Fashion

 Yves Saint Laurent at the press conference for his first retrospective 25 Years of Design, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1983. © Roxanne Lowit. Photo: Roxanne Lowit

Yves Saint Laurent at the press conference for his first retrospective, “25 Years of Design,” Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1983. © Roxanne Lowit. Photo: Roxanne Lowit

A short history of luxury designer retrospectives – of Armani, YSL, Alexander McQueen, et al – and their more experimental counterparts illuminates 20th-century ideas of nation-building and fashion’s many possible futures.

 Vivienne Westwood in SS 2017, detail. Photo: Juergen Teller

Vivienne Westwood in SS 2017, detail. Photo: Juergen Teller

Is it possible to have style undressed? And what do we lack if we lack clothes? In her July column, Joanna Walsh ponders the hard work of taking (almost) everything off.

We feel either too big or too small for our clothes. In her June column, Joanna Walsh considers the monstrous feminine, oversize fashion, and the hard work required to make us “fit.”

 North Face x Gucci linen puffer from a campaign shot in Iceland, 2021. Courtesy: Gucci. Photo: Jalan and Jibril Durimel

North Face x Gucci linen puffer from a campaign shot in Iceland, 2021. Courtesy: Gucci. Photo: Jalan and Jibril Durimel

“Fashion is the future, clothes are what we already wear.” In her May column, Joanna Walsh ponders how fast fashion’s accelerationism plays with seasons, desire, and the virtual, projecting us into an elsewhere we’ll never venture into.

 Congolese Sapeurs

Congolese Sapeurs, members of the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People)

What is style? It’s not fashion, or clothing; it’s only ever personal, but never entirely personal. In the first installment of Spike’s NEW COLUMN, Joanna Walsh ponders why we yearn for ten-piece wardrobe plans or call for Derrida to get style. 

 “The Happy Nut.” Courtesy: Kindred Black

“The Happy Nut.” Courtesy: Kindred Black

For her first column of 2023, Cara Schacter looks under the soft, draped gown of fashion’s obsession with everything angelic.

 The iconic Arc'teryx Gore-Tex bikini

Nicole McLaughlin, b'kini (2021)

What’s hot for 2022? Clinical – institutional, terminal, quasi-medical – horniness. Libido with surgical precision. Latex, gore-tex, aphrodesiacs and anesthetics. Cara Schacter reports from the runways of Eckhaus Latta and beyond.

 Toshiki in the studio.

Toshiki in the studio.

Spike sat down with Japanese designer Toshiki to talk about the TOSHIKI x SPIKE Tote Bag collab, sustainability, and how totes are like dating apps. 

Thebe Magugu, SS18 – Gender Studies
Figures of Fortitude (2018)
Photos: Aart Verrips, creative direction & set: Thebe Magugu, assistant: Nhlanhla Masemola

Fashion has built a trap for itself. The most contemporary medium may still pride itself on being ahead of the curve, but it has fallen prey to a totalised corporate capitalist realism that is closing the door on a new generation. Where will it go with its need to rebel and experiment?

Thebe Magugu, SS18 – Gender Studies

Figures of Fortitude (2018)

Photo: Aart Verrips, creative direction & set: Thebe Magugu, assistant: Nhlanhla Masemola

Fashion has built a trap for itself. The most contemporary medium may still pride itself on being ahead of the curve, but it has fallen prey to a totalised corporate capitalist realism that is closing the door on a new generation. Where will it go with its need to rebel and experiment? By Jeppe Ugelvig

 All images courtesy of Celine 

Hedi Slimane, image Courtesy of Celine 

Director Hedi Slimane’s new Celine Art Project enlists contemporary artists to design work for stores around the world. Charles Teyssou discusses Slimane’s artistic imaginary through Americana cultural landscapes, and poses ten questions to two of Slimane’s collaborators, David Kramer and Shawn Kuruneru. 

Annotated images of the Fomalhaut system from NASA/ESA.

The details show the orbital motion of the planet Fomalhaut b (aka Dagon).

NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

How to dress the devil? If there’s one thing we can learn from the canon of villainy it would be that evil rarely requires a stylist. The arts are populated with villains – on both sides of the screen, page, canvas – who know how to work far more dashing cuts than their heroic counterparts. By Ella Plevin

Illustration by Kurt Woerpel

As products and media started to blur into each other, in the wake of a cultural repositioning of the image through social media streams, fashion led the way in turning content into a new art form. By Thom Bettridge

The origins of the fashion industry’s most provocative and innovative strategies had a forerunner in BLESS, the enigmatic fashion studio founded between Paris and Berlin in the late 1990s. By David Lieske

 Symonds Pearmain; Haute Militaire, AW 2017; The Horse Hospital, London

Symonds Pearmain; Haute Militaire, AW 2017; The Horse Hospital, London

The contemporary has ousted the timeless in art today. Fashion, by contrast, has always operated in a different, tighter bond with the timely, anticipating the next season, channeling the zeitgeist.

An interview with Margaret Burton, an ex-artist who found her way into the fringes of fashion to criticise the industry from within. By Ché Zara Blomfield

 Cover of Vogue in June 1932

Cover of the June 1932 Vogue (detail)

A Summer Chronicle, part 2: Natasha Stagg writes about working in the fashion-magazine world and loneliness on Independence Day

A nihilist’s guide to the unbelievable success of the young European fashion label

 Raf Simons, SS15 menswear

Raf Simons, SS15 menswear

A shirt, a T-shirt, a dress: clothing is inescapably concrete. But several recent collections have introduced new strategies of dematerialization into the world of fashion undoing the separation of image and object. Michele D’Aurizio explains.