IRENE IS ONE OF the fashion industry’s many éminence grises. She started her work in fashion in the late 1960s and worked her way from Mademoiselle to Elle to Vogue. In the late 1980s she became the fashion editor of Vogue Paris where she pioneered the work of photographers like Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Bruce Weber and Paolo Roversi, at the time all young and looking for a break. In 1991 she resigned, after a lunch meeting where an important advertiser tried to put the screws in, and her publisher’s silence spoke volumes. On the day she left she famously received the gift of a photograph from every photographer she had worked with at Vogue, delivered to her office every hour, on the hour. Shortly afterwards a chance encounter with Yohji Yamamoto led to the next phase in Irene’s life, as the designer’s creative director. Next to Yamamoto, who Irene affectionately calls her spiritual ‘brother’, she helped the designer fine-tune his vision and shape his legacy, in the process leaving an indelible mark on the history of fashion.

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FASHION WEEKS ARE PECULIAR rituals stretched over ever expanding slices of the annual calendar in which fashion professionals prove their worth. They are like the Olympic Games of glamour: designers show off their ability to catch and direct the Zeitgeist, stylists their editing skills, writers and critics their wit in making all this colourful blurb comprehensible for the general public, even when the actual message is little less than the emperor’s new clothes. In this sense, writers are a fundamental part in the whole mechanism, and in fact reading show reviews is a regular and often enjoyable commitment in the self-reinforcing and exclusive routine of attending fashion events. In the morning, right before the action of the new day starts, it is with a mixture of expectation and delight that we read what Suzy Menkes, Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman, Sarah Mower, Tim Blanks, Godfrey Deeney and all the other penmen who have made it to the upper echelons of the industry – for their sharp and insightful views at best, for the weight and circulation of the publications they are affiliated to, in most cases – have written about the previous day’s shows. It might be a way to understand a designer’s message, as in the case of a hardcore conceptual like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, while sometimes it is a way of making overtly and perversely obscure references more approachable, as with Miuccia Prada. As industry people delve into these daily offerings of critical flourish, everything is carefully scrutinised: from the length of the paragraph dedicated to any given designer, to the countless ambiguous phrases that force the reader into a game of guesswork as to whether a reviewer thought a show was, basically, good or bad. Reading between the lines is a perilous, if amusing, activity and it isn’t for nothing that every comma is evaluated and every adjective dissected, as if these often hastily composed reports were the offerings of an almighty and ancient soothsayer. Why do we do it? Well, it’s simple: we all – readers and professionals alike – strive for objective criticism, knowing all too well the many obstacles that prevent this utopian ideal from becoming reality.

Vestoj and Style Zeitgeist are teaming up for the coming weeks in an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas. This dialogue will take the form of a series of critiques of recent articles in the fashion press with the aim of delving deeper into the state of contemporary fashion media – and what that says about our industry at large. In our first conversation we look closer at a text by Alexander Fury on Alessandro Michele of Gucci and Demna Gvasalia of Vetements and Balenciaga, recently published in New York Times’ T Magazine’s ‘The Age of Influence’ issue, in order to ask more wide-reaching questions about the role and significance of fashion writing today.

MANY ARE THOSE WHO today speak of the necessity of a ‘fashion revolution.’ Certainly there are some fundamental issues in the way fashion currently functions; the pressure on brands (high and low) to distribute garment collections at a faster pace, the question mark over the role of fashion weeks in the current climate (and the fashion show as the optimal model for displaying clothes), and the flux that the role of the ‘creative director’ of high fashion brands is currently undergoing – not to mention the ethical concerns that have dogged the industry for decades. In T Magazine’s ‘These Two Guys Are Changing How We Think About Fashion,’ Alexander Fury talks obliquely about rules that need to be broken, and implicates ‘the editors, the designers, the corporations’ as the manufacturers of these rules. But if the fashion system at large is at fault, what role does Fury and T Magazine (the editors) alongside Michele and Gvasalia (the designers) of Gucci and Balenciaga (the corporations) play?

There are countless flaws in Alexander Fury’s article, (many of which are pointed out in Eugene Rabkin’s recent opinion piece on StyleZeitgeist¹) but perhaps the most significant (and common) one is that the writer neglects to see the role he himself plays, alongside his client and subject, in the mainstream fashion system. With this in mind, it’s worth broadening the spectrum to ask wider questions, not just about lazy journalism but rather about what we can expect from the fashion press today, and what role each of us have in upholding the ‘status quo’ that Fury refers to in his article, and that so often gets blamed for the ills of our industry.

There is a vicious cycle between mainstream fashion media platforms and the industry at large, with the tendency of fashion press to generate hyperbolic statements that feedback false narratives into fashion’s economic framework, as well as to its consumers. Fury’s truism that, ‘rules in fashion are made by the industry: the editors, the designers, the corporations who fund the whole thing’ is a sentence that seems to gesture vaguely at the industry paradigm, but this simply reflects a ‘Buzz Rickson effect.’² A similar dynamic occurs between fashion media platforms – both their editors and writers – and the fashion industry at large. In this case, however, the textual storytelling around the so-called ‘broken system,’ Gvasalia, Michele and so forth, builds on the cultural capital of these conglomerates. As a result, companies, like LVMH and Kering, acquire a perceived status as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘rule-breaking’ to their brand.

Fashion writing has a tradition of being flaky, commercially-motivated and solipsistic, and what is often lacking in mainstream fashion reporting – Fury’s article being a good case in point – is actual argument offering a balanced point of view and consideration of both sides to an argument. Fury, as so many other fashion critics, not only fails to provide the debate with any analysis, but also fails to identify the real issue – the lack of self-awareness that so often leads to unwitting self-censorship and any critique that does more than just gesture vaguely at the industry at large.

Nearly two decades ago, Anne Hollander attempted to explain ‘why there is no good fashion writing’³ in a piece for Slate Magazine, and her observations about verbal hype, (Fury, for example, calls the reactions to Gvasalia’s first Balenciaga collection ‘ecstatic’) the relationship between advertisers and publishers (Kering, who owns both Gucci and Balenciaga, is a major advertiser in T Magazine) and the far-remove of most catwalk garments from the reality of the majority of women’s everyday lives, (Fury extols the virtues of both Michele and Gvasalia who ‘talk frequently, incessantly about clothes, rather than fashion’ but fails to mention the exclusivity inherent in said clothes due to their price tags) still hold true today. The type of obliviousness displayed here by Fury, and elsewhere by so many other fashion writers, raises the question of what is really going on in the triangle between publishing platform, writer and brand. As a rule writers and editors would never openly acknowledge the influence that corporations have on editorial content, and to avoid cognitive dissonance, most find ways of obfuscating this fact from themselves as well. The tacit agreement that ‘you don’t bite the hand that feeds you,’ thus mostly comes across in the attitude that fashion journalism should be about ‘seduction’ (as Vogue’s Hamish Bowles acquiesces in Vestoj ‘On Power’) or the rationalisation that posits that a magazine should only feature what its editors like. The psychological defence mechanism that gives rise to criticism by omission is but one of the many ways that the fashion press avoid the discomfort that would arise from any overt censorship, be it from your publisher or a press executive at any given fashion house.

Literary scholar Siobhan Brownlie describes self-censorship as occurring ‘prior to publication when the cultural agent censors his or her work voluntarily, in order to avoid public censorship, and/or in order to achieve approval from the dominating sector in society. Self-censorship may be conscious or unconscious (in which case social norms have been internalised).’⁴ Understanding how self-censorship affects fashion writing is crucial for any discerning consumer with an interest in reading between the lines: it is the compromise we make in order to marry our desire for expression with the (perceived) necessity of paying heed to the dominating forces in the industry. Noam Chomsky has famously written about the manufacturing of consent, and the filters that he identifies with regards to the elite domination of mass-media news reporting are as relevant when it comes to analysing the microcosm of fashion press: ownership and profit-orientation of the media, advertising as primary income source, the reliance of information provided by agents of power and the regular disciplining of errant media.⁵ The interests and choices of the fashion press can be understood better when we as consumers keep in mind that very little gets printed that hasn’t first gone through these filters.

The filters that affect what gets printed today are often so insidious and fundamental that it is fully possible for a well-meaning reporter to convince him or herself that s/he is working with full creative freedom. With this in mind, perhaps the most relevant question to ask when reading fashion reporting is what kind of critique we can expect from any publication, whether owned by a news conglomerate or an independent publishing house, while it is funded by advertising and keen to keep its position in the pecking order? It may be cloaked in ‘avant-garde’ and photographed by Juergen Teller, but all too often fashion writing is nothing short of propaganda.

As T Magazine broadcasts on its most recent cover – this is the age of influence.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. http://www.sz-mag.com/news/2016/04/vestoj-x-sz-what-revolution-t-magazine-gucci-and-vetements/ ↩

2. The ‘Buzz Rickson’ was a jacket, in the style of an MA-1, that writer William Gibson fictionalised in the 2003 book Pattern Recognition, as a result and due to popular demand by fans of the book, the company created a jacket as it was described in the book. http://gizmodo.com/jackets-dreamed-up-by-william-gibson-are-gaining-a-foll-1463266282)”>http://gizmodo.com/jackets-dreamed-up-by-william-gibson-are-gaining-a-foll-1463266282 ↩

3. ‘A Loss for Words: Why there’s no good writing about fashion’ by Anne Hollander for Slate Magazine, 1997. http://www.slate.com/articles/business_and_tech/clothes_sense/1997/02/a_loss_for_words.html ↩

4. S. Brownlie, ‘Examining Self-Censorship: Zola’s Nana in English Translation’ in Ed. F. Billiani, In Modes of Censorship in Translation: National Contexts and Diverse Media, Manchester, St Jerome Publishing, 2007 ↩

5. N. Chomsky & E. S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent, London, Vintage, 1994 ↩

As evidenced by one of Menkes’ most recent reviews, ‘#SuzyPFW Balmain: Supermodels, Curves, Super Relevant,’² readers cannot help but recognise Menkes’ efforts to ensure her so-called ‘relevancy’: she designates her digital status via a catchy hashtag, casually namedrops Kanye West and Kris Jenner as backstage guests, tightens her word count to accommodate shortened attention spans and even refers to the ‘hourglass body looks’ that Olivier Rousteing sent down the runway as ‘Instagram friendly.’³ Her critique of the Balmain show and its underlying ideas, however, was shallow at best, overshadowed by mentions of click bait celebrities and superfluous nods to social media platforms.

For a renowned fashion critic who gained a reputation for her bold point of view and often blunt critiques over the course of her twenty-five-year-plus career as chief fashion critic for the International Herald Tribune, Menkes’ new role as international editor across Vogue’s nineteen editions (save for the US) leaves something to be desired, particularly where the relevancy of her ideas is concerned. In the move from the British media platform to Vogue, Menkes’ embrace of digital platforms has not been a smooth one. Menkes clearly cares deeply about how the public perceives her embrace of the digital age, which has irrevocably changed the way we consume fashion media – 24/7, interactively, on smartphones. Yet there is a difference between staying ‘relevant’ via merely acquiring technological fluency, if only on the most basic level (i.e. regularly utilising Instagram), and offering contextualised, challenging critiques that push the industry and its insiders forward.

In this same interview, a then seventy-year-old Menkes explained that she was entering a ‘digital-first’ phase, moving in a new media direction aiming for increased publication speed, a wider international reach, and greater relevancy to the multi-platform millennial generation she now writes for. Menkes, and by extension, her current employer, recognise the necessity to cater to this new audience, for whom the daily consumption of digital media via social platforms – where significant profit lies – has become a natural extension of their lives. This has undoubtedly impacted Menkes’ decision to abandon her Herald Tribune post and migrate to Condé Nast. Now, two years on, and nestled in her new role at Vogue, Menkes has gained greater reach and immediacy with her readers, but the tactic arguably comes at a cost to her integrity as a critic.

The once analytical voice to be reckoned with seems to have lost its sharpness, its probing and considered tone – the very qualities that once made Menkes stand out – only to be replaced by generic, comfortably complacent content: glorified blog posts interspersed with blurry Instagram photos of Menkes smiling beside this or that celebrity or designer. Although the fashion world continues to talk about Menkes as if she is still a critical voice worth respecting above all others, her move to Vogue signifies not only a shift in her priorities, but also a tonal shift. In her golden years as a critic, receiving a compliment from Menkes in a review felt earned, not diluted by empty praise; it was indicative of a collection not just well made, but created with something important to say about the culture at large. Menkes did not simply applaud a designer on the basis of how many Instagram followers he or she had accrued. Her past writing, such as ‘The Bright Continent,’⁴ her February 2009 commentary on fashion’s embrace of both African design and increased diversity among models on the runway, written in the same year that President Barack Obama was elected, found Menkes working and thinking on many levels: she contextualised the current moment in a helpful way, critiqued past iterations of the trend, noting how ‘In previous years, references to Africa have at times seemed awkward, patronising, even insulting,’⁵ and engaged with art, politics and appropriation, all the while staying forthright but not unnecessarily acerbic. It is these qualities which are becoming increasingly difficult to discern in Menkes’ writing today.

Fast forward and consider Menkes’ first blog post for Vogue in June 2014, tellingly titled: ‘Fighting the Bitch Brigade.’⁶ The conceit of the column – that the internet, and particularly Twitter, runs rampant with a ‘stream of catty comments’ – seems to contradict Menkes’ once-discerning voice. ‘Suzy in Vogue,’ she declared, ‘is going to be “anti-bitch.”’ Surely it was never in question of whether Menkes was an industry ‘bitch,’ but as a fashion journalist, her critiques for The International Herald Tribune often challenged designers’ thinking or questioned their concept. Though not explicitly ‘bitchy,’ her critical writing was enough to get her banned, famously, from the Versace shows for several years. Then, in 2001, she was banned from all LVMH shows for a day that season’s week in Paris, a result of her critical comments towards brands in the conglomerate. As Menkes herself explained, ‘I try to offer constructive – not hateful – comments. It is about thoughtfulness as opposed to meanness and analysis rather than knee-jerk reaction.’⁷ For someone like Menkes – and her peers, Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman, Tim Blanks et al – the expectation was that she would always write and think about fashion in the spirit of independent journalism. Now, with a global platform on which to discuss fashion at her disposal, Menkes’ 500 plus words debut, bemoaning fashion-police style criticism, is a telling stance.

For Vogue, the addition of the critic to their staffing is indicative of their desire to be seen not merely as a newsstand-exclusive fashion glossy, but as the premiere arbiter of taste – and relevancy – both online and in print within an increasingly global fashion industry. Hiring Menkes – a critic eager to expand, not diminish, her presence within the rapidly changing fashion world as her audience skews younger and towards the internet, by writing more accessibly for wider appeal – conveniently bolsters Vogue’s credibility as a publisher of respected commentry. The mere mention of Menkes’ name, no matter where her byline appears, calls to mind a certain gravitas, formed through the decades of knowledge and experience and relationships she has acquired within the industry.

If fashion media continues to provide old guard critics like Menkes, whether or not they remain as relevant as they once were, with the most widely read platforms to write and think aloud, it will miss out on marginalised and rarely heard critical voices. Those are the voices that hold the potential to introduce new perspectives and ideas within an industry that relies on constant change, even as it hesitates to embrace structural change. Those are the voices that just might prove themselves not only relevant, but also utterly refreshing.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. I. Amed, “Inside Suzy Menkes’ New Digital World,” The Business of Fashion, 10 June 2014. ↩

2. S. Menkes, “#SuzyPFW Balmain: Supermodels, Curves, Super Relevant,” Vogue, 3 March 2016. ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. S. Menkes, “The Bright Continent,” T Magazine, 19 February 2009. ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. S. Menkes, “Fighting the Bitch Brigade,” Vogue, 3 June 2014. ↩

7. Ibid. ↩

NOT LONG AGO I hosted a dinner at the London College of Fashion’s Fashion Space Gallery, themed around writing on fashion. Together with a group of journalists, editors, bloggers and scholars we spent the evening debating what it is that makes a fashion writer good, what ‘integrity’ means to a fashion writer, why criticism in fashion writing isn’t encouraged in mainstream fashion publications and if it is fair to expect an unbiased view of the fashion industry from publications dependent on advertising for their survival.

Getting members of the fashion industry to speak candidly and on the record about the often-fraught affiliation between journalists and fashion brands is not an easy feat, and the ambivalent relationship that many writers have to the fashion system was evident already in the responses I received to my dinner invitation. ‘Will we be recorded?’ was a question asked more than once. One very well known fashion journalist declined by saying: ‘I feel that we are now just garnish for fashion PRs and designers. Few people read what we say, we are not the gatekeepers any more, and none of it matters. So I am feeling bleak and don’t want to talk about it.’ In this environment it’s apt to ask what role and importance those writing about fashion have. How can we make what we do matter?

It’s an open secret in the industry that advertising brands dictate editorial content, sometimes explicitly, often tacitly. Stories of reporters being banned from shows after unfavourable reviews belong to fashion folklore, but accounts of PR people demanding final approval of articles, interviews being cut short after an uncomfortable question and designers bringing their own recording devices to interviews are surprisingly common. The PR being a silent witness to a designer interview is today so routine that it fails to even raise eyebrows. What journalists tend to talk less about are the generous gifts sometimes bestowed upon us after a favourable article (sending it back would be rude, keeping it feels like an implicit understanding that more good reviews will follow) or the difficulty many of us find when it comes to writing critically about someone you know and like (and will be bumping into at the next industry event).

In Vestoj’s issue ‘On Fashion & Power’, American Vogue editor Hamish Bowles remarks that: ‘Fashion advertising and editorial complement each other. Fashion is all about creating desire, and both advertisers and editors want to seduce the consumer; after all, that’s our job.’ While it’s no doubt true that fashion editorial content is enmeshed with advertiser interest, it’s hardly the only industry where advertising plays a vital role in sales, or where PR machinations have an ever-increasing role in the business. It is however worth pointing out that, as opposed to a music or film critic, a fashion journalist or editor barred from participating in industry affairs is, in effect, prevented from doing their job. Being black listed in the books of a specific brand often means not only being banned from fashion shows but also being blocked from potential interviews and even the borrowing of garments for fashion shoots. A few of those embargos and a publication can very quickly become, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant in terms of fashion capital. To write credibly about the fashion system you need to operate within its parameters. Fashion values exclusivity, it is hegemonic and self-reinforcing. As the editor of a much respected biannual recently wrote to me to turn down an invitation to participate in Vestoj’s issue ‘On Fashion and Power’: ‘Surely you realise that people in the industry are there not only because they understand these power structures but also because they love to know about them (though not necessarily approve of them, as you say). Why on earth would they then jeopardise that vantage point? Surely they value participating in them (whether subversively or not) more than communicating about them and thereby shutting themselves out?’ Put more plainly – you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

In this climate it’s hardly surprising that magazines like Gentlewoman or Acne Paper are often listed when insiders are asked to name ‘good’ fashion publications. Sophisticated-looking and full of lengthy articles, these are magazines that appeal to our urbane side and that flatter our view of ourselves as discerning fashion consumers as well as participants. But what is it that distinguishes a gushing profile of Prada’s Verde Visconti in the recent issue of Gentlewoman (not far from the ubiquitous ad by the same label) from an obsequious review of the brand on Style.com or an editorial full of ‘total looks’ in any one of the current crop of fashion glossies? To paraphrase Hamish Bowles, publications about fashion today are primarily in the business of seducing the consumer, and of selling clothes. Be it in the straightforward manner of advertising or the more insidious approach outlined above, the result remains the same: the editor’s freedom is nominal, and big brands rule the roost.

The fashion industry today is a place where most insiders are keenly aware of the lack of autonomy afforded reporters and critics, and the neutering influence that status and prestige has on critical thinking. Like a legion of Janus-faced cohorts we make use of our professional face when necessary and switch to our private face when the proverbial tape recorder is finally turned off. Though fashion is not the only industry where its practitioners have great difficulty seeing their own part in what they don’t like, it is one where we aren’t often held accountable for it. Instead we make concessions, come up with excuses and, when that doesn’t work, we simply learn to live with the discrepancies. So whereas I’m greatly tempted to continue and turn this into a further rallying call for disgruntled fashion professionals, I will stop here. Fighting the system, after all, isn’t for everybody. What we all can do however, is to look for cracks in it. The chinks and fissures of any structure is where the most intriguing things are often found, the fashion system is no different. So scratch the surface, question the perceived knowledge and bring a critical eye to those admired uncritically. Only then can what we do begin to really matter.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.