. Some days I spend way to much time trying to decide if I’m an INTP like I always thought or if I’m an Ni-Ti INFJ instead, which would make sense given my predilection to symbolic thinking and getting overwhelmed under a sea of intuition. None of it really matters, except not knowing bothers me greatly. I’ve mostly made my piece with not knowing my exact IQ, but personality….
Perhaps this is a case of “if you can’t understand the world, try understanding yourself instead.” Or, it’s just me avoiding doing the work.
» If you are concerned with truth and are at all into fairies, conspiracy theories involving aliens, or hallucinogens of any flavor, run—do not walk—and read Owen Cyclops’ observations on demons. I’m not kidding.
So, people always bend the knee. People often take the path of least resistance. Corporate PR is used for both purposes, to show Power that the corporation recognizes its authority. It’s no coincidence that WokeCapital’s bio has read “Speaking Power to Truth, one tweet at a time”. That’s all that’s going on there, really. And recognizing that Power lies on the Left, and not on the Right, corporations take advantage of this asymmetry. You can never go wrong by signaling too far left, but you can afford to piss off righties, who have near zero cultural, political, or legal power. Just note how they go after Trump, who is ostensibly CEO of the country, when he rocks the boat!
“It’s all about learning who your supporter base is,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the NPD Group and the author of “Why Customers Do What They Do,” in an interview during the 2016 campaign. “How do they live? What are their trigger points? What words resonate with them? It’s worth its weight in gold, in the political arena just like the consumer arena. We call it demographic profiling, because voter profiling sounds like a dirty word, but that’s what it is.”
Fashion profiling is another facet of this approach, using data analysis to identify the way brands are perceived — and it should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Assessing value systems, and goals and priorities, via the clothes people wear has been a part of professional life for years. The “dress for the job you want” adage is an expression of fashion profiling. Calling someone a “Gucci person” or a “Celine person” is fashion profiling; opting for Levi’s over Rag & Bone makes a statement about associations and history and opens one up to fashion profiling — albeit in a manner that generally leaves much unsaid. Cambridge Analytica preyed on that human reality via algorithm, using data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.
» Italian Vanity Fair looks to be doing some interesting things. I’m taking notes.
“We don’t have to close ourselves to our golden tower,” he said. “In Italy, we are living an era of populism and I can see the suffering of big newspapers because they are closing themselves into a very niche and snobbish explanation of reality.” He views the “simplification of complexity” as the opposite of that populist movement. “Philosophy can be very pop.”
Marchetti describes his strategy for Vanity Fair Italia as an “opera in three acts.” The first priority is online content, where he wants to publish exclusive songs, videos and content that will hopefully be newsworthy. “The goal is to become the center of the conversation in our country,” he said.
Next comes Wednesday’s print issue, which he has redesigned with creative director Massimo Pitis to have a more collectible, independent magazine aesthetic. It’s an approach he said he’s learned from fashion brands like Gucci: just because something is intended for wide audiences doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have the sophistication of a niche product. And the third act represents his ambitions for events.
I’ve been sick(ish) this weekend, and watching more YouTube than usual, so there’s some fatty videos at the end of this post. It’s one of those times when I can’t tell if this is a real upper respiratory infection, if my body is processing out yet another round of SIBO toxins, or if it’s something else—perhaps the physical manifestation of a mental transformation? Weird, I know. I still wonder. I’ve watched my mind and body chase each other around enough times that it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Anyway, there’s lots of interesting stuff on the internet this week.
» The “Why I left Buzzfeed” of the beauty industry. Fashion and beauty editors are discovering the power of the personal brand, and are “defecting” to join the ranks of bloggers that they once railed so hard against.
Some editors say they ask their managers before agreeing to appear in a campaign or post sponsored content. Others say they often agree to work with brands and ask for forgiveness afterwards, especially if the brand is from outside their beat.
Steinherr did not ask for permission from Condé Nast to sign with the agency Storm Models in 2016, but she informed them afterwards and says the company was always supportive of her partnerships with third parties, which she identifies with “#ad.” “I have my own code of conduct,” she says. “I don’t find it difficult because I’m used to it — to say this is editorial, this is advertising — to me, there are no blurred lines.”
» From the other end, ROOKIE is shutting down. Tavi was a blogger who became the editorial establishment, so we’re kind of coming full circle.
» We all knew it was coming: CRISPR babies. Pray for these children.
» True confessions of a trans person. I appreciate the honesty, even though I can’t begin to wrap my head around how this is a good thing. Then again, I have spent my life getting my body to heal, so it’s unthinkable to deliberately inflict a wound upon myself.
The merger of fine and casual dining seems to show no signs of abating. As a result, even moderately quiet restaurants have become few and far between. Things have gotten so bad, there’s even an app for helping potential diners find quieter places to eat. The culinary establishment once aimed to dismantle the stuffiness and high cost of dining out by blurring the line between casual and fine dining, eliminating classist dress codes, and make dining a more collective experience. But ironically, that democratization of eating out has produced a new and more hidden tyranny: making people tolerate unhealthy, distracting noise for good food—and then duping them into spending more, drinking more (along with the risk of vulnerable situations that can result from alcohol), and shouting over the din to socialize. By comparison, the worst thing that could happen at one of the upscale establishments of old was using the wrong fork or running afoul of the dress code.
» Reverse Foundation tutorial…but really an interesting ramble on personal beauty.
» I like how Gabbie Hanna describes the process of change. It’s never linear, and always includes setbacks. The mental transformation is the toughest part. If you’re going through any sort of major change, you might find this helpful.
» Gary Vaynerchuk always provides food for thought (edited slightly for clarity):
There’s a reason that people are struggling mentally, and I’m telling you: everybody wants to blame social media. It’s bullshit. It’s parents creating fake environments for children. We’re building zoo animals. When you take a tiger from the Bronx zoo and you put it in the actual jungle, he dies in one second—because he’s not grown up in the actual environment.
You take kids who think they’re good at baseball, because in school up until 12th grade everybody’s good, and then you actually go and play baseball and get struck out 900 times in a row, you go back to your dorm room and start doing cocaine.
“Oh come on, Gary, it doesn’t work like that.”
That’s exactly how it works. …
Creating fake environments is an issue that needs to talked about much more. “[Don’t create] fake environments” doesn’t mean be mean, just don’t create delusion.
The jackals of social media have descended on Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations.
AIDE: There’s this perception you don’t care about children, so we need to—
MELANIA: Get me the blood-red nightmare Christmas trees with NO ORNAMENTS OR PRESENTS
These trees remind me of the Handmaid’s Tale protestors. Perhaps these decorations are more tongue-in-cheek than you think.
Yet when Michelle Obama rolled out a similar treatment, she got a feature in Vogue.
Glowing lava trees
At this point, the double-standard isn’t shocking anymore. Frankly, it’s expected, boring, tiresome. No matter what Melania does, a large subset of the population will criticize her for it regardless of what (or if) they liked the aesthetic last week.
If Melania wore the Gucci clown look (which she never would, but let’s pretend for a moment), it would finally die.
Perhaps the “Cold Melania Doesn’t Care” criticism is real, but ~showing compassion~ wouldn’t turn things around for her. It would just make her weak, and they would swarm. Even divorcing her husband and denouncing everything he stands for wouldn’t do it.
Feminists, which most fashion people tend to be, absolutely hate it when other women go off the reservation. The hate is so strong that it permeates everything—the free-thinking woman can no longer do anything right.
Even Christmas decorations.
I appreciate that Melania does her own thing, with style and grace. She’s certainly not going to get any support from the Style Establishment.
“Lean In” is not fundamentally a feminist manifesto. It is a road map for operating within the existing system, perhaps changing it at the margins to make it easier for other women to, well, operate within the system. Sandberg does not spend much time asking whether the system is so screwed up that pushing against it might be the better route toward meaningful change.
Landver believes that the next big lifestyle brand—the next Tory Burch or Martha Stewart, say — will be founded by an influencer. Or several, actually. “As opposed to looking at one big hundred million-dollar brand, we’re looking at building many ten million dollar brands,” says Landver. “I say longtail five times a day. The future is going to be many more small brands focused on smaller segments.”
» Further proof that SM Entertainment’s audio engineers are the real MVPs
One way or another, the end is coming. But if you truly, deeply engage here, you can live more life in a week than most people live in an entire lifetime. By that I do not mean that you can have more experiences, I just mean that you can experience far more moments with far more depth and clarity than someone who’s just drifting through life on autopilot. One week fully and consciously appreciated contains more lived life than an entire stay in this world from cradle to grave when it is taken for granted.
According to Tribe Dynamics, the top influencer driving the conversation on luxury products is the popular — and controversial — singer-songwriter, model and make-up artist Jeffree Star, who has over 500 million views on YouTube and almost five million followers on Instagram. “[Star] is talking not just about the beauty brands, but also the fashion apparel and accessories products,” says Begley, recalling a meeting in which representatives from one luxury house told him they didn’t want to be associated with Star, although he was already driving more conversation about the brand than anyone else.
“[Star] is shaping the perceived messaging. [Luxury houses] don’t have to make him the face of their brand, but this is a new wave of publishers that you have to manage and work with….Think about this as PR,” he continues. “How have you treated editors in the past? You got product into their hands pre-release. You built relationships with these people and created experiences that shaped their view of the brand.”
» The Jake Paul story never ends. Good at sales, or just manipulative? Knowing that Gary Vaynerchuk is an investor in the Jake Paul brand changes the story quite a bit, for me at least. Listening to Shane Dawson talking to him about “how he doesn’t know what he’s doing is wrong” is like watching a rabbit explain to a shark how eating grass is better than snacking on surfers.
Not saying that Jake Paul is right, necessarily, but the discrepancy in worldview is large. Shane “I FINALLY HAVE MERCH!” Dawson comes from an entirely different place from Jake “yo” Paul.
Because no event calls for a nun-Darth-Vader-puffer-jacket-Christmas-angel look like a Harry Potter movie premier. Looks like Ezra Whatshisface is determined to ascend to the next level of fame, yeah?
Dressing this way certainly gets you buzz. But it also makes you the weird goth kid who is super-pissed that he has to take family photos with the rest of the normals.
I love the end of October; in my part of the world, it’s finally starting to feel like fall. This weekend I’ve been raking leaves and curled up in front of my fireplace. I’ve discovered a renewed interest in practical wisdom—that only comes from doing something—so as I do an activity I ask myself “what am I teaching myself with this?” Am I teaching myself to be passive and accept something that someone else is offering to me? Or am I pushing myself to do and to accomplish things for myself?
It’s a revealing question.
» Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way? Phonics, as it turns out, teaches kids how words are an physical manifestation of an abstract system. Teaching “whole language” is the equivalent of “do what I tell you and don’t ask questions,” rather than giving children the tools to think and discover for themselves.
while you’re likely to find some phonics lessons in a balanced-literacy classroom, you’re also likely to find a lot of other practices rooted in the idea that children learn to read by reading rather than by direct instruction in the relationship between sounds and letters. For example, teachers will give young children books that contain words with letter patterns the children haven’t yet been taught. You’ll see alphabetical “word walls” that rest on the idea that learning to read is a visual memory process rather than a process of understanding how letters represent sounds. You’ll hear teachers telling kids to guess at words they don’t know based on context and pictures rather than systematically teaching children how to decode.
» Someone is already looking at MBTI type and personal style, and I love it. The site is more more sales-oriented than a thorough examination, but it’s still something to go off rather than simply expanding through first principles.
» In grantland, the wrong font can mean certain death. This PI’s grant got rejected because of byzantine font rules in the VA’s grant review system. Given the sheer volume of grant submissions to go through, I can understand why something as arbitrary as formatting is used to disqualify applications—just to narrow down the field.
But Instagram’s current reporting pathway doesn’t allow users to explain exactly why something is offensive, leaving moderators to guess.
“There could be all sorts of things that the user understands that the moderator doesn’t,” Andy said. “So many of my co-workers are old, people who did not grow up thinking like anything like this would ever happen. They got hired because their résumé says, ‘I have a Facebook account,’ but you need a Ph.D. in 4chan slang sometimes, and stuff that’s specific to Instagram, in order to understand what someone means when they post something. We just have no context about the stuff that we get related to harassment, and it makes it a lot harder to interpret who is attacking.”
» Everything I knew about reading was wrong—a recap of Naval Ravikant’s approach to reading. I’ve heard a lot about this guy on Twitter, so I listened to the podcast that was the origin of this list. He had some interesting things to say, but he’s not the luminary I was expecting. I will continue to be mildly interested.
» I’ve been ruminating on the NPC meme. If you pay attention in this world, you’ve seen it before. It’s nothing new. If you’ve ever tried to do online dating, you’ve seen it. If you’ve ever worked customer service and known the exact conversation you’d have with someone before they even open your mouth, you’ve seen it. I recently moved, yet I see near carbon-copies of people that I knew in my last living environment.
Today I’m wondering if one of the hallmarks of an NPC is the inability to conceive of a way of thinking outside of oneself. Not just the ability to entertain the idea as a “thought experiment,” which most people can and will, but actively cultivating and using other people’s way of doing things to everyone’s better advantage. I feel like many of the people I talk to come from a “but why would you do it that way?” perspective, like any other way of tacking a problem is completely alien and therefore wrong.
I think this is closely related to solipsism.
» Speaking of solipsism, this type of thinking may be why the fashion industry is so insufferable.
Coco Chanel, a winter, once said that “Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony” – and thousands of editorials ever after never dared to question her. Similarly, a famous Australian fashion editor, also probably a winter, insists that her family all wear white on Christmas Day (which may indeed be a great foil for her, but mightn’t do much for a Soft Summer cousin or Autumn in-law.) A lot of fashion gurus seem to be winters, come to think of it, and perhaps this projection and marketing of personal bests as universal truths is a key point to understanding the industry as a whole.
In other words, people want rules and “universal truths” instead of thinking for themselves and standing on their own two feet. That goes double for fashion people.
Anyway, in my drugged-up, post (minor) surgery state I’ve decided that the absolute best way to spend my time is to do a deep dive into Personal Color Analysis and revisit, once again, the question of “If I’m a Soft Summer why do I look so good in olive green?” Seriously. The 12-step, more nuanced version of the “seasons” color palette makes a lot of sense, but I still can’t really figure out where I fit. I have a lot of characteristics of a “soft,” but have more contrast than the typical Soft Summer palette. I don’t do pastels, but feel at home in jewel tones. Yesterday I thought I could perhaps be a Dark or Deep Autumn, but I’ve never considered myself particularly warm-toned.
My skin has yellow undertones with pink overtones. My eyes are hazel and grey. I prefer wearing warmed-up cool tones (olive green, plum) and cooled-down warm tones (burgundy, brown). Basically I am very confused.
It doesn’t really matter if I fit in a category of someone else’s color system, as long as I find colors to wear that I like, that harmonize with me, and that project an image that helps me to succeed in this world. But I, like the people I grumbled about three paragraphs above, simply seek a set of rules and universal truths that will make me feel better about myself and my place in the universe.
I just talked myself into and out of a hole in the span of a few paragraphs. That is kind of weird.
» Speaking of weird, or maybe just speaking of drugs, WHY DO PEOPLE LIKE THIS STUFF? I do not understand the appeal of being high, aside from the obvious appeal of not being in pain. Especially the type of high that comes from drugs, which is this shallow chemically kind of mind/body change. Maybe it’s because of my extensive experience which I wrote about yesterday, but there is a huge difference between a shallow drug-induced change in your body, and a real, lasting change that you initiated yourself. Energy from caffeine does not equal energy from a full night of sleep. It’s the energy equivalent of fake news.
There are so many other ways to change your state of mind that require little to no effort or money and which have very few side effects or downsides if you get addicted. Like sprinting. Or cream sauce.
Try one of those things before you try drugs, kids.
I think that this is related to “women aren’t funny” but also to the fact that fashion is likely full of personalities kindred to Registered Dietitians or Nurses. They know what is approved right now and that definitely isn’t it.
Humor is never “approved” and so fashionistas will never recognize it.
This reminder is brought to us once again by the humorless fashion writers of whatever British newspaper this screenshot is from. I can never tell apart The Guardian or The Times or whatever. (I did my research. It’s The Guardian.)
As far as I can tell, Karl Lagerfeld is still in charge of the design direction at Fendi (which is focused on fur, something that Karl has never compromised). And from the looks of it, Uncle Karl is still up to his old tricks.
I can never decide if I like Karl. He’s somewhere in between “Elitist Fashion Prick” and “Greatest Troll of Our Time.” Sometimes he comes across as so stuck up—but maybe that’s the fairytale that fashion journalists want to weave about him—and yet he can get Fashion People to wear the stupidest stuff.
And some of that stupid stuff is really, really beautiful.
It’s like he’s turned trolling into an art.
Why stop at pink pussyhats and vulgar homemade costumes when you could go luxe, with fox fur and silk? With the further indignity of having paid that much money for it!
Who’s more at fault—the fashion designer who put something together knowing exactly what it looks like, or the fashion girl who buys it anyway?
I would love to get Karl Lagerfeld and Banksy in a room together, honestly. I think they’d have a lot of interesting things to say about art and commerce, and playing to the crowd.
Tonight I didn’t give myself a lot of time to write this post (hello, 10pm bedtime) but I’ll put it on my to-do list to write up a listicle or something of Uncle Karl’s Greatest Hits.
I seem to remember what’s essentially a Wookie suit from sometime circa 2008.
I want to escape into a misty forest at dawn and run toward the light that spills through the trees. I want to cloak myself in velvet and swim into a glittering nebula. I want to discover the truth of God and the universe.
Recent Comments