HE WAS JAPANESE, A painter, about forty. He started talking to me in the foyer of a gallery, while I was waiting in a line to store my coat. ‘What did you think?’ he said, meaning, I presumed, the exhibition. ‘This is the entrance,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he said.

It was not his exhibition – I should make that clear. When I say he was a painter, I mean that he worked mostly in a pet emporium on Ninety-Sixth and Broadway which housed rabbits bred to look like miniature Dalmatian dogs, in the windows, and which offered on site-grooming sessions and appointments with an animal nutritionist. The animal nutritionist was him, and he kept a canvas in the back, for when shifts were slow. Some of his paintings were OK, had been sold for quite good money in the Nineties – at least, that was what he told me. Now none of them made anything but he kept a brush in his front pocket, all the same, and sketched portraits of society ladies’ spaniels and chinchillas to pay rent. He said, often shaking off some flaky residue of fish food from his arms – he was always paranoid he smelt residually of ‘pond’ – ‘You cannot be a primadonna, about this.’

I didn’t have a pet, but pretended that I did. A cat. ‘Leopold,’ I said. The emporium was en route to my office in the English Literature department and most mornings, I would get a question about him, or an earnest ‘Say hello to the little feline guy.’ I had shown him photos of my friend’s cat in Seattle. ‘He looks well hydrated,’ he would say. ‘That’s unusual, for Manhattan.’

I started going round to his for dinner at the end of autumn, when the leaves were on the point of falling, when the runners started wearing fleecy swathes of cotton bonded to their ears and hands. He avoided corn, and gluten, also dairy – foods that he decided made him ‘fatally apocalyptic.’ He strained his own nut milk using a mesh pouch which he had bought online, and stored batches of red quinoa and adzuki beans in his fridge. Otherwise he seemed to me to eat nothing other than expensive, coarse, dark things – eighty five per cent or higher chocolate, tarry black coffee, wine. He bought tapered cigarettes in lurid pastel colours and rationed them for ‘torpid days.’ ‘I feel this voltage twitching between us,’ he said, on the third or fourth time I went to his house, ‘but I can’t. I’m exercising discipline in my attachments.’

‘The last girl,’ he said. ‘She called me all the time.’

In this there was no risk – I didn’t have his number. We had always arranged seeing one another in the street, outside the shop, and still went out sometimes, at weekends, to over-bright bars which sold drinks which were half cocktails, half desserts – I gave in to the temptation of the tiramisu amaretto, every time. When I went back to the UK, after my time in Manhattan was over, he found and sent a message to my faculty address, asking me to forward him my details, and, if you can believe it, I received a Christmas card from him that same December, with a picture of a lizard wearing a red Santa hat, specks of glitter coming off the front. ‘Greetings,’ it said, inside. Every year now, without fail, he writes to me and sends me something. Last year it was a pyjama shirt, with stripes in pink and blue. I didn’t know if he had been saving it for someone else, or had just wrapped it up several months before he sent it. When I opened up the package, there were moths.

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

Wolfgang Tillmans is a photographer and artist based in London.

Whilst fashion’s efforts – faced with constant accusations of frivolousness and triviality – to embed itself in other, more respected forms of culture have a long history, and amount perhaps, to nothing new or noteworthy, such attempts by Prada and Vuitton to specifically target literature seem relatively novel. Typically, it is to music or to cinema that fashion gravitates, as art forms more in sync with dress and costume’s visual, sensorial, and decidedly performative appeal. The prolonged imaginative and introspective space of literature and the closeted postures – having us hunch and fold ourselves over books, laptops and desks – it elicits, fit less well with fashion’s promises of transformation here and now, and require us to be less ‘out in the world’ exhibiting new wares than to remain stubbornly absorbed in fictional ones (even if Marcel Proust by all accounts did write In Search of Lost Time lying in bed under a plush fur coat.)

In her 2004 work Atlas of Emotion, visual scholar Giuliana Bruno notes furthermore how cinema and music crucially imbue the starched, static textures of the fashion garment with vital fluency and movement, whereas text, as cultural theorist Roland Barthes observed in his seminal account of fashion language The Fashion System, fixes clothes down to one interpretation, yokes them to ‘a single certainty.’³

For Barthes, fashion ‘never achieves literature,’ only ‘signifies’ it.⁴ Such a statement corresponds to his broader argument within The Fashion System that fashion writing or rhetoric is ‘received, but not read,’⁵ being at heart a hollow, surface exercise that trades in superficial, pretty signs but never meanings, and which corresponds to a self-serving ‘vestimentary code’ but not ‘English grammar.’⁶ The reason writing about fashion is so difficult, he argues, is because fashion has no concrete referent – its ‘object’ being transient, ever changing, and ephemeral.  This denigrates or ‘designifies’ the fashion sign, to the point where it becomes arbitrary and empty: able to decree tracksuit trousers as slobby and unsightly one year but ‘louche luxe’ the next.

In such a context Prada and Vuitton’s recent investments in the art and act of writing are more significant – indicative of desires to heal a long-time asymmetric, fractured bond.  And yet, they also speak to recent shifts away from patterns of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen⁷ infamously christened ‘conspicuous consumption’ towards a new, present-day paradigm of what Yann Moulier Boutang, the French socio-economist, terms ‘cognitive capitalism’⁸ which locates value not in the commodity or material good but in experiences, knowledge and ‘intellectual capital.’

Against such a backdrop, the acquisition and accumulation of visibly logoed designer products feels gauche; demoded; ostentatious – something that Prada and Vuitton evidently recognise, with Vuitton’s most recent collections, in contrast to earlier collaborations with Stephen Sprouse or Takashi Murakami, paring back its signature florid monograms in favour of demure, streamlined, minimal designs endorsed by understated tastemakers such as Sofia Coppola or actress Michelle Williams. A much anticipated 2011 campaign set in Cambodia and featuring Angelina Jolie, seemed furthermore to mark a break with prior benchmarks of ostentatious display in favour of more experiential archetypes such as exotic travel and humanitarian activity.

Such a campaign, if controversially received,⁹ illuminated how in these times of lesser attachment to the commodity, Prada and Vuitton’s true ‘selling points’ become less leather goods and knowingly ironic nylon bags than a general aura of understated cerebrality, for the former, and an ingrained sense of artisanal craftsmanship and stylishly outfitted voyage for the latter. This shift speaks not only to the new model of cognitive capitalism, but also to our post financial crisis context, where qualities of authenticity, history and heritage fare better than the endorsement of unchecked consumption and untrammeled luxury.

And yet, however much sociologists and cultural economists proclaim the waning of commodity fetishism, both companies still need to sell vast quantities of their star items in order to have funds for this sophisticated level of brand maintenance. In both initiatives, indeed, the shadow of the commodity looms near: with a link to browse Prada’s most recent eyewear collection directly subtending the link to download the Journal online, which, in similar vein to Vuitton, not so subtly takes ‘the metaphor of prescription glasses’¹⁰ as a generative starting point. In addition, Vuitton’s hosting of literary ‘conversations’ at La Hune conveniently dovetailed with the opening, a mere few streets away, of a pop-up ‘Cabinet d’Écriture’ or ‘writing shop’ in its St Germain flagship, exhibiting work by text based artist Ed Ruscha and selling various luxury items – collector pens, leather-lined notebooks, crystal ink pots – of writerly paraphernalia.

Even both brands’ taking up of the short story – a form more easily consumable and able to be fashioned into a cult objet fétiche than the novel – seems to point less to a desire to transcend the fatigued designer good than to simply find new forms for its expression, via approved intellectual channels.

In the online blurb explaining the initiative, Vuitton claims that the imperative behind the ‘writing shop’ was to celebrate the act of writing and its accompanying sense of ‘plush, intimate’ materiality in our at times overbearing digital culture,¹¹ yet risks branding writing as the display and ownership of various luxury products rather than a process in and of itself. The stories in Prada’s anthology – which are as intuitive, fresh and kookily surprising as you’d expect from association with the Prada brand – similarly risk being obscured by the scheme’s underlying marketing objectives. The collection takes as overarching theme the idea of ‘windows on the world’¹² which seems ultimately apt, with the Journal at risk of becoming less a space for seeing differently than a transparent exercise complicit with the logic of the market.

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

1. ‘Prada Journal: A Place for New Stories’; http://www.prada.com/en/journal/project ↩

2. M Aissaoui, ‘Vuitton crée un salon littéraire à Paris’, 2012 http://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2012/10/14/03005-20121014ARTFIG00164-vuitton-cree-un-salon-litteraire-a-paris.php ↩

3. R Barthes, The Fashion System, Editions de Seuil, Paris, 1967, p. 13. ↩

4. Ibid, p. 232 ↩

5. Ibid, p. 232 ↩

6. Ibid, p. 232 ↩

7. T Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, Macmillan, New York, 1899. ↩

8. Y Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, Polity Press, London, 2012. ↩

9. S Armstrong, ‘What’s Angelina Jolie Doing in a Swamp with a £7000 bag?’, 2011 http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/14/angelina-jolie-swamp-bag-ad ↩

10. ‘Prada Journal: A Place for New Stories’; http://www.prada.com/en/journal/project ↩

11. ‘The Art of Writing,’ http://www.lvmh.com/lvmh-news/news/louis-vuitton-cabinet-d-ecriture ↩

12. ‘Prada Journal: A Place for New Stories’; http://www.prada.com/en/journal/project ↩

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.