The Met Gala, “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” and the State of Style

13:56Vinson Cunningham:And I find this theme to be such a fascinating, almost like passive-aggressive trap. Fashion is art. First of all, it sounds very defensive to me. Like, who's saying it's not? And I guess many people. So I found there to be a lot of literalism. Like, I was a little bit less into the dressing up as works of art in the museum collection, even though some of the individual looks I really enjoyed. I really liked Hunter Schaefer, who was dressed as a Klimt painting with these kind of very light, beautiful, like girlish embellishments, floral embellishments. And a Prada dress. And a Prada dress. There were some really obvious, like, talk about camp.

14:37Vinson Cunningham:Heidi Klum dressed as a shrouded sculpture. Yeah. Heidi Klum was like, we know from Halloween's past that Heidi Klum loves to dress up outrageously. in ways that are almost admirable because it looks, it's often like, remember when she was a worm? Yes. She kind of writhed on the floor. She couldn't stand up and she was like interviewed while lying on the red carpet and this kind of like gross, like husk of a, you know, so it's a way for people. I think, Alex, the vulnerability thing that you're pointing to, I think the idea of a theme and the idea of dressing up does really, it's a risky proposition because you're like, if you're just going to wear like a nice gold dress, people are going to be like, eh, boring, you know.

15:26But then if you go all out and you're like, you know, you go crazy, like you do the Heidi Klum thing, people might be like, oh, it's not, she looks ugly. She's not bankable, you know, whatever it is.

15:37Vinson Cunningham:Well, she doesn't care. I mean, Heidi Klum does not care. I'm not talking. Yeah, she went as a large shrouded sculpture. Yes, Heidi Klum is a limit case. I mean, yeah, no, and I actually admire it. But I just mean, you know, just like, okay, are we going to make a pretty picture? Are we going to push the envelope? And it's interesting for the first time ever because I knew we were doing this recording today. I yesterday I watched like a live feed of the carpet, which I never have. You know, I usually just like look at images either on Instagram or like Daily Mail or Vanity Fair or whatever it is, you know, Vogue.

16:18And it was kind of one of those like I don't even know. I think it was CNN, but it was kind of like one of those shaky feeds where you just see the people posing for for photographers. and you see assistants scurrying around them, arranging the train just so and, you know, everything around them to make the perfect image. And you see them, like, you know, striking a pose, like, you know, smiling and then not smiling and then looking over the shoulder and then doing. And you realize how I almost had a panic attack just watching it, you know, because it's like the look is so, so much kind of the thing, you know.

16:59It's not like a premiere of a movie. It's like kind of the only thing that matters is like what look you chose. That's the main event.

17:08Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I understand that. I mean, what I'm thinking about is the relationship between the performer, because all of these celebrities on the carpet here are performing, as you say, Nomi, this is the event. It's not in support of a movie that everyone's about to go see. It's in support of themselves and their own image. So quite an amount of power is actually with us, the viewers, who could not cough up$100 ,000 for a ticket to this event and who are watching from our snarky phone screens and participating in, for me, what the mass spectacle of the Met Gala is really about is as a social media event.

17:46Vinson Cunningham:I am very skeptical of big pylons, et cetera, but I do like participating on social media because I love seeing smart, funny, creative people analyze looks, appreciate looks, and also do the opposite of appreciate looks. So much of it is about the bread and circuses. Are we pleased with what we see? And I do think a lot of the discourse around the Met Gala has been exactly that. One thing I noticed quite a bit of this year was people commenting, you know, and they do every year, but even more so now, now that Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez Bezos are so prominently part of this. And also let me say, not the only tech titans there, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were inside.

18:34Vinson Cunningham:They skipped the carpet, interestingly. Perhaps they were afraid of figurative or literal tomatoes being thrown. But there is a lot of Hunger Games talk. There's a lot of what is going on, how is this happening, look at the rest of us. Titanic vibes, major Titanic vibes. So the event strikes that interesting balance between being mass entertainment provided by a very elite few and something like schadenfreude fuel. And that makes it fascinating. So, Vincent, I'm curious, what do you think the Met Gala in 2026 is for?

19:11Alexandra Schwartz:Well, I think it can't, first of all, be overstated the extent to which it really is just the biggest and most visible night in the fashion industry. I tend to appreciate a refreshing of just like seeing what people are able to make and the ideas that fashion puts out. I don't know. It kind of still is important to me. But it's a great moment to see fashion and also to hear it discussed, which we don't often do. On the feed that I was watching, the E feed, there was a moment when the designer Christian Siriano came on. And he's famously been on Project Runway. And besides being a really good designer, kind of just knows how to speak about clothes.

19:59Alexandra Schwartz:And he was being really critical of some of the looks and talking about in this really minute way. And it was so refreshing to hear a whole vocabulary, a lexicon pointed at objects that I was looking at, too. Weirdly, the theme, fashion is art, is to me the reason for this event. It's like it's the one time where divorced from utility and other reasons, it's okay to just look at fashion. And as somebody who looks at lots of other things that people think of as frivolous, like I'm thinking about sports, the other big event last night in my life was the Knicks game. I tend to defend our opportunities to just look at things that provoke pleasure in our lives.

20:38Vinson Cunningham:He's a hedonist, folks.

20:39Alexandra Schwartz:That is what I'm trying to tell you.

20:44Vinson Cunningham:When we're back, we dive into The Devil Wears Prada 2. Critics at large will be right back.

21:05Alexandra Schwartz:Before we get back to the conversation, listeners, it's that time again. We're working on another I Need a Critic episode. We've come to really love this series because it gives us a chance to hear from you.

21:17Vinson Cunningham:Oh, yeah. You all know the drill at this point. But for anyone who doesn't, don't fear. All you have to do is record a voice memo on your phone with a specific cultural question that we can help you with. Maybe you're looking for the perfect book to read after you just had a baby and you have no attention span or time. Maybe you want to know whether book clubs are actually helpful. Maybe you want an example in media, the movies, what have you, of an actually happy relationship. I mean, who can tell really what you come up with? And we can't wait to find out. You've got questions. We've got answers.

21:51Hit us up. Send your voice memos, as always, to themailatnewyorker.com with the subject line critics. And now back to the episode.

22:05Vinson Cunningham:now on to the devil wears prada too which fittingly opens with a lightly fictionalized met gala it's an early scene where we first see miranda priestly in a very swooping red gown off the shoulder walking into the american museum of natural history with stanley tucci as nigel on her arm um but before we delve into the sequel for everyone listening has seen the devil wears product i'm assuming but if you haven't it's okay it came out in 2006 you can catch up um i re-watched it the other day guys i i also i also re-watched it what a good hollywood movie um what a great movie like what a perfect confection it's like a snappy well-written well-acted you know you follow andy sacks the the bulligard assistant of of miranda priestly who has to kind of find her way in the world through this, like, apprenticeship, I guess, under this very, very difficult woman.

23:10But it also has kind of like the glamorous benefits of these sufferings are happening in a milieu that is easy on the eyes. It's just like a great, kind of like a perfect movie of its kind, I think.

23:25Vinson Cunningham:Well, 20 years later, the wait for Miranda Priestly to return is over, and the new film came out last Friday. All the major players are there. We got Anne Anne Hathaway back, Meryl Streep back, Emily Blunt, who became a star from this movie back, Stanley Tucci, and the director David Frankel and the writer Aline Broch McKenna are back also. There are a lot of repeats. From the first, you are going through exactly the same dynamic. Andy has to again ingratiate herself to the forbidding Miranda Priestly. Okay, so, um, I am the new features editor at Runway. No, you're not. Are you serious? Wow. Wonders never cease.

24:09No, I'm actually a journalist now. I've been published in a—it doesn't matter. Anyway, we are all well aware that running that story was a mistake and are taking immediate steps. I cannot actually get over this.

24:21Vinson Cunningham:It's really remarkable. A senior editor at Runway. You. Yep.

24:28Alexandra Schwartz:We're all so thrilled.

24:30Vinson Cunningham:You know what's funny is you've changed. You have. You're much more confident. Kept those eyebrows, though, didn't you? In my position of ultimate power as host, I'm going to tap Vincent Cunningham to give us a synopsis.

24:43Alexandra Schwartz:Thank you very much. Well, in Devil Wears Prada 2, we pick up with a sort of very different kind of Andy Sachs. She's a journalist at a gala about to accept an award. And all around the table that she's sitting at, phones are buzzing and chirping wildly. Because as it happens, she and all of the colleagues with whom she came to this gala have been laid off. So we enter into this movie in a mood and an environment of precarity in the journalistic world. She's lost her job. So what does she have to do? Of course, by hook or crook, she's recommended to go back to Runway Magazine and once again work under Miranda Priestly.

25:31Alexandra Schwartz:This time as she's sort of forced upon Miranda by the owner of the company that also owns Runway but has other magazines. Elias Clark. As it turns out, that same feller dies at yet another gala. 75th birthday celebration. So 75th birthday, he unfortunately croaks. All of a sudden, his son, played by, I thought, a pretty funny BJ Novak, is in charge. And the Emily Blunt character, she has become betrothed to a billionaire who he's very Bezos-like in his orientation. Emily Blunt and Andy come together to say maybe we should get perceived good billionaire to buy the magazine so that the B.J. Novak character who's sort of like, you know, obsessed with consultants and efficiencies and wants to kill all the things that we like about the magazine so that he can't do that.

26:30Alexandra Schwartz:And this plan goes awry.

26:33Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I would say the thing that is very notable about this movie is, Nomi, as you were saying, the first one takes place when fashion and certainly fashion magazines are at the apex of their power. And Miranda Priestly is in an unquestioned position of dominance and prominence. She is it. To work for her means to serve her. And that is just an unquestioned reality of the world. And a huge difference here coming into Devil Wears Prada 2 is that she's vulnerable. There's a very memorable moment early in the movie where Stanley Tucci says, Miranda Priestly and Stanley Tucci, who plays her number two, her conciliary, Nigel, are talking about how the whole business has changed since Andy was last at Runway.

27:16Vinson Cunningham:Now they still have what they call the book, which is the physical magazine, but it's shrunk down to a tiny portion of what it was. Their job is to make content online and Stanley Tucci whispers, people scroll by as they pee. There's a sense that everything is vulnerable and that a new world order has come in. The billionaires who it is implied strongly in the movie are totally tasteless but want to buy their way into taste, which of course is the dominant criticism that was made of the Bezos presence at the Met Gala. So did you like the movie? I didn't really. I mean, maybe I wanted to like it too much because of my experience with the beloved first movie.

28:01And there was no way to make the sequel without contending, you know, with how the world has changed, how the Internet has changed everything, how fashion and media are no longer what they were, etc., etc., all the things we know. But I just felt that it was like a very kind of odd and awkward balancing act between trying kind of admirably or at least honestly to portray the way things are now and how they're different from the way things used to be. It would be absolutely insane to make a movie about this milieu and argue otherwise. So that's great. But then to kind of have the movie be enjoyable and kind of tonally, in some ways, echo the first movie.

28:50I mean, it's this is not the Dardenne brothers, right? Like, it's not like a movie about collapse, right? Or decline, right? It can't be because then it wouldn't be like a Devil Wears Prada sequel. So how do you mix these two tendencies? And I think it's a very hard thing to do and perhaps even impossible. Vincent, what did you think?

29:19Alexandra Schwartz:I liked it a little bit more than Nomi seems to without totally having liked it. You know, I think I'm a little bit higher on the spectrum. I thought it kind of admirably did try to be about decline. Yeah, yeah. And in its best moments, it did sort of try to engage with a real environment of precarity. And I thought that was really interesting. But so much so, though, that I think it was a movie that was often more interested in its thematics than the execution of those thematics. So it was really trying to set things up. You know, at the beginning, it's like, boom, she loses the job. Boom, somebody gets it.

29:57Alexandra Schwartz:I mean, everything is happening so quickly in this movie. and I think it's because, to your point, Nomi, it's trying to do a lot, a lot of things at the same time. There's this useless boyfriend character. Oh, my God. Where it's like, oh, she meets a guy at a showing of an apartment. It's like they only did that because they wanted some love interest stuff that maybe echoes the Adrian Grenier stuff from the first movie, which I thought is way better than that. It was just like a kind of useless person. And I think those minutes, those precious minutes, came at the expense of more development of the relationship between Miranda and Andy, which there's one good scene in The Hamptons where Miranda, in her stress about all of this, whether she's going to get this big promotion, whether this series of corporate misfortunes mean that she'll kind of go out in the wash, actually kind of opens up to Andy.

30:48Alexandra Schwartz:And I think that there needed to be more of that in this film. I really wanted to see them, Streep and Hathaway, really play against one another in ways that they really didn't get to do as much of um but again i will say that i was kind of shocked at how this movie really did engage with political economy and the way we live now i don't think i've seen a mass entertainment treatment of uh what's going on in culture industries. I just don't think I've seen it, really. I was happy to see it.

31:25Vinson Cunningham:Alex, what did you think? Okay, so I am here as a Devil Wears Prada 2 apologist. I wouldn't say I love the film, but I'm close to loving it compared to you guys. I thought it was fun, and I especially liked Andy's fashion in the film. I know the big look that everyone remembers from the first Devil Wears Prada is when Andy has had her glow up and her hair has been blow-dried and she looks kind of like the way that a poodle, if it had had its whole hair sleekified, and she's wearing those super high, thigh-high Chanel boots, and frankly, I'm sorry, I know I'm on the wrong side here. Hideous little page boy cap.

32:06Vinson Cunningham:You're not on the wrong side. I mean, that is just no. That's a no for me. But I really liked Andy's fashion in this movie. The Blazers, where are they from? Please share. I want to know the stripy dress that she wears to get on the jitney to the Hamptons. I loved seeing this movie in a theater. It was a communal experience in a way that I found satisfying. I was pleasantly surprised by how I felt that the magazine dynamics were depicted because without getting into detail, the way that those anxieties are expressed in the movie I did feel was very true to life for the way that they're felt. And I appreciate that.

32:44Vinson Cunningham:It's a hard balance when you're trying to sell and enjoy a confection to also deal with these like very real anxieties about the state of the business. And I liked the balance that the movie struck with those things. And, you know, the film is making an argument again for where things are in the state of fashion. I think what people will probably remember most vividly from the first movie is the cerulean monologue, where Andy chuckles at a session where Miranda Priestly is choosing between two what seemed to Andy to be identical belts. What you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue.

33:26It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. and you're all so blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of Cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn't it, who showed Cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then Cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions.

34:01Vinson Cunningham:She gets a stern dressing down when she's told about basically how she is essentially the product of the fashion industry. And every choice she makes in her own life that she thinks she has independence on has in fact been decided for her in this very room where she now stands. And here the dynamic in the movie is more about the shifting locus of power where that is no longer the case. So let's talk about power and fashion. A big point in this movie, which echoes reality very closely, is that Benji Barnes, the billionaire played by Justin Theroux, wants to essentially gain social acceptability for his, well, his girlfriend played by Emily Blunt, Emily Charlton.

34:42Vinson Cunningham:There is this idea that if they can only appear as the owners of Runway, they will have ascended to the very white-hot center of the culture and have gained something that money alone cannot buy them, which is cultural prominence. I will just say I thought that the Justin Thru character was one big mistake of the movie because these people are very powerful and very dangerous and very intelligent. And Jeff Bezos himself smiling with his unwrinkled forehead backstage at the Met Gala because he declined wisely to walk the carpet sent shivers down my spine. um vincent can we go back a little bit to the reality and the fantasy mixing element of the way that this movie depicts something that just happened in reality what what do you make of the presence of lauren sanchez bezos at the met gala well here's the thing about uh the the

35:43Alexandra Schwartz:presence of the Bezos clan is that it's a strange and sad paradox because what do we want from rich people to do stuff like this instead of, you know, build products that threaten to vaporize the, you know, attention, literacy, agency of a whole generation, et cetera, et cetera. The other things that these people do preclude us from appreciating when they do things that they, you know, when we think of the benign gestures of the rich, like their tendencies toward philanthropy and stewardship of various sectors of the arts. I didn't really pay too much attention to Lauren Sanchez Bezos one way or the other.

36:34Alexandra Schwartz:But what it was, though, was it seemed to me her presence was more of a symbol of things, which is that our world these days, and I think this is part of the message of the sort of tectonics of Devil Was Prada, too, is that you have to be hoping for the good billionaire to come along. You have to be – there is some level of surrender to plutocracy that says we just hope that they decide to pay attention to the right things instead of the wrong things.

37:06Vinson Cunningham:I certainly think this year is going to be remembered. No one's going to remember the theme of the gala this year. It's almost a non-theme. No one's going to remember that. Everyone's going to remember this as the year that the billionaires bought their way into the Met gala and got in bed with it. And for better or for worse, that is what this year represents. And I just find the look fascinating. The Lauren Sanchez Bezos look fascinating. The dress itself, it really could have been out of the Devil Wears Prada too. It's not a good dress, guys. She didn't look good in it. She looked like she had been physically immobilized and had to kind of like hop, hop, hop because things were so tight.

37:49Vinson Cunningham:She did her like usual very cleavage forward look. And so I think that we find ourselves in a position. I'm almost like, did she do it so that people would be entertained by tearing her apart? And that was like a little bit of bread thrown to us on the ground. And we can all feel really good about saying she looked bad. She looked bad. No, I think she looks good, and I don't think she cares what we think. Yeah, I think that's probably right. I mean, one of the things that was cracking me up was an online discourse saying that La Roche, the stylist who dressed her, was, quote-unquote, part of the resistance because of the styling failures of this look.

38:24La Roche, welcome to the resistance.

38:29Vinson Cunningham:Fashion is political, yes, but of course, it's also deeply personal. In a minute, we're talking personal style. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

38:53Vinson Cunningham:All right, I'm opening with a story. Here we go. Get ready, guys.

38:55Alexandra Schwartz:Let's do it. Let's do it.

38:56Vinson Cunningham:Gather round.

38:57Alexandra Schwartz:Boom.

38:58Vinson Cunningham:I'd like to give you a little bit of a childhood fashion history. Like if this was a session and we were like, you were my therapists, this is the intake, okay? I was not allowed to wear pants for a long time. That's my accounting of it. I was dressed like a little French girl in my mother's imagination. Well, I'm just saying little skirts, little leggings maybe, things I remember being devastated in the first grade before picture day when I was given what I was supposed to wear, and it looked like it was on backwards to me. It was a little jumper thing with an X in the front. And yes, I recognize now I probably looked chic, but I was being told how to look, as kids are, and I did not like it.

39:50Vinson Cunningham:So a huge revolution happened when the blue jean came my way. And I realized this, too, could be mine. Bell bottoms were very big. It was the 90s. There was a big 60s re-envisioning happening. So I would say I came into my own sense of personal style around the age of eight, wearing big bell bottoms. And one day, one day, thanks to the Delia's catalog and a trip to Bloomingdale's, I walked into Hebrew school on Shabbat because we had to go there on Saturdays in our fancy clothes, wearing a full salt and pepper, black and white. It looked like a checkerboard. Black and white little skirt, black and white little top, just 100 % polyester.

40:32Vinson Cunningham:and these huge platform shoes. Oh. And a boy looked at me and said, is it Halloween? Oh, God. And you know what? It wasn't Halloween, but I was feeling it. And that is my memory of what can happen if you just try to express yourself through clothes. You got to own it, guys. Okay, so what happened after? Like, what happened? And like, did you, were you shamed into conformity? Well, I became a feminist. And I said, I do not care. No, I was not shamed into conformity. I think what makes, I'd love to hear about your own personal relationships to dressing. You know, I've had phases my freshman year of college.

41:20Vinson Cunningham:I didn't, again, wear a pair of pants, but that was by my own choice. I was doing skirts all the time. Long skirts, boots with bells on them. Some hippie shit was going on. who knows and now I can't imagine that because I want nothing more than to look kind of as unrumpled as I can in a nice blue jean and a white tee what's interesting about fashion is is it does remind you and I guess this goes back to the Met Gala theme every day you must confront again the fact that we are embodied that we got to deal with that and there are days when it feels like a big wonderful celebration and I'm flaunting my stuff and feeling great.

42:00Vinson Cunningham:And there are, of course, many days where I just feel like a sack of potatoes in my little mesh bag trying to just jangle along until someone can get me home from the market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you relate to this, my friends? Well, I really relate to that, Alex. Surprise, surprise. I really relate to that. I think I have a very hard time being embodied, and which as a woman I've always felt was a failing because I kind of never slipped into conventional femininity in any easy way, you know. But the kind of, I think I've come to realize over the years that, I mean, my husband, Han, always says, you really like to dress conceptually, And by this he means not like kind of in any kind of like interesting Japanese designer way, but more in the sense of like dressing is an idea rather than, you know, like, oh, this button down shirt reminds me of a shirt that like Robert Smith of the Cure wore in like some video in 1982.

43:18and when I was like 12, I always loved that. You know what I mean? So it's not necessarily what's like flattering to me or what would look like especially good on my body, which has to do with the kind of like the difficulty of embodiness, but more of kind of like an idea, kind of a cultural idea. And I've at least tried to relax into that way of dressing in recent years and kind of accept that that's what it is, if that makes sense. And it's really important to me, even though if people who see me probably are like, you know, I don't strike a pose, you know what I'm saying? I'm not like one of those people where you would be like, oh, she really cares about fashion.

44:05Look at these special shoes she's wearing. You know what I mean? But I do really care about fashion, actually. But in a way, that's interesting for me on the level of culture and memory, I guess.

44:18Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, Vincent, I know you care, too. And you've talked many times about the influence that Ralph Lauren had on you when you were a kid and kind of like coming into your own sense of style. Where does your sense of style come from?

44:28Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, I think I'm relating to many things that everybody's saying. but especially when I think about Ralph and I think about another of the great heroes of my youth Dapper Dan the great sort of cultural remixer and fashion designer from Harlem who I used to see walking around when I was a kid in Harlem and I would also see people wearing his designs for me style is always it's like about two things Nomi mentioned memory and then I would also just add the street to that. Just seeing, this is one of the reasons I don't think I could ever successfully live away from New York for a really long amount of time.

45:13Alexandra Schwartz:Just something about just sort of ideating outfits and I see little things on other people or the experience that you have when you walk on the street and every storefront window is a little bit like a mirror. There's a weird kind of self-absorption at least visually that happens. You look over at this and you see yourself a little bit and you're like, oh, these jeans don't look the way that I thought they did. Something about just sort of the spectacle of other people, but then also kind of the many different mirrors that the city gives you to see yourself. But what you said, Nomi, about culture, dressing for me is also really about personal memory.

45:52Alexandra Schwartz:It's like for many years I dressed only in black and it was like and I would think about it. It's like it's about the way that I like how priests dress. Like, I just think it looks cool. It's about the way that I love living in Brooklyn. I think that Hasidic Jews are the most stylish people in the world. There's always a woman who's like 35 years old who's wearing a very shiny bubble jacket and a flowy black dress and, like, flats that look like Tory Burch and just a perfect wig. And I'm like, this lady is so stylish, man. She's killing it. I just think like there's just so many different ways of dressing in black that I admire.

46:30Alexandra Schwartz:And I'm like, I'm trying, I'm like thinking about these things. Like I'm thinking about being a kid in the choir and like Youth Sunday was always black and white. I'm wearing black and white. I think about that every time I wear black and white. So I'm just like the way you kind of impressions stick to you. Yeah, you metabolize all these different things. Yeah, I'm still, for instance, thinking about that show The Studio, which I really liked. Seth Rogen looks great in a double-breasted jacket. and he's wearing them all through that. And I'm still wondering, okay, how am I going to, would I look okay on a double-breasted jacket?

47:02Alexandra Schwartz:Just like you see things and they just stick to you and you work your way to them. But what both of you guys said also matters to me a lot, which is like, it's so much about gender. And I do think that dressing is a way to try to achieve gender euphoria in a weird way. It's like, what kind of man am I? And so it's all these ideas that are like implanted from childhood. One of my friends, shout out to you, Lovia, one day I was wearing all linen and these leather sandals and she was like, you look like an old African uncle. And I was like, thank you so much. Because I, that is like, there's a black American uncle who's just like that uncle who I'm referencing with this shit, you know?

47:43Alexandra Schwartz:It's just about loose things that have been rattling around in your mind forever. And if you can like realize ideas about yourself and about the world through the way that you dress, I think that's cool.

47:52Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I love what you're saying, Vincent. And, you know, there are so many ways to try to embody yourself as most purely and as a pure expression of who you are. But who you are can change. And it can change from day to day. What you say about gender euphoria is true. You know, we're all talking about this as cisgender people. But it doesn't mean that we can't, you know, push whatever that means for us. Like, I tend to have – I tend to be most comfortable dressing in what I consider to be a sort of boyish way. But that said, it's been really fun to go in a totally different direction. The first time my son saw me in a dress, he was flabbergasted.

48:33Vinson Cunningham:Like, he couldn't understand what was happening. And he was really excited. And he said, that's beautiful. And it was so interesting to me that that just struck him. Then he wanted a dress. We got him a dress. He loves wearing his dress every so often and getting fancy. and I love that we live at a time when those things are just fun and they can mean something or they don't have to mean something. It's just, it's interesting to see a little person figuring out who he is, someone who doesn't, I mean, he does not care 99 % of the time what is on his body as long as it feels comfortable, but then he'll have a really strong striking notion.

49:11You know, that's how we know we're alive,

49:15Vinson Cunningham:that we can play with ourselves in these ways. That's what it's all about, I think, when you get away from the status and the money and the cost. It's about celebrating being alive.

49:30Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. How much does the ambient fashion industry and its workings, I don't know, infect your way of dressing? Like, do you feel that you're making all of your decisions? I had this really alienating thing happen to me as an anecdote and maybe as a way of asking the question. I got these glasses that, you know, like thin-rimmed gold glasses that – of the kind that really hadn't been in style since I was like in second grade. I'm pretty sure these are very much like the glasses, the first pair of glasses I ever got in second grade. But then I saw something on GQ that was like this kind of glasses, you know, men wearing slutty little glasses I think is the way they did it.

50:09Alexandra Schwartz:You got that. It was something like that. And they're like – they're back in. And, you know, it's like, whatever, I got them a year before this thing came out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it just made me question whether I was a fashion victim instead of the captain of my fate. You know what I mean? Does that happen to you? Is there any anxiety of influence for you in terms of your clothes and the fashion industry?

50:31Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I know totally what you mean. And, Vincent, you were talking before about noticing things on the street. Well, things on the street are filtering down to us from somewhere else, from the industry. It's just like the cerulean monologue that Miranda Priestly gives. And so you start noticing, ooh, I want something like that. I want to do a little more like, you know, a kind of chunky sneaker. Or I remember deeply coveting a perfectly round sunglass that looks hideous on my face. And you think, oh, no one's done that since John Lennon. And then suddenly everyone has done it. But you know what?

51:05Vinson Cunningham:I'm actually happy with that now. There are maybe more opportunities if more things are being made. and sold in that vein to experiment with it, to try it out. So that I feel okay with. Yeah, I feel okay with it too. Like there's no way in anything that I do that I'm the captain of my ship. Like there's just no way. Even if I feel, and of course often I feel like I am the captain of my ship, but I know that there are so many forces working on us that it just, it simply can't be. It can't be. You know, it might be a choice other people are making and other people have contributed to making for me.

51:45But I also have my own entire world of associations that are linked to that choice in a complementary way. So I think that's fine.

51:58Alexandra Schwartz:That is a really mature way of thinking about it. I mean, who knows? I really, I have much more attachment to be on my own shit than you. I'm like, no, I made it up. You know, I made this look as mine. No, I used to be that way. But I feel, but it is, I think you are the only you, Vincent, ultimately. So true. Even if the choices you make, and all of us are, even if the choices we made are, you know, influenced in many ways by forces outside of us, the way we combine these choices are still singular, I think.

52:39Vinson Cunningham:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from James Yost with mixing by Mike Kutchman. And as always, you can find each and every one of our episodes at newyorker.com slash critics.

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