By 1818, the forty-six-year-old Henry Sands Brooks had already made his name as a grocer and noted dandy. Given his experience in retail and his love of fashion, it is no surprise that on April 7 of that year he opened a men’s clothing emporium, H. & D. H. Brooks & Co. The original location was on the corner of Catherine and Cherry Streets in the neighbourhood that is often described today as ‘Two Bridges.’ The name comes from the fact that the neighbourhood is nestled between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Of course, in 1818, those bridges were not there; however, it was a bustling commercial district with a view of the East River.¹ The store was also near Catherine Slip, a manmade inlet that allowed for loading and unloading of cargo. The store’s waterfront location was conducive to international and domestic trade. It is also crucial to understanding the company’s connection to slavery. 

The company itself has passed through many hands and many corporate structures.  On Brooks’ death, the business was inherited by his four sons (the eponymous ‘Brooks Brothers’); it stayed in the family until Winthrop Holly Brooks retired in 1946, after which it was sold a number of times. It is currently organised as Brooks Brothers Group Inc., which is privately owned by the Italian magnate Claudio del Vecchio.²

Brooks Brothers’ clientele has always been illustrious. Abraham Lincoln famously wore a Brooks Brothers frock coat (custom-made for his 6’4” frame) the night he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre. On the day he was assassinated in Dallas, John F. Kennedy was wearing a white striped Brooks Brothers shirt. During the 2017 presidential inauguration, both President Trump and former-president Barack Obama wore Brooks Brothers coats during their greeting. In fact, Brooks Brothers has dressed forty of forty-five U.S. presidents since 1818.  

Brooks Brothers commemorated its bicentennial this April, hosting an Americana-themed, cocktail-fuelled fête at Jazz at Lincoln Center with performances by Wynton Marsalis and Paul Simon.³ There was much to celebrate. Today, Brooks Brothers has ‘more than two-hundred-and-fifty retail and factory stores in the United States, shops in airports and more than two-hundred-and-fifty locations internationally.’⁴ Though Brooks Brothers has been subject to the volatility of the retail landscape, the company has maintained its profitability under the helm of del Vecchio.⁵ But gone unmentioned is that this storied clothier, like most American companies and institutions that date back to the nineteenth century and earlier, is entangled in the complicated history of enslavement in the United States. The leadership at Brooks Brothers has yet to publicly acknowledge its connection to slavery. (My repeated requests to examine Brooks Brothers’ archives have been met with unresponsiveness.) Most generously one could speculate that this is due to ignorance of their own brand history. However, it could also be that there is a fear of hurting their bottom line.

Nonetheless, evidence shows that the national reach and different product lines of Brooks Brothers necessarily resulted in the company profiting from the slave economy. This evidence includes the structure of Brooks Brothers’ business, still-existing examples of Brooks Brothers-supplied clothing, and Brooks Brothers appeals to southern clients to pay outstanding bills.

Brooks Brothers profited from ‘servant’ clothing as well as the clothing designed for their masters. Brooks Brothers had a livery department, which provided garments for coachmen, footmen, chauffeurs, etc. in wealthy households, including those south of the Mason-Dixon Line.⁶ Before 1865, most of these servants were presumably enslaved. As symbols of their prosperity, moneyed slaveholders often outfitted their enslaved domestics in fine clothing as a display of their wealth. For example, Thomas Jefferson meticulously recorded the clothing distributed to each member of the enslaved community at Monticello, noting the quality and quantity of materials beside the name of each slave. Their clothing was a visual indicator of their age, gender and status. Curiously, it was not Jefferson’s concubine Sally Hemings who received the best allotment of clothing, but his manservant Jupiter.⁷ 

Misconceptions about enslaved people’s wardrobes may have prevented consideration of how northern commercial interests such as Brooks Brothers were necessarily linked to the day-to-day lives of commodified people of African descent. Though enslaved people’s clothing tended to be drab, shapeless and limited to a few pieces, there were opportunities to acquire more elaborate wardrobes. Enslaved peoples bought clothing and accessories with the small amounts of money from doing extra work for their slaveowners and others, raising vegetables and poultry, hunting, fishing and artisanal work. Enslaved people also bought, sold and bartered garments in the secondhand clothing market. Others were offered hand-me-downs from other slaves and their owners. Slaves most often received lengths of fabrics with which they were responsible for creating their own clothing.

The trade Brooks Brothers engaged in was separate from and parallel to the localised market described above. Brooks Brothers responded to the need of slave masters to adorn their human ‘property.’ In the wealthiest households, enslaved peoples were dressed in garments that ostentatiously reflected the privilege of their owners. A case in point are two Brook Brothers coats that are currently held in the permanent collection of The Historic New Orleans Collection. Given the size and style of the coats, they were most likely made for young male enslaved domestics. The coats were used in the household of Dr. William Newton Mercer.

Mercer was born in Maryland, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army before setting up a private practice in Natchez, Mississippi. In Natchez, he married into a family of cotton planters. When both his father-in-law and wife died, he inherited many of the family’s properties and became extraordinarily wealthy. He eventually retired from plantation life and settled on the toney Canal Street in New Orleans. He even served as the president of the Bank of Louisiana. His obituary extols his virtues.

[The] excellent sense, firmness and consistency of character and thoughtful sagacity of Dr. Mercer rendered him a most successful administrator of a large estate. He not only preserved the estate inherited from his wife, who died not many years after their marriage, but quadrupled its value, and has continued to retain and enlarge it, so that his succession, despite the enormous losses of the war, is estimated at a million and a half of dollars.⁸ 

Upon his death in 1874, Mercer had made his name as a real-estate investor and philanthropist and had become a fixture of New Orleans high society.⁹ Mercer owned hundreds of slaves who worked his many cotton plantations in Mississippi. He also owned slaves who cared for his palatial home on Canal Street. As reflections of his plantocratic wealth, these slaves were styled to represent his power and importance. The elegant Brooks Brothers coats were adorned with silver buttons that bear the falcon crest of the Mercer family, fitting the image of a wealthy planter, real estate mogul and philanthropist.¹⁰ 

Slaves, like fashion and luxury goods, were commodities. Mercer treated his slaves as possessions the same way as finery in his home. Just as he provided his manservants with Brooks Brothers coats with buttons emblazoned with his family crest, the accoutrement of wealth in his home was also adorned with symbols of his dynastic prosperity. For example, the Historic New Orleans Collection holds one of Mercer’s silver trays that also features an engraved falcon and a capital ‘M’ below it.¹¹ 

The coats bring to light the symbiotic relationship between manufacturers and retailers in centres of commerce in the North and producers of raw materials and consumers in the South. Brooks Brothers was decidedly located in lower Manhattan, walking distance from ports linked to Southern entrepots. The company serviced residents of New York City as well as many clients in the American South (as the provenance of the coats reveals).

Brooks Brothers itself acknowledged its engagement in the slave economy in its attempts to get payments from its Southern ‘work employers’ (a euphemism for slave owners). In 1853, Brooks Brothers was among a group of businesses that published ‘The Tailor’s Appeal,’ a complaint about unpaid bills from Southern merchants. It reads:

Gentlemen: Whereas, a number of the ‘Southern’ work employers, refuse to give us a fair remuneration for our labor, and as it is utterly impossible, for us, working for them, to earn bread for ourselves and families, and as we wish you to fully understand who are the friends of the workingmen, we subjoin a list of employers who have signed a bill of prices, and earnestly call upon you to patronize only those employers who have acted so honorably…¹² 

The companies complained that Southern merchants employed their service, but they were not recompensed fairly or at all. Number twenty-nine on the list of employers is Brooks Brothers. Here Brooks Brothers publicly acknowledges that it included ‘Southern work employers’ among its customers. Given its lower Manhattan location within walking distance from ports linked to Southern entrepots, it would have been surprising if Brooks Brothers had not been deeply entangled in the American ‘peculiar institution’ even as it established itself as the go-to menswear emporium for Northern elites.  

What lesson are we to take from this evidence of profiteering from human servitude in the foundational years of Brooks Brothers? This is a question that other American institutions are being asked recently. Perhaps due to their nature as loci of inquiry and self-reflection, many universities have been on the forefront of exploring their connections to slavery and atoning for the ways in which they profited from the labour and sale of enslaved peoples. In 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons appointed a steering committee to unearth the university’s connection to slavery and the slave trade. A group of Harvard’s faculty members and students launched the ongoing Harvard and Slavery project, which examine the history and legacy of slavery at Harvard.¹³ In 1838, Jesuit priests of Georgetown University sold two hundred and seventy two of its slaves to save the school from potential financial ruin. Georgetown is now offering preferential admissions to descendants of those slaves.

Though many universities have started atoning for their connection to slavery and the slave trade, Brooks Brothers, and other for-profit entities, have not. Many such entities have avoided scrutiny by ceasing to exist. Very few of the signatories on the ‘Tailors Appeal’ still exist. Those that do include Hewitt Lees & Company (now investment banking and brokerage firm Laidlaw & Company) and bank Brown Brothers (now Brown Brothers Harriman & Company). While many others American corporations and families have roots in American slavery, few have maintained a continuous brand identity over two centuries. Brooks Brothers has survived in part due to the glacial shifts in menswear trends that protect it from the vagaries of a mercurial fashion industry. Over the course of two centuries, Brooks Brothers has fashioned itself as an American institution, solidifying its status as the go-to purveyor of respectable suiting and preppy wear.

But it is reasonable to ask Brooks Brothers to acknowledge and reflect upon its roots in the trade with slaveowners. Its longevity is also due to the fact that its early profits came in part from selling clothing to slave masters. Brooks Brother is often credited for introducing ready-to-wear suiting to the clothing market in 1849. ‘The ready-made suit was a turning point for the garment industry and for the American population, making fine clothing more accessible to all,’ wrote the company recently in its online magazine.¹⁴ What has not been examined is how much this innovation might have been based on its outfitting of free and enslaved servants who did not have the time or luxury to be fitted for bespoke garments.

The success and longevity of Brooks Brothers is due, in part, to its connection to slavery and the profits it gained from selling clothing to planters in the South. In the end, by counting slaveholders among its clientele, Brooks Brothers directly benefited from the buying and selling of enslaved men, women and children. It is in its best interest to fully acknowledge its part—even if small—in propping up the institution of slavery, rather than remaining silent and sweeping it under the rug. The company, which is considered the epitome of preppy all-American style, is also a benefactor of slavery. But what is more American than slavery?

Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is a writer, historian and curator specializing in Afro-Diasporic fashion and visual culture. He holds a PhD in history from New York University and teaches at Harvard University. He also founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.  

1. E G Burrows and M Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 437. ↩

2. E White, ‘Retail Brand Buys Brooks Brothers from Marks & Spencer for $225 Million,’ Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2001. del Vecchio, whose family owns Ray Ban and the Italian producer of eyeglasses Luxottica SpA, bought the company in 2001 for $225 million from Britain’s Marks & Spencer. ↩

3. Z Weiss, ‘Brooks Brothers Rings In 200 Years with a Jazz-Filled Celebration,’ Vogue, April 26, 2018, https://www.vogue.com/article/brooks-brothers-200-birthday-celebration-yara-shahidi-katie-holmes-christina-hendricks ↩

4. ‘Stores, Emails & Catalogs,’ Brooks Brothers, accessed June 20, 2018, https://www.brooksbrothers.com/Stores,-Emails-Catalogs/help-stores,default,pg.html ↩

5. As a privately-owned entity, the figures on the company’s success can only be gleaned from what the company chooses to divulge. A recent New York Times article credits del Vecchio for posting ‘profits for thirteen of the last seventeen years.’ T Agins, ‘With a Glance Backward, Brooks Brothers Looks to the Future,’ The New York Times, April 21, 2018 ↩

6. Evidence of Brooks Brothers livery department include this sixteen-page livery catalog from 1900. ‘Brooks Brothers Livery Department,’ accessed on June 23, 2018, https://www.abebooks.com/Brooks-Brothers-Livery-Department/22684247331/bd ↩

7. Farm Book, 1774-1824, page 41, by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003. Original manuscript from the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. ↩

8. ‘William Newton Mercer,’ The Times-Picayune, August 18, 1874, 4. ↩

9. Mercer makes a cameo in historian Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach, which explores the legal battle of the formerly enslaved woman Rose Herera when her former owners the De Hart family kidnapped her five children and fled to Havana during the Yankee occupation of New Orleans. It was the well-heeled Mercer who financed the purchase of Rose Herera and her children for his friend and dentist James Andrew De Hart. For a man of his wealth, the cost of this chattel was small price compared to his vast holdings. A Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015, 48-68. ↩

10. There was no Brooks Brothers store in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, but Mercer was well travelled and may have purchased the coats during one of his trips up north. These coats were acquired by the Historic New Orleans Collection after they were discovered by descendants of the Mercer family in an attic of a former plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. ↩

11. Classical Institute of the South and The Historic New Orleans Collection, silver tray, CIS-2011-0175, http://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/hnoc-p16313coll17%3A7342 ↩

12. P S Foner, Business & Slavery: The New York Merchants & the Irrepressible Conflict, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941, 1-2; New-York Tribune, August 19, 1853. ↩

13. See http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice and https://www.harvard.edu/slavery ↩

14. The company claims that it began creating ready-to-wear suits for pioneers headed West towards the California gold rush. “A Ready-to-Wear Revolution,” Brooks Brothers, accessed July 8, 2018. http://magazine.brooksbrothers.com/ready-to-wear/ ↩

The press release for Jefferson Hack’s new book We Can’t Do This Alone: Jefferson Hack The System permeated fashion and design media these last few weeks. The monograph, released mid-May and published by Rizzoli, is a hardback, visually led selection of the editor and publisher’s work on Dazed & Confused magazine over the years.

As the author, Hack is presented as a fashion provocateur, moving easily across cultural categories. Concurrent with the book’s launch, Hack collaborated with French designers Each x Other creating T-shirts (stocked in Paris boutique Colette and priced €155 to €255) for their spring/summer 2016 collection. The T-shirts endorsed the book by referencing its title along with statements like: ‘The best way to make money is not to make any.’

The book’s contents select from Dazed & Confused magazine’s prolific body of work over its twenty-five year existence, adding to this, it features contributions from the high profile figures, like co-founder and photographer Rankin, musician Björk, actress Gwyneth Paltrow to artist Ai Wei Wei and novelist Douglas Coupland.

Since it was founded in 1992, Dazed & Confused has persisted through commercial and economic shifts in the fashion industry. It was initially conceived as a zine when eighteen-year-old printing student Hack approached photography student Rankin to create a publication to represent London’s art colleges as a collective. The project began in a black and white poster format, and its pages reflected the counter-cultural, DIY spirit of an era where cultural disciplines were beginning to break down and speak to each other more dynamically.

These early issues were highly influential in merging genres from fashion, music and art graphically on the page. Hack and Rankin, two bold students frustrated with the state of media in the creative arts, appealed to a young, culturally savvy, style conscious reader in reaction to mainstream glossies. The first issue reflected this spirit with its opening manifesto reading:

‘This is not a magazine. This is not a conspiracy to force opinion into the subconscious of stylish young people. A synthetic leisure culture is developing – plastic people forced fed on canned entertainment and designer food. Are you ready to be Dazed & Confused?’

– Dazed & Confused, issue 1 1991.

These counter cultural beginnings are essential to the branding of the global media company Dazed now operates as, and We Can’t Do This Alone attempts to project this energy. An opening essay by Hack reads as a call to action. He writes: ‘We are all media. We can rewrite the rules together. We have the power to construct our own language and distribute our own images.’ The tone is similar to Dazed & Confused’s initial issue, but the economic context in which it is written is vastly and fundamentally different.

The graphic approach to layout also echoes this paradox. Collated and designed by New York-based art director Ferdinando Verderi, the publishers worked with Kodak to produce a unique cover for each of the 5000 copies in the print run. No stranger to corporate collaboration, Verderi is a founding member and creative director of the ad agency Johannes Leonardo, whose clients include Coca Cola, Adidas and Trip Advisor.

Corporate dealings are home territory to Hack. As publisher and director of Dazed Digital, Hack oversees an editorial and media empire that now incorporates AnOther Magazine, Dazed Digital, AnOther Man, NOWNESS (funded by luxury conglomerate LVMH) as well as Dazed & Confused. On their website, Dazed Digital boasts global brands like Armani, Chanel, Nike, Swarovski and Dunhill as key clients. Given this, Dazed Digital is unequivocally embedded in the mainstream fashion system, making the political-sounding rhetoric and graphics of We Can’t Do This Alone seem empty to say the least.

In effect, the book is a corporate project dressed up in DIY aesthetics. Dispersed through its pages are hyperbolic, political-sounding phrases presented in graphic arrangements. One spread features the text, ‘A conspiracy of ideas’ in an artwork of haphazardly cut and stapled paper. The message is direct but fundamentally ambiguous: who the conspirator is, and how we, as readers, are supposed to deal with this ‘conspiracy’ remains unarticulated.

Hack’s claim as an independent publisher is equivalently hollow, prompting criticism from journalists on the commercial activity of the Dazed Group. Features on Hack in The Guardian and the Financial Times have addressed this.¹. In a particular ‘Lunch with the FT’ feature for the Financial Times, John Sunyer mentions to Hack his ‘surprise at the amount of “content sponsored by brands” in his magazines, much of it passed off as regular journalism. Take, for example, the October 2013 issue, in which six pages are given over to Hack’s collaboration with Tod’s, the luxury Italian shoemaker.’²

When offered the opportunity to respond to these criticisms, Hack still doesn’t seem to be able to articulate a key distinction between independent publishing and corporate activity. In an interview with Lou Stoppard for SHOWstudio in 2014, she questions him on the commercial motivations of Dazed & Confused:

“When you started Dazed you talked about it being an independent magazine, […] but you yourself, and Dazed Group, doesn’t operate in an independent way, you’re very closely tied to advertising.”

“Independent doesn’t mean anarchist. Independent for me means we choose what we do, and nobody tells us what to do.”

“So your stylists don’t shoot full looks for advertisers then?”

“Of course they do. But I still decide what happens. What goes in and what doesn’t. We make all the decisions. And that’s independence.”

[…]

“Independence from what?”

“Independence from anybody telling us what to do. We do what the fuck we want to do. That’s independence. It’s that simple.”

– Interview with Jefferson Hack by Lou Stoppard for SHOWstudio in March 2014, https://vimeo.com/91950177

In her research on ‘niche fashion magazines’ fashion scholar Ane Lynge-Jorlén cites Dazed & Confused, among others as part of a genre of magazines that although aesthetically is ‘positioned outside the mainstream, their financial underpinning is advertising revenue, and they are thus, not outside commercial interests.’³ Dazed & Confused’s implicit relationship with big corporations, despite claiming an independent status, functions as a brand extension for the luxury fashion companies it features in ‘full looks’ on its pages; a relationship that symbolically and economically reinforces the brand value of both parties in the contemporary market.

Under the umbrella of Dazed Digital, a content and media producer for corporate brands, Hack capitalises on the cultural clout generated from Dazed & Confused’s heritage as a counter culture publication. Yet, fundamental changes in the way this publication operates in the commercial market indicate the magazine’s shift from being an independent publisher to a media agency, making press release statements like ‘If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything,’ dangerously hollow. Stoppard querying Hack about ‘Independence from what?’ is a critical question in defining a position in relation to the commercial high fashion system, and Hack’s oblique answer points to the difficulty of appearing ‘authentic’ while simultaneously being transparent with your commercial motives.

In his failure to answer his critics, Hack, not surprisingly, appears unable to demonstrate what exactly needs to be ‘hacked’ in the fashion system. Apart from a light-hearted pun in its title, how to meaningfully subvert the system that he has become a leading tastemaker of, is a question his book raises but fails to answer. Instead, it falls amongst the many voices that harp on about the sorry state of the contemporary fashion industry, without wanting to acknowledge the role they play in constructing and upholding it. The end result is just more white noise.

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

1. see Eva Wiseman (2011), ‘Still Dazed at 20: the gang who changed pop culture’, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/nov/05/dazed-confused-gang-still-cool, 6 November, 2011 ↩

2. ‘Lunch with the FT: Jefferson Hack’ by John Sunyer for the Financial Times, 8 August 2014. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fc444a8a-1cab-11e4-88c3-00144feabdc0.html ↩

3. Ane Lynge-Jorlén 2012, ‘Between frivolity and art: Contemporary niche fashion magazines,’ Fashion Theory, vol. 16, issue 1, pp. 7-28, Berg, Oxford. ↩

With:

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at Business of Fashion

Thom Browne, founder & head of design at Thom Browne

Ralph Toledano, president of the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, president of the fashion division at Puig, CEO at Nina Ricci

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury goods consultant

Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International

Glenn O’Brien, editor-at-large at Maxim

Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder & senior adviser for creative direction at United Arrows

Steven Kolb, president & CEO at Council of Fashion Designers of America

Nicole Phelps, director at Vogue Runway

Nathalie Ours, partner at PR Consulting Paris

Robin Schulié, brand manager & buying director at Maria Luisa

Andy Spade, co-founder of Partners & Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade, founder of Jack Spade, founder of Sleepy Jones

Tim Walker, freelance photographer

***

Glenn O’Brien: Do you know who the ‘pharmakoi’ were? They were the scapegoats in Ancient Greece. They were sacrificed annually, driven out of Athens or thrown off a cliff, in a purification ritual. That’s what we do to people who fail today. Drug addicts, criminals, people on ’entitlements’ – we ostracise them. In America we can’t accept failure; we can’t say that we’ve failed. Instead it’s the system that’s failed, the president that’s failed, the congress that’s failed – we never fail. I’m not a failure, I’m on the chamber of commerce for god’s sake! In fashion it’s the same thing: people are in denial about failure. The game is about how to transform failure into a perceived success.

Robin Schulié: The press release that was put out after Alexander Wang was fired from Balenciaga was pure propaganda. It was your typical statement where everyone praises each other to the sky. There was no reason given for the ‘separation’. And then Alexander Wang started giving interviews about his new store opening in London and none of them mentioned what had happened at Balenciaga – it was all airbrushed out of the success story that is Alexander Wang. Hilarious!

Jean-Jacques Picart: In fashion we treat failure as if it was a disease.

Steven Kolb: There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry. It’s hard to tell how well a fashion business is doing: whether people are getting paid, what a company’s cash flow is like.

Ralph Toledano: Failure in fashion is not selling.

Steven Kolb: Look at Band of Outsiders. It was a ten-year business, critically acclaimed, on the radar of major editors; they’d won prizes and had a point of view. They grew from zero to seventeen million in a decade, and they just folded. Why? They just didn’t have the resources to take their business to the next level. You know, it’s easier to take your business from zero to ten million in a relatively short time span, but once you hit ten million it becomes much harder to grow. You need an influx of capital to really start investing in expansion, in distribution and stores, in control of inventory and wholesale – all those things are expensive. Lots of fashion companies take outside investment at this point, and most of those investors aren’t fashion people. That leads to conflict because people have different expectations.

Jean-Jacques Picart: Success or failure in fashion isn’t a measure of how talented you are as a designer. You can be the most talented designer in the world and still fail. There are so many incredibly talented designers who had to close their brands because they weren’t commercially successful. That they were the darlings of the press doesn’t matter in the long run. If you don’t know how to translate your creative vision into commercially viable products, this industry will spit you out.

Steven Kolb: Often designers get stuck on whether they get a bad review or no review for a collection, on what Suzy Menkes thinks. To me, that’s not failure. Going out of business, that’s failure. Not being able to deliver what you promise, not being able to pay your employees, not being able to feed the infrastructure you’ve created – that’s failure.

Nicole Phelps: Success in fashion today is about how many $5000 handbags you sell. That’s what determines if a designer stays at the head of a brand. How many bags a brand sells matters infinitely more than what I, Vanessa Friedman or Suzy Menkes might think.

Adrian Joffe: I’d say there’s a blueprint for success today – a certain path you need to tread. And an important part of it is being charming to reporters. Do the blah blah blah. Some people who are successful today are brilliant at it. They can charm the pants off anyone.

Tim Blanks: Look at who makes it today. Look at Proenza Schouler for instance; I find them banal but they’re cute and charismatic. Then again, there are designers like Joseph Altuzarra, who’s a genius in my book, so I’m glad that he’s so telegenic and gets a leg-up because of it. On the other hand, there are designers like Anna Sui who have forged ahead for years doing absolutely amazing work. Her shows now have a much better calibre of audience than they used to, but she never quite manages to hit the big time because Anna Wintour doesn’t like her.

Nicole Phelps: If you look at someone like Frida Giannini who was fired from Gucci recently, it’s very hard to see what her next act might be. She was always a bit aloof with the press, and that didn’t make her many friends in the business. That might affect her chances to get another high profile job. Let’s just say that she doesn’t have the world’s most powerful editor in her court.

Adrian Joffe: Rei has always said that she doesn’t think she has succeeded at all. She believes that if she was successful, she wouldn’t have to think about next week’s cash flow, she wouldn’t have to worry. Sometimes I ask her, ‘Can’t you just be happy? Just for one instant?’ One time she didn’t want to come to Paris at all, she wanted to cancel the whole show. She said, ‘This is no good, no one is going to like it, it’s not good enough.’ In fact, she says that every time, and every time I remind her that she’s always wrong. It’s getting worse though, the suffering and torture she puts herself through. I’m constantly reassuring her. I try to protect her and make things easier but it just gets too hard sometimes. But that’s what drives her, this dissatisfaction. For her, one instant of self-satisfaction would mean the end.

Thom Browne: Without sounding self-congratulatory, I’d define myself as someone successful.

Andy Spade: For me success means getting respect from my peers for the work I do. If Glenn O’Brien writes about what I do, if he likes it and thinks it’s brilliant, that to me is a success. Because he gets it. Success for me isn’t financial. I mean, I know how to do things that sell. That’s not a challenge. Success to me is doing something highly conceptual that sells. Then I feel like I’m fooling the public. I like the idea of pulling the wool over the consumer’s eyes.

Glenn O’Brien: A lot of times I’ve been distracted from what I should have been doing by doing stuff just to make money. I’m a family man: I have kids and I want to live well. By many people’s standards I guess I’m a brilliant failure. But navigating this corporate colossus world is hard. You exist only through benign neglect. Like, please don’t crush me, I just want to have a hot dog stand – I promise!

Adrian Joffe: The system is what it is and fashion can’t change that. Are you going to change the world with fashion? I don’t think so. Fashion is just a reflection of society at large. We live in a culture where poor people can dress up in nice things for cheap, and where rich people want to know that they’re the only ones to have what they have. That’s not new. Some people have yachts in the Caribbean; others have a shack to sleep in if they’re lucky. My point is that we need everything – ultimately it’s about balance. In fashion, we need Uniqlo, Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garçons. Nature is about balance, and culture is too. And the fact that that balance is never achieved is what keeps things moving. If we were to somehow achieve absolute balance, the world would end. And still that’s what we keep striving for. That’s the Tree of Life.

Tim Blanks: Everything moves forward according to a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We go through smooth and rough patches – that’s just progress. We don’t know what our world will look like in twenty years’ time. Maybe we’ll all be living in another Fascist regime. Or in Utopia. Though I doubt it – human beings are incapable of Utopia.

Thom Browne: If you want to fight the system – good luck! A lot of people complain about the fashion industry today, but the way I see it, there’s no use complaining. I prefer to live my life according to the way things are.

Andy Spade: Look, if you choose to ignore the system, if you’re just like, I want to do my own thing, fuck the world, I hate everybody – then you shouldn’t live in a capitalist society. You should leave. Where would you go? I don’t care – but get out of America! I hate it when people whine about the system. Figure it out! I didn’t have any backing when I started; no one paid for my samples. I didn’t have any patrons; I took two jobs to pay for it all. I think the system is working fine.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion and the big time art world have been corrupted. The only space noncommercial culture has today, is a little temporary space that nobody notices. Like the space for cheap buildings in big cities, you can fill them until they get knocked down in order to put something expensive in its place. It’s nothing new; it’s been this way since Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. But today we’ve reached this whole new level of stupidity orchestrated mainly by the mass media. Everywhere you look you see Caitlyn, Kim and Kanye. If people spend all their time thinking about ’The Real Housewives’ or ’Dancing with the Stars,’ they’re not thinking about poverty, police brutality or the exploitation of workers in Abu Dhabi.

Tim Blanks: The whole process of fashion has become fascinating to ordinary people. It’s a whole fallow area of escapism that hadn’t yet been exploited. Bread and circuses. The world has gone further and further down the toilet and fashion is glorious window-dressing. Nobody buys the clothes, but they sure like looking at them or reading about the people who make them or wear them.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion is one of the main things that distract people from thinking about what’s important today: ecology and politics. It’s a manipulation machine. The celebrity system we have now doesn’t make people think bigger or question anything. It’s the opposite actually – it makes people think more and more shallowly.

Hirofumi Kurino: Money and politics have conquered fashion. In the press for instance, nobody dares saying anything critical anymore. To me, that shows a lack of love. If you really care about fashion, you should be able to say critical things when it’s warranted. Recently I had dinner with the editor-in-chief of GQ Japan, Masafumi Suzuki. It was just after LVMH’s Berluti presentation, and afterwards all the PR people were asking him, ‘Mr Suzuki, how did you like the show?’ I’m sure they expected the usual niceties, but instead he said, ‘It was the worst show I ever saw!’ He told them they were cheating the customer and ruining the heritage of the brand by making expensive, uninteresting clothes. The PRs were shocked, but what he said came from a place of love. He cares about the brand. And because he’s important, people listen and invite him back to see the next collection.

Nicole Phelps: The corporations are getting stronger all the time in fashion. I see new brands coming up all the time; they stay underground for a season and then they too move towards the corporations. Partly it’s because it’s too expensive and too difficult to develop a fashion line without support. But it’s also because the glamour that the corporations represent is irresistible.

Robin Schulié: When Bernard Arnault bought Christian Lacroix in 1987, it marked the beginning of a new era. Arnault was interested in building a fashion house in the traditional way – starting with haute couture, moving on to ready-to-wear and then diversifying into accessories and perfume. But Lacroix was extremely reactionary in terms of design, for the time I mean. Alaïa, Mugler, Montana and Gaultier were already huge by that point. But they were all kind of scary – too advanced for most consumers. Lacroix with his charisma, and his organza and puff skirts, could appeal to grannies. Instead of growing the business organically, Arnault invested a lot of money in Lacroix. Still, it never worked. No one wanted what he was selling.

Ralph Toledano: People who look down their noses at LVMH or Kering are just jealous. They envy their power and money. Look, the CEOs of these companies might wear grey suits and white shirts, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t get it. They do. François-Henri Pinault had the guts to hire Hedi Slimane even though everybody was sceptical and look at where Saint Laurent is now, so don’t tell me he doesn’t get it. As the president of the Fédération, I know that we need people like Pinault or Arnault to achieve our goals. They have the money.

Glenn O’Brien: The people who cooperate the most are the ones who are rewarded so there are always willing participants.

Robin Schulié: Is there any other way to play the game? If you want to compete with the big guys, do you have to do it on their terms? That’s the million-dollar question. Young designers today are often competitive. They want to prove themselves and play the game. But the market today is too fragmented, and the big brands have already honed their skills for several decades. How can a young brand compete with that? And anyway, is there really just one way to be successful? Young designers need to ask themselves if they would be satisfied with another model. Why does every designer seem to follow the same blueprint for success? Why do you need to please everybody? I can understand that Dior needs to, but Christopher Kane? What will happen to his vision once he starts making long dresses for the Middle East, short cutesy ones for Asia and conservative tailoring for Middle America?

Nathalie Ours: A designer with an independent brand needs money to develop his company. The big problem for young designers is that buyers might love what they do and order it, but to produce it they have to be able to pay their manufacturer. Bear in mind that buyers pay designers six months after they have delivered the goods, so there’s a gap in the timeline. If the designer doesn’t have a good banker or partner, how do they manage that gap? That’s the big issue. Every designer I know has the same problem. Sometimes with very new designers, a buyer accepts paying, say, thirty percent in advance. But after three or four years, the buyer says, ’Okay, we’ve supported you – enough already.’ So now what do you do? Can you afford to lose this buyer? Most designers can’t. That’s one of the reasons why many young designers are so happy to have a conglomerate behind them. It’s a way to survive.

Tim Walker: As a creative you have to work out how to direct the money into projects where you can capitalise on it. You have to know how to take your vision to a level that wouldn’t have been possible without the financial support available. That’s my tuppence worth.

Ralph Toledano: Big corporate monsters need to have a creative vision and a genius designer at the top. The public wants someone they can identify by name, someone with a recognisable face. They want a hero. That’s why fashion companies stage fashion shows – the public needs to dream. But this aspect of fashion is only partially important to the success of a business today. What really matters is the rest of the machine: the marketing, the supply chain, the location of the shop, the communication campaign. That’s where you make your billions. In this sense fashion is a commodity business. As the CEO of a company you go to the show, but in the end the quality of the show is much less important than currency fluctuations or the economic situation in China.

Nicole Phelps: The fashion industry has a knack for turning designers into stars. Look at someone like Alessandro Michele at Gucci; your typical backroom guy thrust into the limelight because of his position. We editors are storytellers by necessity – we need to create stars. We have pages to fill.

Adrian Joffe: Do multinational corporations abuse power? I’m not sure they do. They just do what they do, that’s all. They have power because they’re rich and because that lets them spend a million dollars a month in advertising budget on some magazine. And if they then expect the magazine to write nicely about them because of it, is that abuse of power? I’m not sure it is. They just do what they feel they have to do.

Glenn O’Brien: We live in a time where corporations are seen as individuals. But if you work for a corporation, are you allowed to have an individual opinion? Not really. You have to follow the company voice and the company line. It’s destructive to human beings. Me, I believe in a freelance world. Working for a company only for money is what Marx called ’alienated labour.’ Today we live in a world of alienated labour where people sell out – they sell themselves, their minds, their integrity. They become liars for money.

Andy Spade: Glenn respects commercialism just like Andy Warhol did. If I just did my work in some small corner of the world, I don’t think Glenn would respect it as much. What he respects is the fact that I built a business while still being subversive, working on two levels. I’m not claiming to be a designer or an artist or anything – I just like having good ideas that sell.

Adrian Joffe: Long live the one percent; they are the ones that change things.

Tim Walker: There’s been an incredible explosion of money and power in the industry. Today there are countless forces polluting the innocence of play and experimentation, and the impact on true creativity has been damning. From my point of view that’s a failure and a betrayal of sorts.

Ralph Toledano: Life is about power. It’s always been like that – it’s nothing new.

This article was published in Vestoj On Failure.

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist. These images are from his ‘Indoor Sculpture’ series, 2002.

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