ON THE COVER OF the recent October issue The New York Times’ weekend supplement, T Magazine, Karl Lagerfeld’s profile looks out like some sort of modern renaissance bust. As one might expect, his severe white collar and dark sunglasses are firmly in place, as is the white ponytail. The cover is one of a series of six released for the issue, and accompanies a feature article inside on the designer. It’s a long-form profile and interview by Andrew O’Hagan that gushes over Lagerfeld, depicting him as the most important designer of our time, or in the author’s words: ‘fashion’s one and only.’ The high praise of the designer could be mistaken for an extended press release and might be construed as another example of the failure to present balanced and analytical coverage on fashion in mainstream media, particularly for a publication like The New York Times.

The interview itself takes place between the designer’s home in Paris and also in Seoul, where he is preparing for a Chanel presentation. O’Hagan opens the article and interview with a quote from Marcel Proust’s famous sartorial descriptions from In Search of Lost Time – a book that illustrates fashion as ‘not a casual decoration alterable at will, but a given, poetical reality like that of the weather.’ The preface leads into the sweeping generalisation that: ‘It’s about a hundred years since fashion took its place alongside literature, painting and music as a way to look for the social essence of one’s era.’ Fashion, which as we know is older than this, is immediately marginalised from the outset as a lesser, younger form of the arts. This is a statement that is reinforced in the intellectual banter about literary and cultural figures that ensues, an effort to add some sort of cultural capital to Lagerfeld and reassure us of his significance as an ‘intellectual designer,’ despite being embedded in the world of fashion.

Andrew O’Hagan is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction writer with seven books published and one Booker prize under his belt. His credentials as a writer suggest that the editorial choice of him as author feeds into the overarching semblance that this article will be looking at fashion seriously. This notion is reinforced by Lagerfeld’s cultural dexterity, which is constantly reminded to us throughout the article – from the setting of the designer’s Paris apartment with its ‘Art Deco ambience’ and ‘candle-scented air,’ to the art (a Jeff Koons sculpture) and its book-lined walls (‘the room is all about the books’). O’Hagan’s conversation with Lagerfeld begins with the name-dropping back and forth on twentieth century figures from film, literature and classical music, which are apparently more respectable streams of culture. Mentions of Françoise Sagan, Günter Grass and Thomas Mann emerge in the discussion, as a device that seeks to give Lagerfeld (and the author) a sizeable dollop of cultural capital. In effect, the dialogue reflects the pervasive hegemonic conception of fashion, and one that hinders its progress as a site for critical discussion.

Historically, fashion has an uncomfortable relationship with critique: mainstream media coverage by newspapers and magazines often shy away from rigour and analysis on fashion’s output of events and collections. This is a dynamic that is constantly repeated in its discourse. References to other cultural disciplines, namely art and literature, are used to legitimise the domain of fashion, and suggest that it’s an industry that fails to measure up to a similar level of intellectual rigour.

Reinforcing this notion, in the article Lagerfeld is presented as a creative genius in the world of fashion: ‘our premier idea of what a brilliant designer can be’; and is unashamedly showered with praise by O’Hagan: ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone more fully native to their own conception of wonder.’ In a more literal metaphor of the designer later in the piece, he is compared to the twentieth century conductor Herbert von Karajana as he tweaks the accessories to a Chanel outfit for the presentation in South Korea, a movement that is described as similar to ‘conducting the violin section during a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.’

Though some of O’Hagan’s comments to Lagerfeld are deserved, the heavy-handed approach portrays the designer as having a symbolic status that distances him from the commercial messiness of the industry.

‘The Maddening and Brilliant Karl Lagerfeld’ reinforces a convenient and problematic summary of fashion as a frivolous domain. Though T Magazine may not be the context for academic discussion on fashion, there is surely room for a bit more rigour when dealing with the subject matter. This may also reflect the dilemma facing all national newspapers and their glossy weekend supplements, which lend themselves as platforms for corralling (often luxury) ads, perhaps as a source of revenue to commissioning more serious news-style articles elsewhere. With that said, the history of The New York Times as a platform that offers more critical positions on fashion and dress – having featured writers like Ann Hollander, Cathy Horyn, Lynn Yaeger, among others – should set a stronger precedence for coverage such as this. Unfortunately, this article is yet another exemplar of the lack of critique in the discourse, a paradigm that means that fashion is constantly playing catch up on itself.

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

Roitfeld left French Vogue in 2010, amidst frenzied, Schadenfreude-fuelled debates as to the nature of her unforeseen departure, which we won’t go into here. Suffice to say that Roitfeld’s second in command Emmanuelle Alt was swiftly, if somewhat anti-climactically, promoted to the top job, in what many saw as an obvious concession to continuity on Condé Nast’s part. Yet far from consolidating Roitfeld’s agenda, the magazine under Alt’s direction has consistently attempted to chart new ground. Mainly, it has replaced Roitfeld’s fiercely provocative and artistically uncompromising fashion manifesto with something altogether more accessible; breaking up the swathes of unannotated images with a more text-led, feature driven, beauty and lifestyle approach; enlisting popular blogger Garance Doré to write a “humours” column; putting mainstream celebrities, rather than industry mainstays, on the cover; and carefully cultivating digital content. The media, ever ready to lay the charge of catfights and of bitching at the feet of powerful women, might encourage us to see this aesthetic fallout between the two Vogues as a natural expression of Alt and Roitfeld’s widely reported personal difficulties, but the differences between their publications are no doubt symptomatic of the constant tug of war between high and low culture in fashion.

Profiles of Roitfeld – consistent with today’s cultish fawning around the figure of the editor – tend to stall at the appraisal of her distinctive and much-imitated ‘look’, typically comprised of clean lines, high heels, a passion for the colour black, and caustic combinations of leopard print, lived-in leather, and sometimes PVC. But for Roitfeld, starting as a stylist and consulting famously for Saint Laurent and Tom Ford, the look, indeed, is everything, with the title of her new venture (‘CR’ was how she used to sign her editor’s letter at Vogue) suggesting that her book will above all be a homage to a signature style; its pages first and foremost subject to the CR stamp of approval. In Issue 1, Roitfeld’s controversial sex and death aesthetic – quickly christened ‘porno chic’ by the press – still glowers in the margins, but the overriding theme is ‘Rebirth’, and the spirit of abundance, bounty and joy that this brings strikes the dominant note. Luscious, prelapsarian shots of women in nature, holding babies, abound, and the book is fertile in its collaborations, featuring contributions from Karl Lagerfeld, Amanda Harlech, Tom Ford and even written pieces by Anne Hathaway and Kirsten Dunst. That such features run without adjacent photo portraits of their starry authors is unusual for a fashion magazine, typically worshipping the cult of the ‘celebrity face’ as brand. In contrast, Roitfeld’s non-illustrative approach suggests that CR Fashion Book will be interested in celebrities as creative sources of inspiration rather than as static, one-dimensional images.

Overall, a beautiful, meticulously put together fashion publication that requires sitting down and immersing oneself in its pages is a clever antidote to the attention deficit, ruthlessly regenerating digital domains which define our times. It speaks shrewdly to the idea that in this late capitalist, market saturated age “luxury” might be less the acquisition of luxury goods than a dedicated space in which to dream.

But is it a ‘book’, though? Or is this moniker aimed at steering the publication away from the irreverent and impermanent impressions personified by the fashion magazine?  And are books even the best place to showcase fashion? To my mind, a book is less irreverent than permanent. Fashion, by contrast, is ephemeral, non-committal, prone to changing its mind – perhaps better suited, then, to the fast-paced, capricious world of online blogging.

So Roitfeld is sending out mixed messages here – on the one hand, calling her new venture a ‘book’, with all the associations of immobility and cerebrality that books imply, but on the other, dedicating both issues so far to the carnal, changeable domain of the body, and allowing her publication to exist within the very traditional magazine format, with its seasonal publication dates, focus on trends and heavy reliance on advertisers.

If obligations to the body – namely, that clothes are first and foremost functional, and have to fit the lumpen human form – are what ultimately prevent fashion from truly taking off and becoming ‘high art’, then Issue 2’s stated, specific focus on ballet, a notoriously disciplined and refined art form, suggests that Roitfeld does want to be taken seriously, and for her readers to see her project on a footing with elite culture. 

We might read the differences between these respective magazines as an allegory of the state of our current sartorial times, and of the relative freedom that fashion publications have to situate themselves between artistic and more pragmatically commercial impulses, between digital and print culture, between text and image, between fantasy and reality. Fashion after all is full of smoke and mirrors, signs and signifiers, and it’s up to us, the readers, to decode its so often mixed messages.

Alice Blackhurst is a writer and academic based in Cambridge, UK.