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Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, BILT makes it worth it. Bilt is revolutionizing how millions think about paying rent by rewarding their members with points and exclusive benefits around their neighborhood every single month. By paying rent through Bilt, you earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. BILT is about making your entire neighborhood more rewarding. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios, and enjoy exclusive experiences just for built members every month. BILT is turning a monthly expense into an opportunity to earn rewards and discover the best that your neighborhood has to offer. Your rent is finally working for you. Earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to joinbuilt.com fashion that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com fashion make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Ready to level up? Champa Casino is your playbook to fun. It's free to play with no purchase necessary. Enjoy hundreds of online social games like blackjack, slots, and solitaire anytime, anywhere, with fresh releases every week. Whether you are at home or on the go, let Chumba Casino bring the excitement to you. Plus, get free daily login bonuses and a free welcome bonus. Join now for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Play Chumba Casino today. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void board prohibited by law 21/TNCs apply hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Lauren Sherman, writer of Puck's Fashion and Beauty Memo Line Sheet, and today with me on the show is W. David Marks, author of Blank Space, a cultural history of the 21st century. We discuss fashion as pop culture, selling out, a bathing ape supreme, preppy culture, Grape nuts, and a whole lot more. Before we get going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email called Line Cheat. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. It's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries line. She is scoopy, analytical and above all, fun. Along with me, a subscription to Puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment, media, sports, politics, finance, the art world, and much more. If you're interested listeners of Fashion People get a discount, just go to Puck News FashionPeople to join Puck or start a free trial. Happy Friday everyone. Hope you had a great week. This is a very long episode. David and I both have trouble shutting up, so it was inevitable and I let it ride because I really love talking to him. But let's get right to it. Buy his book. It's great. And really quickly, I just wanted to say that I hope to see you tonight at our Stories of the Season event where I'll be interviewing a bunch of amazing Oscar worthy costume designers. Lots of other cool people are going to be there. Elle Fanning, Peter Hamby is going to be interviewing her and Jesse Plemons and Will Arnett and a bunch of other people. Matt Bellamy is interviewing Chloe Zhao and he's also interviewing Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer and their casting director about J. Kelly, which I think he went to see that this week. So that'll be really fun. I'm, I'm excited. Thanks to everyone who came out to the Brentwood Country Mart, my favorite shopping center in Los Angeles on Thursday to hear Amy Laka speak about or Tuesday. Sorry, it was Tuesday. Who knows? Life. Life is crazy. Amy Laka speak about her book how to Be well and Big. That was big. Thanks to Lizzie from Irene north, who also is the originator of my son's favorite stuffy sheepy. He knows her as Lizzie, who gave me sheepy. So I appreciate her and Laura Van Rupol from Emeritus, obviously from Capitol for making that happen. Also massive thank you to Bobby Brown who's been on this podcast, who you all know who's a proud Emerson College alum just like me. Is alum the right plural? I don't even know. Alumni, alumnus, alum, whatever. I interviewed Bobby in Santa Monica on Wednesday about her book and Still Bobby. And it's basically a memoir of her life and her business and it was really cool. Interesting crowd of people who admire her who like went to personal appearances in Los angeles in the 90s when she was doing them at Saks at the beauty counter to entrepreneurs who just wanted to hear about her story. A lot of dudes, which was interesting and great. I love, I love a mixed crowd. Both were great talks and very much overlap because all the stuff, beauty, fashion, wellness, comes back to this idea of self improvement and our desire to live forever or at least ignore the fact that we are going to die. Anyway. I hope you enjoy this conversation with David. I really did. David Marks, welcome to Fashion People.
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B
Thank you so much for having me.
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A
Lauren, it's very late where you are. What did you have for breakfast?
- [05:29]
B
This morning, oh, I had, I made myself some poached eggs on English muffin. My secret, my secret. Because you don't always want to make a holiday sauce because it is, you know, Thursday morning or whatever. So I, I, I put a little bit of sour cream under the egg and that gives it the tartness of a hollandaise.
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A
Would you make a hollandaise sauce on a Thursday?
- [05:51]
B
No, no, that's like a, that's definitely a special Sunday kind of thing to do.
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A
The other question I have is, you live in Tokyo. Do you buy, are there like store bought English muffins or is this a thing you make custom?
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B
No, the English muffins are store bought. There's a pretty common brand you can get everywhere. But you also could get crumpets once in a while here, which I think growing up was something I did not eat. And that's been, that's been fun. But yeah, there's no English muffin shortage in Japan.
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A
How long have you lived in Japan? For 20 years or.
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B
Yeah, more than 20.
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A
More than 20. Is the availability of like American foods, has it increased? Like legit American foods increased? And, and if it has, do you even care at this point because you're so sort of embedded in Japanese culture?
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B
No, I care quite a bit and it has increased. And I'll give you a couple small examples. One is that bacon used to be, I don't, I guess it's not cured or something, but it just wouldn't get crispy whatever the bacon they sold here. And now the crispy bacon is here. So you can get the crispy bacon, which is, it's been critical things. You still can't get Grape Nuts. I love Grape Nuts. I can't get Grape Nuts. So when I go to the US I buy Grape Nuts and I smuggle them back into Japan. But overall, I would say American foods have expanded.
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A
I wonder why not Grape Nuts. I'm shocked that you can even get them in America at this point. Who eats them now?
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B
Who eats Grape Nuts in general?
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A
Yeah, other than you.
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B
I thought I got really into them because I did Outward Bound in eighth grade and that was the breakfast we had. And I remember mixing them with cocoa powder at some point because of just desperate camp living. But since that time, my mom was one of those moms where you would go to the grocery store and you'd be like, mom, I want this cereal. And she would look at the box, but this is one gram of protein. We're not getting this. And so I've since that point really obsessed over the protein in cereals. And so Grape Nuts is like, it's incredible. It's like 8 grams of protein or something. It's the most. But the way they make Grape Nuts, I don't know. This is why you had me on to talk about this. But you take a. They like bake a loaf of bread and they flash freeze it and then they smash it. And that's what Grape Nuts is. It's just like a smashed loaf of bread.
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A
Did you learn this on like sesame street or Mr. Rogers or something?
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B
I learned it because I was at some point desperate to make my own Grape Nuts. And so I tried to figure out how to do it. It's like, I think it's impossible for a person to. To do on their own.
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A
Okay, so talking about taking things and making them on your own, you, the Japanese, and we'll get into this. Cause you wrote a book about this. The Japanese, their thing is taking things from other people's culture and perfecting them and making them better in a way that so good that the people from the other culture want the Japanese thing. But my feeling, and I don't know, I've been to Japan, I think four times now. As you know. My husband is a big fan of Japan and has been many more times. But I feel like a lot of the stuff that they make, especially food wise, it doesn't satisfy me as much as the original, like, go, I don't want pastries. When I go, I don't want to go to great example. I don't want to go to City Bakery and get the hot chocolate because it does not taste like the hot chocolate that whatever Reuben guy made on 19th street in New York City. I'm just curious what you think about that. Do you think that the one thing I will say is that I had pizza the last time we were there, but the guy was Australian. Not that that matters, but he wasn't Japanese, I don't think.
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B
I mean, I think what's really important is, number one, not to essentialize that every single person in Japan is doing this importation and perfection process. It's like a very specifically upper middle class, very educated, sophisticated side side of Japan. There are things there. There's some French cuisine and some Italian cuisine where it is excellent. Maybe it's a little more delicate. I. I had a Chicago deep dish pizza recently in Japan, and because it's Japan, it was just so much more delicate than a real deep dish pizza. And so it was better because it just wasn't. It didn't feel like it was so heavy, like the American version. But I would say pastries are not the best. And croissants here are fine. But if you go to Paris. I had only gone to Paris for the first time in my life pretty recently, and I've had many croissants in my life. And the real Parisian croissant feels like 100 times better. And so, yeah, there's just still things that obviously you can't get the air and the water and the butter right perfectly. And so you can't. Even if you know the technique, you can't quite get the flavor down.
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A
Yeah. What did you think about the Parisian obsession with Japanese food? So when I go to Paris now and I go out to eat with people, all they want to do is go to Japanese restaurants in the first and second.
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B
Yep, that's a real thing. And, you know, so much Japanese food outside of Japan feels like a fusion, even if the chef is Japanese. So it's. I don't know, they're still like the same way that an American hot dog in Japan is not quite like it, actual American hot dog. I think Japanese food in Paris is not quite the same.
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A
Yeah, that's that. I. I see that. So, okay, let's talk about your work. And you. You are on here because you have a new book out, but tell us a little bit about yourself and what you've been doing for the last 20 years. That. That led up to Blank Space, which is your newest book.
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B
Yeah. So originally I studied East Asian studies. And within that it was Japanese society and culture. And the thing I was interested in was pop culture, and especially why Japanese pop culture was so different than American pop culture because I had gone as a high school kid and so that's what I wanted to study. And I ended up discovering the brand the Bathing Ape when I was in Tokyo in 1998. And this was a brand where when I first went to buy the T shirt, I had to wait three hours in line and there was resellers and there was all the things that now we think are quite common globally, but at the time felt really strange. And so I ended up writing my senior thesis about a bathing apes marketing techniques and the marketing technique of intentionally making your clothing hard to get and why that worked. And so that was pretty early in terms of people thinking about streetwear or this kind of limited edition marketing and all that. So that was 2001 ish. And so I came back to Japan to get a master's in consumer behavior and marketing, which is the idea of trying to figure out how pop culture works, like what are the social underpinnings of cultural change and how that relates to consumer behavior and marketing and things like that. And so my writing was mostly Japan specific for quite a while, but I was always interested in the connection between how an industry is organized and the output of the pop culture. And so, yeah, so my first book was a culmination of all that about specifically Japanese fashion, the history of Japanese fashion. So that's Amatura, it came out in 2015 and that's a cultural history of American fashion coming into Japan and now Japan, Japanese brands exporting it to the world. And then I think once when I wrote that, everyone around me would be like, why did you do that? Why would you have wasted your time on such a niche topic? And I didn't really think about it at the time. I just thought it was a good story and I didn't expect it to. To be widely read, which it ended up being quite widely read. But anyway, so in this backlash of, hey, this book is so niche, I tried to think about what would be the broadest possible book I could do. And so when I was in graduate school, you're presented with all these kind of theories of how fashion works and why culture changes. And they were all scattered across all these different kind of works. And so I thought to put them all together to make one book. And so my second book, Status and Culture, is a more universal look at how the individual desire for status. I think you can explain most cultural phenomenon and most importantly cultural change and fashion through that. And so that kind of gets me to recently. And then when that book did well enough to warrant doing another book, I thought about trying to explain what's going on rather than from a kind of sociological point of view, more of going back to the timeline, the history. And so this new book, blank space is 2001-2025. It's a linear history of the 21st century. I did not really know what I was going to write about the century until I started writing it. And then I kind of ended up with this thesis that culture has had a great 25 years in terms of being entertainment, profit making and politics, but probably not as great of a 25 years as being a source for what I call creative invention.
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A
Okay, lots to, as they say, unpack there.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Okay, let's start with your. So you, you explained your sort of initial interest in how the, the fashion system and how kind of consumers worked by. Through the lens of a bathing ape. But I'm curious, were you interested in supreme at the same time when you were living in the US and when you got to Japan? Can we talk a little bit about your relationship with clothes and the relationship men would have with clothes in Japan versus the US and how you think that has sort of influenced this work that you've done?
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B
Yeah, look, I grew up in the south, and the south was still incredibly preppy in the 80s and 90s in a way that I assumed the north actually had lost a lot of that. And my dad had gone to tulane in the 50s and addressed Ivy League his entire life, and he worked at universities, and so his closet was full of tweed and regimental ties. But I would have never thought this Ivy preppy style was fashion at all. The word fashion seemed to me to apply it.
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A
You once sent me a 500 word email about how preppy is not fashion.
- [16:56]
B
Yeah. I mean, so it was like church clothes or. It's like I did cotillion in seventh grade. You know, you put a blazer on for cotillion. It's not fashion. So I wasn't interested in fashion. And the only clothing that I cared about was if I liked a band, I would have the T shirt for it. Right. And so I didn't know Supreme. I mean, I'd seen the movie Kids or something, but I didn't know Supreme. When I went to Japan in 98, I was put in the editorial office as part of this internship for a fashion magazine called Hot Dog Press, which was the rival to Popeye. Popeye's still around. Hot Dog Press is gone, but in looking through a magazine, I saw a T shirt with the Planet of the Apes face. And I really liked the musician Cornelius, who was a Japanese musician who also took his name from Planet of the Apes. And then that connection is what got me into streetwear, was just that I liked the bands that were associated with streetwear. When I got back to Japan, when I got to the us, there's no bathing ape on sale more or less in the United States. And so when I went to New York, I would go to supreme, because supreme was like the only thing you could get in this kind of streetwear category. Like X, large, Supreme, and Supreme. Yeah, it was like a $22t shirt. And you just walked in the store and bought it, and there was none of this. There was no velvet rope and no bouncer. And the staff was the worst staff in the entire world. But that's what made it cool, is that you go and be like, can you get this next large. Like what? But yeah, so supreme was not a big deal. It was just kind of a thing that was there. Bathing Ape was sometimes sold at this one brand. And the New York Times did an article about bathing ape in 99 as part of this article about limited edition brands. And they wanted to interview somebody from a bathing ape, but there was no one from a bathing ape. So me and this other guy had put together the first Bathing Ape unofficial webpage because the idea of a brand having a webpage at this point was farcical. And so we had made this webpage. And so the New York Times interviewed me in 99 as the. Not necessarily the spokesperson for Bathing Ape, but I'm just on the record, like, yeah, let me tell you all about this brand. And then of course the people who actually sold a bathing ape in the US got really mad at me. And so then I took that angry email and I put it as a preface to my senior thesis, which is kind of a very nerdy college thing to have done. But anyway, yeah, so I mean the main point was in Japan, guys dressed immaculately well. And even if it was just T shirts and jeans and sneakers, it was shocking to see that as an American where. Yeah, I mean, you weren't supposed to care about clothing and nobody really did. And there just wasn't. It just wasn't part of the culture yet.
- [19:43]
A
So Amatura, I think the reason it worked so well is because it was very specific and then therefore universal. So that is the. And whereas your other two books are very big and they have a lot of information in them. I mean Amatura does also, but. But it are really big ideas. And I think with status and culture, you know, for me I connected to it because it's all your references. A. I'm obsessed with this same topic of like, why do people buy the things they buy? Like what. What is driving that? And. And all your sort of pop culture references that connect back to that are things that I relate to as well. Exactly. Like Chloe Sevigny, Whit Stillman, the end. But yes, like that is a very specific generation and niche of people. But that is again, you're being very specific to have a bigger idea. But being in Japan and doing this from Japan, first of all, everyone should know that you also always had a full time job when you're writing these books. And like, I know that it's possible my friend just wrote a book and he has a full time job, but his is a novel. And I not saying it's easier, but I Do think it's a little easier than doing a ton of research? Like, your books are so heavily annotated and researched and reported. And there's just so much like, I don't understand how you did it. But also being away from America and writing really like, I'm sure Amatura is huge everywhere. I'm sure that these books resonate in Japan and across the world. But I do think you are also really speaking about American culture in many ways. How has it been writing this stuff and thinking out through these ideas when you don't live in America? So even though you're on the Internet and you can see is different. It's 6am Where I am, it's 11pm where you are. There is a disconnect in a way.
- [21:55]
B
Yeah. I mean, this is the big question, especially about this new book, which, as much as I wanted it to be a global history, ended up being incredibly overly focused on the United States. But there's an argument to be made that, you know, as an American, I understand the basics, but then being separated from it, I have a little more distance in the sense that when I see what's going on in America, I don't necessarily feel like I'm living as part of it. And so I notice the changes more. That would be my main argument. I think that if you're in deep in the middle of it, sometimes you can't see the conventions that you've absorbed because they're just in your unconscious. That would be my argument for why I have a very specific perspective. I think that not being on the ground sometimes, then I'm just getting a. You're getting the hearsay view or you're getting the Internet filtered view of something. But then I would argue from about 2010 onward that there was some year in which the Internet becomes more or less a mirror to real life, or it becomes the place where culture is happening rather than a kind of sideshow. And so at that point, if you're taking everything from the Internet and you're becoming a little too online, maybe you're more plugged into actually what's going on. So I think that's a debate. There was a point where I went home for Christmas once and I was with my friends and they mentioned Larry the Cable Guy. And I always bring this up because it's so specific. But. But Larry the Cable Guy was like, what's Larry the Cable Guy? And they're like, you don't know what Larry the Cable Guy is. And so that's a good example of where I just missed something completely. Because everything I followed online was not talking about Larry the cable guy, but if you. But anyways. But it was one of the, one of the. Yeah, sure, but it's, it's. There's some ambient culture that you miss because you're not just sitting in the United States all the time. But you know, one of, one of the things is when I wake up and I check the social media for news, the day is more or less over in, in the United States. And so I can just absorb all of it in about 30 minutes and then move on with my life and then have a nice day in Japan when I go home for Christmas. It's like I'm always, it's like 11:00am it's like, oh wow, news is breaking in real time. This is. It's like almost. It's endless. And you're kind of just living your whole day with, with the news breaking. So I don't know, there's probably pluses or minuses. But I mean, ultimately I am as an American, overly still in my head tied to the United States and the health in the United States. And sometimes I do think at the worst moments of being depressed about the political situation. For example, I don't even live in the United States. I mean, I know I vote and I know how I'm going to vote every single time. But why am I spending so much of my psychic energy worrying about these things when I don't even live there? But yeah.
- [25:03]
A
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B
That's right. I mean, so when I got to Japan, the consumer society had really blossomed in the 90s, especially youth consumption. And so kids were just spending ridiculous amounts of money on clothing. And so from 2003 or so onward, the consumer market was just dropping, dropping, dropping. There was a kind of a boost for the luxury brands around 2006, and then it started going down. And when I first got here, the Prada building had just opened. It's this like, iconic, amazing glass building. And by the early 2010s, I heard a rumor that they were going to have to dynamite it because the sales were so bad they would have to close it. But they couldn't let another brand Move in. And so they would just have to destroy it. I mean, I don't, I don't think any of this is, is, is true.
- [28:44]
A
Don't call us Prada.
- [28:45]
B
PR Yeah, but it was just like that was the vibe. Let's just say this was a great urban legend, was that the market wasn't doing well. And that was because the Japanese consumer market was Japan. It was Japanese consumers. And so the big difference was Japan started becoming a tourist hub for all of East Asia. So, you know, flight from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, Singapore, these places are quite close. And people were coming more and more. And that consumer boost just breathed new life into Harajuku. It used to be the Harajuku. If you walk down the street, everybody was a Japanese kid and now almost nobody there is Japanese. I mean, it's almost all foreign, foreign tourists. So that's obviously been really good for retail in Japan. And the strategy for these brands obviously is anchoring their Asia rollout to Japan in the sense that they know they're going to reach more than just Japanese consumers in Tokyo. But I mean, it's just, it has changed these specific neighborhoods and it pushes actual Japanese consumers to different places. So, you know, a more trendy Japanese youth is probably not hanging out in Harajuku anymore and they're probably not even. And in Ginza they're going to some other smaller neighborhood. But Tokyo's so big. I mean, I think that's the part that makes it all work, is that if you haven't been to Tokyo, you can't actually fathom how just big of a city is. It's like Los Angeles. But if all of it was just densely urban. And what it means is just that if one neighborhood does become over touristed or too overdeveloped, there's just some new place that's still going to be cheap, that people can turn into cool boutique little stores. So Tokyo is still dynamic and I think that it's still a great place to be. But it's just that those initial neighborhoods that used to be really authentically kind of Japanese youth fashion neighborhoods are not so anymore.
- [30:49]
A
Okay, so let's talk about blank space and essentially a history of pop culture for the first 25 years of this century. How did you coming out of Status and Culture, which is sort of like a series of vignettes illustrating your thesis. How did you think about this book and how did you decide to organize it? Because as you mentioned, it's not. It is comprehensive in a way, but then in another way it's not like, you couldn't get every little bit of this in there because the. Every single part of culture could have been a book from the last 25 years. You could have done a book about fashion the last 25 years, about music, all of that stuff. So how. How did you. When you, like, started plotting this book out, how did you think about it?
- [31:43]
B
I mean, the first. The reason I wanted to do it this way is because the status and culture, because it was theory, you could only have the small kind of vignette, as you said, and then you moved forward. And I really wanted to do something that was more of a linear history, because I think readers like linear histories just because you're moving through and you know where things are going. And it's just a pretty easy to read format. And I wanted to take the technique of Amatora, of trying to follow specific people as much as you can do. I don't think it's as tethered to characters. But what I noticed in thinking about these 25 years is you do have people. I mean, especially Kanye west and then others like Gavin McGinnis or Terry Richardson, I mean, Joe Francis. These aren't always. They're mostly not good guys, but people who kept popping up all the time. And I just thought that was a fun thing to follow them. One of the early reviews calls it like a system novel in the sense that these characters kind of keep interacting. And so, I mean, the way I thought about it was I did try to be as comprehensive as possible and cover as many things as possible. But I knew that I wanted to talk about music in fashion and Internet. I think that too late in the game I realized, oh, I don't have any literature in here. I think there could have been more gaming. Men's fashion is way over indexed versus women's fashion. There's a lot of just gaping holes in it. But in general, I tried to figure out what are the main themes and what are the things you have to cover and kind of work backwards from there. But at the end of the day, I had read David Halberstam's the 50s to kind of prepare for this, to think about, like, how do you write a book about a specific time period? And that book is so funny because it has no thesis at all and it has even no chapter headings. You just like chapter one and you're like, I guess this is about Joe DiMaggio or something. So I wanted to at least give more of a. This is the thing we're following and the thing we're following is this moving out of the 90s when commerce was a dirty word and there was this real emphasis on not selling out and how we got to in 2022, the Goldman Sachs CEO DJing@lollapalooza. And I mean, that's just one of a million examples of how commerce driven culture has become. And so once I had that kind of thesis, then obviously I'm going to talk about the trends that move us there. But, yeah, I mean, it just. It felt like an incredibly organic process. But at some point I did get this big piece of butcher paper and I started writing like, I cut out names of like, all the characters and started to, like, tie them through the chapters and make sure they were kind of moving through. And I did some of that kind of organization. But, you know, then your editor comes in and says, why is Terry Richardson on, like, every third page? And then it's like, good point. We should remove most of these. Terry Richardson, by the way. Terry Richardson, again, not the good guy of this book. He's definitely a villain in this book. But. Well, I mean, so the thing also is, as I went through this book, it's like everyone is canceled by the end of this book. And the funniest part also is at the end that Dov Charney is getting evicted from his home and he's living in the home with Milo Yannianopoulos and Kanye's production staff or something. It's just the funny thing, also just the intersection of all these people that you don't know exist unless you've read some really deep, deep web pages. But.
- [35:36]
A
I don't want to get too off topic, but I do want to tell you that. No, please. I mean, this is what it is. And there are some themes I want to go over specifically. But I talked to someone who talked to Dove the other day who is. Is friends with Dove. I would say Dove is still in my life. Like, Dove is always. Is going to be in my life in forever until he stops working in the fashion business and sleeping in his factory or whatever he does. But because he. When he moved out of his house, he was also staying in his factory for a while. But they went to a yoga class with Dove in New York because, you know, they opened a Los Angeles apparel store there. So he's been in New York a lot and he wore chinos to the yoga class. It's just too funny. It's like, because. And when you think about his cancellation, it's just all very interesting thinking about all the, like, drama and stress of these men and what they represent now in our current culture with a Trump in office and you think of Dove wearing chinos to yoga class, you're like, it's fine.
- [36:48]
B
I mean, anyway, the, the, the challenge of writing this book.
- [36:53]
A
Terry Richardson lives upstate with his and hangs out with his kids.
- [36:57]
B
Like, there's just every time I bring him up, someone's like, you know, he still shoots for. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, Cannot quit Terry Richardson. So I guess the point of this 21st century history, which the controversy would be, do you want to over index a character like Joe Francis who did Girls Gone Wild? Right?
- [37:19]
A
Yeah.
- [37:20]
B
And the truth is that this has been a completely fragmented, fractured 25 years in which it's hard to create narratives. There's a lot of creative activity out there. What rises to the top, what people remember, is maybe different than where the quality is, which is one of the problems that we all think about. But with some of these people who are less than ideal characters or less than ideal influences on culture, it's somewhat their shamelessness and their willingness to break norms that has been their superpower, rather than something that maybe in the long run it gets them canceled, but in some way has guaranteed their place in the narrative. And so there's just no question that American Apparel, their ads, and Terry Richardson's many campaigns and fashion photography and photo of Obama and et cetera, et cetera, were all massively defining. Or the Lady Gaga photo in the supreme shirt, et cetera. These are all error defining aesthetics. I mean, I don't think we can argue with that, but were there more talented people? Absolutely. It's just that these are the people who, when you boil everything down, are still kind of the most central and seem to be the most connected to the story of the 21st century is in most, most summarized.
- [38:58]
A
Okay, real talk. We all love a good deal. And there's nothing more satisfying than knowing you didn't pay full price. And that's why everyone is obsessed with Rakuten. It's free to join. And every time you shop at your favorite stores, Target, Macy's, Ulta, Nike, even Expedia, you get cash back. And listen, the holidays are when Rakuten really shines. Because not only are the sales already big this time of year, but you can stack Rakuten's cash back on top of those sales. That means saving on savings. Like, if a store is doing 20% off and Rakuten has 15% cash back, you're getting both. It adds up fast. They also do this weekly big deal reveals where one store will offer a super high cash back rate for one day only. I've seen some wild ones and I always check. Obviously signing up takes no time. It's totally free and there's even a welcome bonus when you join and make a qualifying purchase. So do not miss out. Go to rakuten.com, download the app or install the browser extension. Join today for a new member. Welcome bonus after minimum qualifying purchases. Terms and conditions apply. Hey fashion people. This week I am sharing something very special. It's a new series from one of my favorite favorite podcast IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. On imo's special series, the Look, Michelle Obama opens up for the first time about her journey and legacy as a fashion icon in and beyond the White House. Through a series of candid, intimate conversations with her longtime beauty collaborators, fashion insiders and legendary women including Jane Fonda, Nina Garcia, Bethann Hardison, Elaine Welcheroth, Jenna Lyons, among others, she reveals how she and her team leverage the scrutiny of her public image to boldly celebrate self expression, inclusion and cultural impact. A companion to her book, the look celebrates an extraordinary legacy of authenticity and representation that continues to permeate culture, politics and fashion today. In this episode, Project Runway host and editor in chief of Elle Nina Garcia guides a conversation between Michelle Obama and African American literature professor Farah Jasmine Griffin. They dive into the making of Michelle Obama as a defining force in style. What she wore growing up in the south side of Chicago, how she evolved herself, presentation in college, and how she stepped into her public image on the national stage as the first black first lady. You can hear the look series by searching for IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. Wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, I want to talk about this idea of selling out. And because I think of selling out as a very Gen X versus Millennial Gen X. Still, the idea of selling out was important to Gen X. Millennials don't care about it at all.
- [42:05]
B
Yeah.
- [42:07]
A
Does that idea still exist? And because it comes up occasionally for me, especially in Europe where people still seem to like, have. I don't know if morals is the right word, but they like, are very sincere.
- [42:23]
B
Right.
- [42:24]
A
Whereas there's no sincerity in America, I don't think. But how much did that, the idea of selling out come up in your work? In this, when you and I talked, when you were doing the book, we talked about like poptimism and all of that too, which I think is connected to this as well. I do feel a my boss is always like, we're both 82. And he's always like, we're more Gen X than millennial. And I don't agree. I think that we're millennial. Yeah. But I think we have interest in Gen X culture or whatever and that. Or like a little bit more skeptical about the world. But I'm curious, like, doing this book about the. The 25 years where selling there was. There was no. Everyone was selling out. Like the. The point was to sell out. How much were you thinking about that? And do people. Is there anyone in culture now who is concerned with that? Because I think it's a big topic if want to ladder it back to fashion. It's a big topic in fashion because, like, all fashion is about selling out now.
- [43:44]
B
So, yeah, I definitely agree that selling out is a dead concept. And it is one of the motivating things behind this book, which is, to me, they had not done a book of the aughts. There has not been an aughts history that everyone's read. And there's not been a teens. I don't even know what. We didn't even come up with a name for this decade. Right. The 2010s. And so I wanted to do that kind of book. And it seemed like, well, at the 25 year mark, there must be at least enough change. It felt like a blur. But there must be something where you could say, well, that's really changed in the last 25 years. And I think selling out, to me is the clearest example of that in ideas towards commerce and the degree to which people's goals are so oriented towards not just becoming comfortable or wealthy or making money off their art, but literally becoming billionaires. The B matters so much to some of these major creators. And I had read the 90s by Chuck Kosterman, and he obviously talks a lot about selling out.
- [44:48]
A
I unfortunately couldn't read it because there were so many footnotes that I couldn't get through it.
- [44:54]
B
Okay.
- [44:55]
A
My big feedback of that book is like, it's too many footnotes. I had to stop. Like I would say, and it was during COVID when I was reading a lot, but just hide feedback. Sure.
- [45:10]
B
But anyway, that book got me thinking about it. Look, I think there's a side of selling out where it was pretentious and it was too much. And I understand that. But I think it ultimately came from a place in the same way that avant garde art came from, which is just a deep belief that if you're doing something artistic and good in earnest, that the market won't understand. And so there's an inherent skepticism about if you're making money, you must be doing something that is too conventional, and therefore it's not really worth your time. And so put that aside for a second and then you get. I think even by the late 90s, with the rise of Britney Spears, with the rise of Christina and Justin and all of these characters, that. And teenagers are really going for this stuff. I think it really put music critics in a hard spot, which is that music critics in the past had generally loved to support the music that the kids liked, and suddenly they were listening to Radiohead and the kids were listening to Britney Spears. And it created this crisis where it's like, what do you do? And the most punk rock thing came to be that you would declare that Christina Aguilera is the true punk and that actually the Strokes are a derivative version of this art form that's not going anywhere. And so optimism and the actual poptimists hate this word and will pounce on you for using it. But this general sense that pop music not only can be important, but that maybe it is actually more important because it's more democratic. I think there was an ideological underpinning to why selling out became taboo. And one of them is just that artists should be paid. And if the music market's collapsing, then artists need to find other means. And who are we to tell them that they shouldn't want to make money? Artists who didn't grow up in comfortable backgrounds, who are we to say that they shouldn't want to pursue money? Obviously, if you have an artist like Jay Z, who's made his entire identity on being an entrepreneur, that played a major role in the lyrics themselves. There's this real commitment to business success as being a sign of his artistic success. So all these kind of boiled together to where selling outs becomes no longer not only not a taboo, but becomes the goal or this liberatory act of selling out. And I think, again, by writing this book as a history that's in a specific order, you can kind of see where selling out dies off. And Vice magazine, what's interesting is the degree to which Gavin and Shane Smith in the early days were talking about how stupid this concept of selling out was. And some of it is they really believed that it was funny to have corporate sponsors for their incredibly lewd magazine. And then the other side, there was a sense that their point was, we're going to make a lot of money. That's what's punk rock. And so some of it's just pendulum swinging against the 90s from an aesthetic point of view. And then obviously then you have millennials who grow up and their entire worldview is based off of success in a corporate way that's going to be measured through money. And some of that is we hate capitalism so much, we want to get rich and get out of it as quickly as possible. And some of it is a real embrace of that entrepreneurial ethic. But it all comes together. Just every single force in society is reimagining money making as this incredible act of creativity and human liberation, rather than a something this kind of old, crusty Marxist idea of, you know, capitalism is obviously bad for us and bad for the human psyche.
- [49:03]
A
Where do you think the culture is moving now? So I feel like, I don't know, there's a sense of I want to be rich, but I want to be rich in the way I want to get rich and I don't want to. And maybe that's the like sort of entrepreneurial thing that really came up in the 2010s, but it's like I want all the things, but I want to do it in my way. And like the increased individualism in the US in particular, like, it's crazy. Everything is about you. And so where do you think, like you stopped at 2025? Where do you think it's moving now?
- [49:44]
B
I mean, first, yeah, I mean, people want money, but they want to be entrepreneurs, they want to be founders. They don't want to work as a drone and then use that money to do the things that they want. I think that's, that's seen as a non ideal life. One of the biggest problems in all of society at the moment is there's just no understanding of what the good life is. And everyone's expectation of how they should be living is based off of what they see on social media, more or less. I mean, that sounds dumb and alarmist, but I think to a certain degree your understanding of the world is from these images that are all obviously selected to make people look like they have higher status than they do. But more or less, I think people think that the ideal life requires a million dollars a year, even if they don't have that figure in their head. In general, to live comfortably, you would have to make lots and lots of money. And they recently did this survey with all the different generations and Gen Z said that they would need something like $500,000 or $600,000 a year to be well off, compared to like $250,000 for everyone else. So I think we have this issue where we don't know what the actual amount of money or how to live on, the actual salaries that companies pay or that you can be expected to make. And that doesn't seem to be improving. But there needs to be some sort of readjustment, because one of the reasons everyone is individualist and miserable is because no one's making enough money to live the life they want to live, because there's no way to actually do it. Yeah, and so that's a big problem. Look, I think the book ends on an incredibly pessimistic note, because I had. It was written, you know, as Trump was. Had won the election. I mean, I wrote the book as the election's happening. And then when Trump won, it was like, well, now everything's pointing to this as the culmination of complete civilizational collapse. But I think even since that time, I've seen some signs that 2024, 2025 were a peak of a lot of these trends. I mean, one of them is, I don't think that we can. We can cram the Internet into our lives any more than we already have. And so there is a move away from the Internet, there's a move towards socialization that doesn't end up online. And that's whether it's private clubs or whether it's just people spending more time with each other and away from their phones. I think that is a real trend that's happening organically. AI is going to completely, completely destroy all media and the value of all media, that everything we see will assume it's fake and we just won't want to watch it at all. And so that's going to bring people back to real life experiences just naturally. And so I think culture has. Human beings are in pursuit of value. They're in pursuit of new stimuli. And so if digital tools are just becoming corrupted and terrible and boring, people will move away from it and back to real life. Or it will be very bifurcated, where people of means are putting away their phones and living more in the moment and everyone else is watching AI slop. We'll kind of go that direction. But anyway, I think these things are already happening organically. I'm in the end of the book. Try to more or less say that you need cultural intervention the way that we want political intervention. That if we look at the environment and say we should save the earth, that you should want to save the culture in the same way. But there's also just. I think organically, people are moving away from the worst excesses already, and they're more or less moving back to smaller community activity because that's where the value is.
- [53:39]
A
Yeah. I mean, if you look at. I have a kid who's about to go into kindergarten and the talk about screens and how that. And this is definitely like an upper middle class thing where I didn't even consider that when. And a friend of mine just started going on tours and she's like, there are screens in all these public schools. I'm thinking about sending my kid to private because I don't want my. And that is a real concern to me. Like, but. But also my, My whole feeling is you mentioned intervention and then we're gonna talk about fashion and then I'll let you go. But you mentioned intervention. And the thing is, sometimes I kind of think this stuff is inevitable. If there's a bunch of screens in kindergarten, it is what it is and your kid's gonna be fine. I watch TV from 9 months old on and I'm fine. So it's. Sometimes I kind of think, well, this is the way that culture's moving. You sort of just have to accept it. But then there are other times when you're like, well, I have the ability to give my kid something different. I might as well. And then you get back to the haves and the haves nots, and this bifurcation of our culture which has happened so greatly. So it's interesting. I mean, I think the, the one great data point is that social media use has declined a lot in the last year. Right. So. Or two years. So that is. That is a good optimistic trend. If we think that it's rotting our brains. Because it's definitely rotting mine.
- [55:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, I, I always try to avoid the, the kind of psychological. You know, these things are happening. That's why culture is moving in certain ways. But it's just analog. Experiences in real life feel more valuable. And I mean, on that measure, if we want to pivot back to fashion, there is something that I'm quite optimistic about. In fashion, I think. I mean, there's obviously very easy ways to become pessimistic about the industry and what's going on. But if you just look at it more broadly, there are more people interested in fashion design and the fashion industry than ever before in history. On a global level, that, especially in the United States, which is somewhere that had been incredibly anti fashion for a very long time, especially with men, there's just all this energy there. And so if you look at the major brands, I mean, Dana Thomas, Deluxe to me was just like a foundational book. I mean, it's incredible, but it really, I think, makes you understand what the realities of the luxury industry are. But even if you put that aside, there have never been more high quality indie brands that are available to almost everybody. I mean, it used to be if you want to buy Japanese clothing, you had to go to Japan. That's not true anymore. There's more Japanese brands that are great than I can even wear. And when you go to Paris and you go to Fashion Week and people are really excited about Orly because Orly is really great. And so the point is that when you look at that, if you just look at the. Do consumers have great choices and are those choices even being valued by critics, et cetera, et cetera. That I would say you should be relatively optimistic about that.
- [57:02]
A
Yeah, I mean, there are a couple points. There's a really great podcast with Jefferson Hack and Kathy Horn. He has a podcast. I had never listened to it, but someone recommended it to me. And the thing she mentioned though, that is it's an interesting point in the orally thing. I went to. I did a talk on Tuesday night with Amy LaRocca and she wrote this book on wellness. And we did it at Capital, which is. This store is. That's in the Brentwood Country Mart, but also is based in North Carolina. This woman, Laura Venrote Poole, started it. I don't know, it's like 25, 30 years. It's in Charlotte. She has an amazing clientele. It's one of these independent stores that like per does really well because she understands her customer and, and she's really beautiful. And she had on head to toe orally and. Cause I was like, I love this skirt and sweater and she had on like a little extreme cashmere scarf thing. But she was like, oh, I'm wearing head to toe orally. And it is an interesting thing of. Orally's very specific because I think they've really understand the Western customer in a way. A lot of Japanese brands haven't been able to connect to a. More to a more honestly, like basic like me. Like I, I like it. And, and it's very. But. And. And it is. The price is also obviously better in Japan, but even here when you're looking at designer clothes, it, it feels like something that is worth spending, but it's not cheap. And Laura was talking about like what her customer wants and her customer's willing to spend like the, the higher end stuff, but it's not. It's $2,500 for a dress, not 4,000 or. Or what have you. And the thing that Kathy said on this podcast, they were talking about Margiela and that era, and she was like, you know, Margiela wasn't that expensive, like, like now. And that is the interesting thing that's happening right now with the pricing with the mega luxury brands, but then also just generally $6,000 for a leather jacket, when most people would be willing to pay, too. And that it kind of comes back to this thing of, like, you can't really afford everything, but. But I think you're right that there are a lot of great brands. But the other issue is that's why Essence, everybody kind of shat on ESSENCE for being, like, taking away from indie retailers. No, Essence is the reason that, like, all these kids know what these brands are like. We should be trying to do everything in our power to make ESSENCE possible and exist and a good and a, like, profitable entity because it has exposed so many people. Like, when I was growing up in Pittsburgh, the only way I knew about this stuff was, like, British Vogue. And so now there's a different level of access. But I think there's two things happening. One is that it's so much better than it used to be, but then in another way, it's so much worse because you can't afford anything, and then you can only afford it when it goes on sale, so that's a bad business. And then on the other hand, there's just not as much. There aren't as many retailers. There's no way to sort of. If you want to be. If you want to sell out, it's harder to do that now than it used to be in some ways.
- [60:39]
B
Yeah. I mean, so I just did this. I helped Popeye translate an entire issue. It's the first English ever, all English issue of Popeye ever. And there was a store, it's called Morrison king in Believe, South Carolina. And they got 50 copies of it, and they sold out immediately. And then they got another 50 copies and sold out immediately. And I keep telling the magazine House people about this, and they're like, in South Carolina, it's like, yeah. And so, I mean, I think the degree to which. Yeah, people everywhere have access to this and are interested in really great clothes, and people are just wearing better clothes than they have before. So, I mean, there's. I think it's not unrelated to what we were talking about in terms of digital trends. Just because a great leather jacket is a tactile experience. It's not just a fleeting kind of digital piece of slop. And so, sure, there's fast fashion and there's problems there, et cetera, et cetera, but still there are more people engaged with really high quality brands and really high quality design than ever before. And hopefully that maintains. But it is one thing about this century that has been more exciting. I mean, there's an argument to be made that music used to be the anchor of American pop culture and that music, surprisingly, still produces most of the celebrities that we have, but that the music itself doesn't matter as much. Yeah, I think fashion has risen in the last 25 years as a much more essential and important part of culture. And there's still a lot of great talent in that. It's not all cynical. It's not all just selling. Making anonymous products in factories in provinces of China you've never heard of and marking them up for insane prices. I mean, there's some of that, but it's not all that. And I think you can be optimistic that there is creativity and it's being rewarded by a market more in fashion than you can in music or television or movies or things like that.
- [62:47]
A
Yeah, I always use the example of, like, when we were growing up, the whole thing was going to Tower Records and standing in line waiting for the album to drop. And then by 2015, it's like people standing in front of off white waiting for the sneaker or the T shirt or. Or what have you. Okay, two part question and we will. Then we. We will end soon. One, how much were you looking at the consolidation of the luxury industry when you were reporting this out? Because, as you mentioned, like, you couldn't write about every little thing that happened. And you did focus more on men's fashion than women's, understandably. But I think, again, like, having specific things is more universal anyway. But the consolidation of the industry happened during the time that you were writing about. And so did you see the sort of like, rappers mentioning Louis Vuitton or Fendi or whatever in their albums and how that laddered back to how big fashion became?
- [63:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, most certainly hip hop had a big major role in that process. And then the other trend I really look at in the book is the degree to which streetwear and luxury fashion merge. I mean, you just can't understand what's going on at least in menswear for these big luxury houses, unless you go back to the origin, the crossover between Japanese and American streetwear in the early 21st century. But, yeah, I mean, the consolidation part and Just the fact that these are publicly traded companies, then obviously management cares about raising shareholder value. That's their job. I mean, when it's a single or multiple individuals whose entire family generational wealth is based on the value of that stock, then it matters as well. But the point is, if you're always needing to chase growth at all costs, then it's going to change the nature of the clothing. I mean, there is a real capitalist logic there. And then one of the later chapters in the book, I look at the rise of China because China has been very interesting in the sense that it's a huge part of the 21st century in terms of the economy booming and the consumer economy booming. It has had very, very few pop culture exports. And leboo, I think, is even a borderline case in the sense that it's a Hong Kong artist, but it's a Chinese retailer. And it was Lisa from blackpink. It's a K pop group, but she's from Thailand. That really boosted it in the last couple months. But in general, China has had a much bigger indirect role on fashion, which is that they are the growth market and they have been the growth market. And where the Chinese market has not done well for these luxury brands, the luxury brand stock has tanked. And so China and these brands are interwoven. The tastes of young Chinese consumers are different than a traditional luxury customer. Streetwear is the foundational fashion for East Asia. That bathing ape coming to Hong Kong in 99 was basically the start of what is now kind of the basic way of dressing in those places. And so, obviously, if that is your consumer and you're a luxury brand and you need growth at all costs, then the pursuit of shareholder value means turning your brands into streetwear. I think it's that direct of an influence. And so, yes, all these things happened. And yes, there was all this excitement around streetwear in particular. But if your growth market and the one that you expect 40% of your customer base to be pretty soon, then you're going to want to adapt your product to their taste and their taste to sneakers, big sneakers and casual wear. It's not gala balls and what was considered luxury in the past.
- [67:02]
A
Okay, really, two more questions. Do you. I know it's really late. Okay, so one thing about China, and this is something that's come up a lot in my reporting and also talking to people about this, they are starting to like, if you look at the top 10 grossing films in the world the last year or whatever, there are like two from China that have Never been exported from China. It's just there they're starting to develop their own brands. And I mean, they've been doing it for a long time, but it's starting to work. And I, I understand what you're saying about the Labubus. To me, that like, feels very like trolls and I just am not engaging with it. Like, I don't, I have no interest and I don't care. And I think it's hilarious that there's a photo of Bernard Arnault with, with a Labubu. So I. That's the, that's the best thing that's come out of it for me. But what do you think about that? Like, do you think that they are gonna start exporting like that all of this stuff that's happening? I mean, we've seen it with Korean culture. Obviously China's a different story. But like, do you think that China is gonna start that their own brands and that's gonna change the fashion industry as well, where they're not gonna need like right now the luxury brands are just like sort of waiting and seeing, seeing LVMH is opening like four new big stores in Beijing because they think that the consumer is going to pick back up. But do you think, do you think the Chinese consumer is sort of lost forever and they're going to start just relying on their own stuff more like they have in the movies? Or do you think that there's still just like so much opportunity there because of the, you know, upward mobility?
- [68:46]
B
I mean, it's probably a just, I mean, a cop out answer, but probably a combination in the sense that, yes, there'll be local brands, but that the European luxury houses still really have a monopoly on what is considered luxury in the sense that if you want to signal status in a really clear and universal way, that universal language is these European luxury brands and there's really not a competitor to it. So that's all happening. I, I went to China recently. I really love Shanghai. It's one of my favorite cities. But I like to go also just to get a sense of this question, which is, yes, Chinese consumers are a big part of global consumption, but are they starting to create culture that could be exported and the stores, they're really looking at Japan quite a bit. I think Japan's the biggest influence on Chinese retail. And I mean, I'll see trends in Japan and then seeing them pop up in China. And there's one of the strange quirks. When I was in China recently and I was status and culture, the Chinese edition came out and I was doing a little book tour and the staff that I was working with couldn't speak that much English and I can't speak Chinese. And so we were speaking in Japanese the entire time because so many of them had studied in Japan. So the Japan influence is big on China and China is getting cooler. It's getting a little bit more of the indie hipster aesthetic. But whether it's starting to produce things that other people will want, I think is a big question. And this is often called soft power, and I think it's probably the wrong word. But Japan and Korea have become incredibly cool in the 21st century. And this is a big, big change from the previous century. But part of that is some sort of longing to live in Japan or live in Seoul, that these are really high tech cool places. And so when you're listening to K Pop or you're using a K beauty product, there's a lot of aspiration towards these values of a Korean lifestyle. And I think China. The question is, when will people find that same aspiration for China? And because China is just a different political situation than these other places and it's quite still cut off from the world in the sense of my VPN did not work on my phone, so I just didn't have the Internet for five days, basically. And so China is just a little bit off the grid still. And that could be interesting that unique things appear there and then they can hybridize with the rest of global culture. But I think it's still going to take some time.
- [71:33]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's even looking at Korea versus Japan, which, like, what the definition of cool. So, like a younger consumer thinks Korea is cool, but I would argue that like a lot of Gen X consumers don't think Korea is cool. They haven't been there maybe, but I think aesthetically it's different too. So that's, that's part of it.
- [71:58]
B
But it's a big deal that when we were growing up in the 90s, there was just the sense that America had a monopoly. It was kind of like French. Yeah, there's some like cool French cinema and Brit pop is cool. But, you know, obviously jeans are the most important garment for young people around the world. And I just. America, I mean, what is there to be aspirational about these days? There's actually.
- [72:23]
A
You don't like aloe leggings or Jake.
- [72:28]
B
Paul or Jake and Logan Paul or whatever. So there's an op ed in the New York Times today literally making the same point. And I'M copying it a little bit. But America does have this crisis of whether it can be globally relevant as much. And there's a reason that people are excited that Bad Bunny is the biggest pop star in the world, because it does seem like it suggests an age of global pluralism rather than American monopoly. But to young people, there is something really exciting about East Asia in general. I think that's Japan and Korea at the moment. Labubus are not everything. I mean, people asked me about it in China quite a bit about what it means, and I said it's kind of the beginning of the beginning, and it's not in itself that important. But I think it shows that China is starting to get to be part of this global production and creative production network that is Japanese fashion brands, plus K pop artists, plus a lot of Chinese consumerism. And Hong Kong is kind of a bridge between China and the rest of the world as well. So, I mean, it's definitely something to watch. I think that that trend will only increase, that the importance of East Asia will only increase. And then China. How fast China becomes a producer is I guess, the question.
- [73:44]
A
Okay, final question. So everybody read David's book Blank Space. You should buy it. It comes out Tuesday.
- [73:51]
B
Thank you.
- [73:51]
A
Final question about preppy culture. So I just did this piece about Onward holdings, the Japanese owner of J Press, which I'm sure you're very familiar with, with all the people involved with this, are they. They had a big deck in their financial reports about how they're going to expand J Press in. In the US And I was thinking about you because I remember meeting up with you at the Rowing Blazers store because you were doing a talk there or something.
- [74:23]
B
No, I was just visiting, but.
- [74:24]
A
Oh, you were visiting. Someone was doing a talk that we knew it was doing a talk. Shout out to G and he really needs to come. Come on the pod. But so this guy, Jack Carlson, who used to do Rolling blazers, is now the creative director of J Press and is. They're trying to make it cool. And the thing that I was thinking about is this idea of like super traditional preppy clothing and how that's like a way of being versus trend, preppy as a trend. And. And I thought about this email I sent you probably 10 years ago when Noah was sort of coming up. And I said, you know, preppy is like back or trendy. And you were like, it's not a trend, it's a movement, all that stuff. But I. I personally think it's both, like. And you look at Dior, where It's essentially, especially the menswear. It's like designer J. Crew. And I think I thought the menswear was really brilliant the way Jonathan Anderson interpreted that. But, like, what do you think about this? Maybe not if you don't want to speak to the J. Press thing in particular, but like this idea of sort of taking. Why do you think this has happened right now? What do you think of like, does preppy culture mean anything now?
- [75:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, so I think prep and IUV have this advantage, which is they're more or less based on understatement and relatively minimal aesthetics. And also because of the class structure of the US and uk, they're baked in a little bit to just what the standards of dressing are. So if you show up with a button down shirt, it's considered to be quite normal and acceptable. And so there's just parts of prep that when people get sick of the ostentatiousness of a lot of fashion, you can always go back to it because it looks good without seeming like you're trying something so hard. So I think prep has that. I think what Jack did that was really smart. And what's kept prep alive is that it needed to be hybridized with streetwear, hip hop, actual youth culture. And prep can go between being really bland in terms of its color and it can be really popular. I think it's slightly underrated how much Ralph Lauren's whole innovation to prep clothing was that he brought in color to it. That if you compare polo to Brooks Brothers, there's just no question that everything is just this vivid, vivid color with Ralph. So I think the rolling blazers did that really well. It made it seem relevant. So there was a trendy aspect to it. But I think it's. It's anchored in these minimal aesthetics and then also a sense of what I would call kind of historical value, that there seems something grounded and authentic about prep culture because it's. It was at some point it was real people just dressing that way because that was what was around them. I think another important point is that prep could have just died off as the uniform for WASPs, old money groups, where it really became a sign of class oppression or something. And I think that both the Japanese interpretation of it and then also what Jason Jules did with Black Ivy to show the degree to which the Ivy League style really was cool back in the day, even because of black jazz musicians and black Americans rather than just wasps, I think that breathed a lot of life into it too. So I think we've reinterpreted Ivy and Prep for the 21st century. It's just much more inclusive, much more flexible. And so it can kind of go the direction of if things are street wear, skate, it can go kind of that way. If things are really brash colors, it can go that way. I'm thinking about the rowing blazers, rugbys, the cut up, patchwork rugbys were pretty extreme, but they hit at the exact time that people were wearing flashier clothes. So I think that's what's keeping prep alive. And if you had prep in five to 10 years that was incredibly understated and minimalist, I wouldn't be surprised as well. But there's just not a lot of other fashion things that we call looks or aesthetics that have that much flexibility. That being goth, like goth isn't one week super pink. I mean, it's always gonna be black and gloomy where I think prep, again, it's just super adaptable. And I think that's what makes it work in the long run. But I mean, obviously there's. I grew up in a time I grew up wearing incredibly preppy clothing that I was very ashamed of that was very. Because it was a grunge era and was very uncool to wear chinos and a button down shirt. And when I went to university, it was not that cool to wear that kind of clothing. And I wore streetwear. And then prep came back and I think it's 100% Thom Browne that brought it back. He kind of put a spirit of designer fashion into it, but it goes back and forth. But I think, again, the adaptability is what's kept it in the conversation.
- [79:58]
A
David, thank you so much. This was so fun. There's so much more in your book about fashion, about Taylor Swift. We didn't talk about any of that. Sorry. But you come back for a news day when Taylor is back on and you can weigh in when she wears something that I care about.
- [80:17]
B
I am definitely not the expert on Taylor Swift, but. But he wrote a book called Blank Space. I mean, John Kerry, you did Bad Blood. No one's asking him about Taylor Swift. But yes. Thank you so much for having me on, and I hope to be back soon.
- [80:31]
A
Fashion People is a presentation of Odyssey in partnership with Puck. This show was produced and edited by Molly Nugent. Special thanks to our executive producers, Puck co founder John Kelly, executive editor Ben Landy, and director of the editorial operations, Gabby Grossman. An additional thanks to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Jenna Weiss Berman and Bob Tabador.