Does Fashion Need Fixing?

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2:42Hello 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 Eugene Rapkin, author of Torn, Fashion and Postmodernism. We debate about the lack of creativity in the industry, the genius of Virgil Abloh, the proliferation of so-called nice clothes, and so much 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 Sheet. 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.

3:23Line Sheet 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 slash fashion people to join puck or start a free trial. Happy Friday, everyone. Hope you had a great week. It's been a good week being back in Paris. I feel like everyone is bouncing back. Jonathan from Lucien Pages is back from his crazy vacation.

4:03I even went to Delphine Arnaud's husband's private members club for a meeting. Mr. Neil. I ran into, it's very nice. It's private members club, so I'm not going to disclose anything. Not that I signed an NDA, but I did put a sticker on my phone. Anyway, I also ran into the great writer, Lindsay Tremuda, who is meeting up with another amazing writer, Lauren Collins, who I sadly missed, but I'm very impressed by the success of her fabulous book, They Stole a City. Congrats to Lauren. I can't wait to see them for fall cocktails. Anyway, this week in line, we hopscotched around the world. Malik wrote about Abercrombie after its TikTok phase.

4:46Their CMO is going to Viori. Rachel wrote about Westman Atelier the health of that business and whether it'll get the exit it deserves we love this brand it's a great brand and the business has as Rachel reported like really improved in the last few years in terms of margin things like that so I think Estee Lauder should buy it but I don't know if they're smart enough anyway again I looked into the truly wild succession drama at Esselord L 'Exotica and as someone said to me the Delvecchio family makes the Arnault's look like Sesame Street I'm sorry we care more about the Arnault's because they own Dior and Louis Vuitton and all that stuff but like this company is important to the fashion industry they make a lot of glasses and I wear in sunglasses that you wear so anyway I had a anyway three times in one intro how lucky are you I had a great time talking to Eugene whose purpose in life is to make people question things and that's a pretty great way to be so let's get going eugene rapkin welcome to fashion people thank you lauren i'm happy to be here i'm thrilled to have you uh what'd you have for breakfast this morning the same thing i've had for the last 15 years unless i travel which is just yogurt and granola it's a you know it has carbs it has protein it's yeah it has salt fat acid heat it's perfect exactly and you know what it's hard to get good granola when you travel as i found out so i just you know i treat myself to eggs and bacon yeah that's true have you ever tried round swamp farm granola no i gotta note that down my default is bolo granola which is close to where i am in the berkshires and it's phenomenal yeah i just buy from them like in bulk oh nice i like round swamp a lot i've ordered from there two summers in a row.

6:45It's quite expensive, but it is a nice treat and extremely salty. Yeah. Well, you know, the industry we're in, we're used to paying for quality, right? Exactly. We're used to paying a lot for a lot of things. So you are here because you are a veteran journalist, but you also just published a book that is, well, this is going to run a couple of days before you publish. So it's, it's for all you Europe, Europeans who I have to say will not overspend on anything. It's out in Europe already, but it will be out on September 1st in the U S pre-order or order, depending on where you are, maybe at an independent bookseller, but yes, Jean, tell us about, tell us a little bit about your background and your experience and, and And you're because I came to know you as obviously a writer.

7:42You contributed to BOF when I was there, but also because you are sort of a legend on you had your own forum. And can you talk a bit about how you got into journalism, the forum culture of the 2000s and how that sort of shaped your work? And then we can talk about Torn. Yeah, absolutely. So I started out as a fashion fan, as I think like many of us have. I fell in love with fashion around like 98, 99, walking into Barneys and seeing all this creativity, which I did not realize existed, mainly the Belgians and the Japanese designers. and being an immigrant kid there was absolutely zero people around me in my you know Brooklyn immigrant neighborhood who was remotely interested in that and one day I by chance I was googling something and I came across the fashion spot the which is kind of the OG fashion forum and i thought oh my god there are other people who know who andy millimister is it's incredible so i so i joined quickly uh gained the reputation for firing off funny one-liners but also knowing my fashion avant-garde and after a couple of years i decided to start my own uh so i called it style zeitgeist which i thought i should make it as difficult as possible i don't know why i do that uh and uh that forum blew up because it was the golden age of fashion message boards before social media and reddit killed it off and it was a place that people came to mostly discussed fashion forward menswear but not exclusively and how i got into fashion journalism was another accident i got a message on the forum on styles i guys from someone who turned out to be an editor of the weekend magazine at haratz which is israel's most prestigious newspaper it's kind of like their new york times and we were chatting and i just blurted out hey you think i could write about fashion for you and he said well send me something and i sent him a couple of my essays about fashion from my master's program that i wrote at the new school and he loved them and i wrote first article that did well and then uh and that was my beginning and everything else kind of snowballed from that including styles i guess becoming magazine and on and on so yeah i'm curious do you go on reddit like do you have any do you engage on there because to me that has sort of i don't spend i only go on reddit if i'm like looking into usually something to do with like retail workers because there's a lot the thing i will say about reddit to me is like it's the one place where there's still truth on the internet yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.

11:04Well, that's what forum culture was. Exactly. So do you, are you, did you grow out of it? Do you still, or do you run any threads on there? Like how do you engage with Reddit? I've never used Reddit in my life, honestly. Yeah. So I don't know. And I've never really used Twitter also. I purposefully limit, and I know I'm shooting myself in the foot somewhat, but I purposefully limit my social media time like exclusively to Instagram just because otherwise there won't be enough time to do all the other things that I want to do yeah no I think that's fair I used to be really into Twitter I was never a forum person but I was very into Twitter and I really miss it I miss like I feel like I post a lot on Instagram more than I want to because I have a lot of little things I want to say.

12:00I sort of use Twitter as like a running diary almost. And I loved it. I really enjoyed it. And then it got, when the change. Yeah, it's the insurification of the internet, right? It's inevitable. But I think you're touching upon something very important that the level of discourse on the internet is like in the toilet. yeah yeah i mean there is there is a lot of discourse on tiktok and instagram but the challenge with it is it is so um it's not back and forth there's just a lot of people like spitting stuff out and so it doesn't feel and the comments the engagement is not as thoughtful yeah exactly exactly i think we should ban emojis i think that's a big problem even though you know i use them you everyone uses them but you know you put a heart on something instead of saying something and there you go well it's also like i like almost every single post i look at and it doesn't mean i it's like what does a like mean i found my i like something the other day i was like oh i better unlike this because if someone sees me liking this they're gonna think it's some like statement whereas it's just like you either supporting the friend or you're supporting the idea but sometimes you don't it can be read so i have a friend who uses the melting guy emoji a lot and i'm always like what does that actually mean yeah yeah well that's another thing there's i mean so much gets lost i always talk about this with derek guy who also came up on the forums and we constantly talk about the degradation of discourse online how intelligent forum culture used to be and how it's not well he he's a remarkable figure in that he has been able to use twitter to change people's minds and educate people yeah but by beating them at their own game so it's not like he's too clever he's just clever enough and that is um a very hard balance to figure out.

14:13So tell me about Torn and how you, I'd say in the last few years, what you've really become known for are these op-eds that really make people in the industry kind of stop and think. You've done them for BOF and I feel like maybe the FT as well, a few different publications. And they kind of, I don't always agree with you, which you know, But I definitely really admire the fact that you bring stuff up that no one else wants to talk about. And you are. As do you. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. But I think it's interesting thinking about, I feel like you and I don't cover the same thing. We don't cover the same industry.

14:53And that's what is interesting about, you make me think a lot about solutions and what are possible solutions. but what brought you to Torn and why did, can you kind of, I think laying out the thesis for the book would be helpful and what made you compel to do it? Yeah, sure. So I want to preface that I write, I don't want you to necessarily agree with me and I'm actually glad when people don't, all I want is to get people to think. That's it. That's the point of these op-eds. It's, you know, think about the state of the industry, state of consumer culture, and so on. And the same with the book.

15:37There is no question that the book has a pretty strong polemical component, even though it's a work of cultural criticism at the end of the day. So there's a lot of analysis. But there is obviously, you know, it is a polemic on some level. And what happened with the book, Lauren, you're going to laugh, but it's what happened with many other things. It was not my idea, just like Starzegast magazine was not my idea, just like the Starzegast podcast was not my idea. I am good at executing. But these things come out of just stray conversations. And basically what happened with the book is I got an email from a publisher from Zero Books, which is a small kind of lefty, punky, intellectual publisher in London, which, as you probably know, is exactly my speed.

16:35And they just happened to like my writing. And they don't really take commissions for nonfiction. so uh they said you know we've never written a book we've never published a book about fashion all our books are like about politics uh and culture would you be interested so i took the opportunity uh i mean of course and i had one overarching idea uh for many many years right i'm sure you know just like you we've all been thinking like what is wrong with the fashion industry why does it feel like with each year uh it's getting less and less exciting uh and the excitement that that comes out of it feels like forced you know it feels staged and managed and pr to death rather than like a genuine excitement that is driven by creativity and there are so many reasons for that right but i've been trying to kind of figure out if there is a lowest common denominator uh and i thought the and i think the lowest common denominator is post-modernism is post-modern mentality so that's the theme of the book and because i'm like you know where do the old all roads lead to right that the erasure of quality uh the the demise of fashion criticism the logo being like you know the biggest carrier of meaning while meaning is erased from fashion and then superimposed again why does keep why does fashion keep fletching onto culture politics and so on and so on while at the end of the day the clothes are incredibly unexciting and so that was a very long train of thought and that's where it led me to so that's why it's called torn torn you know the the industry seems to be torn um and yeah and post-modernism seems to be the reason for that can you what do you mean by that like what do you mean that post-modernism break that down for me and how it applies to fashion in particular yeah uh so as you probably know post-modernism is notoriously hard to define but it kind of but it can be described right so So your description of it, I'm curious.

18:57Yeah, so we start with something that, sorry, I'm going to throw out names of French theorists that you bear with me. What Franz Liotard - There will be a few people who know. Yeah, what Franz Liotard define as distrust in grand narratives. So what happens during postmodernism is that there is a serious questioning of what is truth. And gradually the overarching idea becomes that there is no such thing as truth, that everything is subjective, everything is relative, everything has a genealogy, and so on. And this type of relativism eventually starts permeating culture to the point where we really have no definitions left of what's what and we really have no standards left to speak of right so whereas before and i start i start my book by saying that fashion has followed art with the delay of several decades and so we are now thoroughly in the postmodern period about 30 years 40 years after uh after art and so what has happened is that we don't have a definition of what fashion is we don't have a real definition of what makes a quality garment we don't really have a definition of design this anything goes mentality that anything is relative has replaced authority of the critic.

20:37Critics don't matter anymore. And what has filled the semiotic void is commerce, right? To the point where now it is brands and marketing and PR dictate to people what is good rather than a critical apparatus whose reasons for existing are different from commerce. So that's one thing. another thing is this loss of historicity right that we you know post-modernism has thought that history is not important that ideas of progress are not important and so we've lost this genuine connection with history and the result is no longer like a progression of things but a constant remixing of things right so this idea of pastiche that we all see in fashion right we just keep copying things that have existed before but because we don't have a genuine connection with history you know we don't teach history anymore in any meaningful way people don't know history of fashion in any meaningful way so the question is how is the new generation it has nothing to define itself against, how do we create new things?

21:55How do we push creativity forward? So these are just some of the things. I can go on and on. And I'm sorry if I've laid out too. No, no, I have a million things I want to poke at. The first few weeks back at school set the tone for the entire year. But with new teachers, schedules, and expectations, it can feel like a lot. If you're looking to help your child start strong and stay confident, I've been using IXL to make that transition so much easier. IXL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning, whether they're building math confidence, strengthening reading and writing skills, or reviewing science concepts.

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24:04is there someone or something in the book that sort of is emblematic of this argument yeah yeah probably the biggest fixed emblem is virgil abloh thank you that's what i wanted to talk about and you know his entire body of work is an emblem of post-modernism right everything he's done is pastiche. Everything he's done is a copy of a copy of a copy that he famously, as he famously declared, he only needs to change something by 3 % to consider it new. Now, the question that immediately arises in my mind, how is this new? How is that innovation? and if we take this as a standard of design that no wonder we are at a point where fashion feels quite enervated in terms of creativity yeah i mean man i have i only have 40 more minutes so i don't know we're going to get through all this so the Virgil piece of it to me I want to get specific specific on on the Virgil because I think it's it's important and to me the process is is what he is his innovation but fashion itself look like when I think of fashion history and I I am not a fashion historian I've read a lot of books, but like I cover the business and I I'm also a big consumer of fashion and and have done some traditional fashion journalism as well.

25:53To me, the innovation became the business in the 90s. And so this idea of fashion as a I don't even want to say an art form, but a form of something other than a commercial vehicle ended in the 90s. Like it ended with the Bumpster or what have you. I don't necessarily think of that as being a negative thing. I think like to me, the innovation was in the business and it consolidated. And when I said we cover different things, like I can cover Andamula Meester, but I am not thinking about these. I am not pushing, maybe I'm a fatalist, but I just don't believe that there is any way to be other than postmodern.

26:44So the Virgil of it all to me is like, I understand why people thought he was sloppy and it felt a little empty. but what I think that was was him commenting on how the world works and so I was very affected by him as a creative person it's not like I bought a bunch of stuff but I really connected with him as a human I'm like seeing him in interviewing a few times and like through the his his media and and through his work. But I think like, I guess the question I have for you, and we can go through, I have a bunch of points, but what you said at the beginning makes a lot of sense. You just want people to question, but why is it bad that that old industry doesn't work anymore?

27:38And that there isn't innovation in clothing? Because the thing is like, at some point, fashion is a commercial and it's different from art because art the there is literally no material value to what artists do there's unless you i don't know like i'm sure some of them use expensive stuff but generally like there is even if it's false and it's it's a construct there is a value on the cost of making something in fashion and there is also a cycle that you have to go through in terms of and and when there isn't there it tends to run its course i guess in the same way that an artist goes from one medium to another and like helmet lang who did a blurb for your book and who for some reason decided to post that meta the the lawyers are going to get you post i almost dm'd because his dms are open i almost was like dude this doesn't isn't going to do anything for you.

28:39But he moved on from fashion. So I guess the question for you is like, why is this bad? Because there are other things and other innovations in the world. And also the critical thinking element of it, like the way that you're basically proposing that people think. No one thinks critically. So do you feel A, why is it bad that this has happened? Is it bad that this has happened? And B, do you feel compelled to poke and question at this because you think it's important for humanity? What is the why? All great questions. Let me start in reverse. Yes, I at the risk of sounding incredibly romantic and naive uh i want the world to be a better place that that is the bottom line of everything i'm saying uh what i mean by that that you know in our little corner of the universe which is fashion i would like that little corner universe to be better uh and that means championing creativity uh to that's basically the end of the day is my you know i I love being odd.

30:03I love fashion. And I write, I always say, I write in the service of fashion. I don't write in the service of brands. So that is, you know, that's where my criticism stems from. Is postmodernism bad for fashion? Well, I mean, we can just look around what's going on now, right? When so much of the fashion's output feels incredibly unexciting. And to me, if that output feels unexciting, like you said, there is a value and fashion is a commercial discipline as well as a creative discipline. I don't think fashion is art. I'm not that. I don't see it. I think fashion is design. And that's a different discipline.

31:00But I do think that fashion is creative discipline. If there is no creative component to fashion, if that's not something we value anymore, we might as well go dress at unique low, right? We can go and see fashion as a purely utilitarian product. But it's not a purely utilitarian product, right? This is the creativity component and, of course, fashion being a status symbol and all that other things, fashion being so-called luxury. That's what allows Dior to pay 57 euros for constructing a bag in an Italian sweatshirt and selling it for 3 ,000 euros. right and they always put creativity in their marketing literature right they always maintain that they are creative so all these big brands maintain they're creative but and i argue that well just look at the runways they're not that creative and i think why i think it's important I think when creativity is lost, fashion will become unexciting.

32:20I think we're seeing that right now. I think a lot of people are turning away from fashion because it's not exciting. And I argue that Galliano and McQueen were more valuable to Bernardo in the mid to late 90s than Bernardo was more valuable to them. they made fashion in general exciting and that's what all these conglomerates capitalized on that's why fashion has become the most exciting cultural discipline right and now it's feeling like it's not and that's why i'm sounding the alarm bell i'm like everyone the entire ship is going down you know it's not yeah i mean it's definitely that's what we can agree on it's over I just don't care and you do I care but I think like one question I have for you is you can get Galliano Dior clothing now like we have so much access to the past because of technology innovation the reason luxury fashion has worked is because of letting the creative people be creative and then the return on investment if you do that is so much greater than if you are less if you're a less risk averse in the beginning like even and even if you look at laura piana which i'm sure you you don't want to look at but like the reason laura piana has been so successful is because lmh really didn't bother them for the first 10 years like they were kind of like do what you want hire franc from a holiday magazine to do your advertising like this is all very bourgeois stuff but like it looks great because they kind of let them cook and so it's still even at that sort of watered down version of it if you let the creative people do what they want in the beginning and you're willing to lose a bunch of money like arnaud lost probably lost billions of dollars on on Dior, like a lot of money in the first decade or so, then in the end, you'll make way more.

34:37The problem is that it's technology. It's the way the business is run. It's the fact that it has become totally commerce driven. So even I talk to people at Dior all the time. They are trying to let Jonathan Anderson cook. They say, don't worry about the numbers. Just do your thing. There is so much. But the problem is Jonathan Anderson is not John Galliano. Jonathan Anderson is a person who, his talent is in the marketing. It's in the mix. And so they've basically, I would say it's just transformed into a different business. The question I have for you, And so for me, like, I am now excited as a business journalist to write about the managed decline of these assets because they will even look.

35:34I'm a huge fan of Hermes and how that company is managed. There will be a decline. There will be a managed decline. Like it just is there is no way you can keep going at the rate they were going. And I think it peaked with Virgil and Demna and all that stuff, the pop culture element. But I guess what I wonder is, is there an opportunity? And I think as a consumer, I don't really mind because it's so fun to buy vintage. and there's so much exciting stuff in vintage to mine that like the fact that there isn't a lot of full price stuff that I want, like there's Phoebe Philo and there's Charvet and that's it for me.

36:22But the question I have for you, I guess, is do you think it's possible forgetting about what happened with the business, but just like culture and society wise to create interesting clothing in the way that you think of them as being interesting? Like, do you think that there is, because the thing that I've seen happening business-wise is like a lot of the smaller brands have done well because they are not as beholden to these crazy numbers, but they're still not interesting in the way you are, they're not innovative in the way you're talking about. Do you think it's possible to regain any of that?

37:05Yeah, that is the question, right? I think it's possible. I think it will be much harder for two reasons. One is that, first of all, I want to say, you know, when postmodernism sort of started supplanting modernism, it wasn't a bad idea, right? There were very valid questions. It's just where it ended up, probably unintendedly, is where we are at. But there are two things that are working against genuine innovation now. A, we have built up a lot of creative history. A lot has been done. And that's part of why postmodernism seems inevitable. Well, if so much has been done and it's so much harder to create something new, we're just going to remix what exists right we're just going to go back and mining history as retro right we're just going to make pastiche out of things that already exist so i acknowledge that and that's what makes things harder you know i always say on some level like the antwerp six were lucky you know we hold them as pinnacles of creativity but they were lucky to be where they were because in 1986 you know this whole connection between youth culture and fashion industry was very new there was just like vivian westwood and that's about it right so you know they had much more to work with there were many more roads open than there now so that's one thing The second thing is that, and that's more fixable, is that as the result of postmodernism is lack of historicity, right?

38:49So young fashion designers today are really badly educated when it comes to history of fashion. and they don't really feel it in their bones right they don't have this historic through line of what design was decade by decade you know innovation confrontation and they've been taught by post-modernism that you know history doesn't matter right and we've raised successive generations of young people who were taught from the beginning you're the best you're the coolest old people suck they're not creative you know there is no need to go back to history and learn about it that's a grave mistake of postmodernism and that one is fixable yeah so i think yes there can be genuine innovation but yes it will be much harder but if we look today i'll uh although all the examples i'm gonna give you if i think about it i'm like gosh they're all like 10 years old right you know but but brands like cray green like sakai like no arcane in amia they're genuinely creative innovators so you know it can happen it doesn't mean these rows are for clothes it just feels increasingly there's so little of it you know i was just on a jury uh this summer of a fashion competition and you know these two young cool kids come in presenting their own line and they're and they're like subculture subculture subculture and it's inspired by punk and divian westwood and ibiza club culture somehow and i'm like oh yeah okay well this is pure post-modernism right you're mixing completely different things that you have no knowledge of and i asked them simple question what does subculture mean to you and they had no answer for me because all they know are empty signifiers what i call in the book right just flow three floating signs and symbols that they can remix ad nauseum and we've just seen it all too much and remember my last up op-ed for baf when i said like you know like uh and i know you don't agree with me with that one that, you know, maybe the epidemic of nice clothes.

41:08And I said, I don't, I mean, I understand. It was interesting because I sent it to someone and I was like, I don't agree with this, but I also get his point. Like, it's not that I totally, it's that, again, it's not that I don't totally disagree with you. It's more that I don't feel the same way about it that you do, if that makes sense. No, I get it. But, you know, my point was, right, is that at some point we so if we've been doing pastiche for the past 25 years right because i think you and i roughly agree that end of the 90s is when it truly kicks in conglomeration democratization of fashion corporate takeover all these things so i'm like fine if for 25 years is all we've been doing is pastiche so what happens when we run out of things to copy and i think that's where we're at and maybe this retreat to what i know what i call nice clothes which by the way i personally like like i love orally i i i don't love the role but i respect it right you know well i mean i think it's this is a crisis that the role is happening right now i've been writing about it that like people are sick of it's too nice yeah exactly it's too polite yeah it's too boring it's too polite like i mean women's you can have like flashes of creativity menswear is like the banana republic for the one percent yeah no it's not good there was another brand oh totem just launched menswear and which is like obviously of the same lineage and yeah it's even like at least with their women's wear it's very like looks like carolyn beset kennedy the the menswear so i got so many messages from guys just being like i don't yeah it like looks like theory or vince or something like they need to push it a little bit more for sure yeah yeah but totem is a post-modernist brand you know it's a complete concoction of what's been there before done by two influencers with you know with connections to fashion and when when it was hard to everyone was like totem totem totem and my wife was like well let's go see they just opened a store in so we walked in and we were like are you for real you got to respect it because they get a lot of people to buy it i just wrote a thing on studio nicholson and and i called them post i called them mood board brands which is the same kind of thing but um i think that what what totem has done that's interesting is they've been able to convince people that part of the brand is the value that they're bringing.

43:54But I think that this gets to this idea. I want to let you finish your thought about nice clothes, but I think there's something that's happened society-wise that makes this challenging because our culture has fragmented. We all know this. Every single newsletter I write, it says something about fragmentation of culture but it has also fragmented our minds where there is no depth people don't have like you're talking about this history everything is running in and out so fast it's just like flashes of information and these kids can't define a subculture for you because they just see flashes of stuff they've probably never read a book like and i'm not even i'm not being facetious like yeah yeah i imagine many children many kids who are teenagers have not read full books at this point like it would be and also you can just put it online and get the clips notes like for real now like there it feels like there needs to be i'm curious because you said art is 20 years ahead right like yeah do you see what the future will look like if there is some sort of creative breakthrough and what that would be Lauren I'm not gonna lie I think the future is bleak and if we look at if we take my thesis seriously and we look at the art world it's just like blah right it's just this diffused thing with absolutely no defined cultural moments like it's just there yeah and i feel that's where we'll end up with fashion and that's why i feel like i'm trying to prevent it the book is a manifesto and there is a manifesto at the end of the book i'm trying to sound the alarm say this is what's going to happen it will be like a very unexciting but maybe commercially successful on some level for some people an exciting uh discipline so yeah i don't you know i don't remember the last time i was uh impressed by something that i saw from the contemporary art world and i don't you know i love fashion and i don't want that to happen in fashion and uh yeah i agree that the internet the social media has just supercharged it because you know i have a chapter on simulate simulacra and simulation jean baudrillard and society of the spectacle by giddy board those were like two big thinkers that foresaw a culture that's purely image driven and this has just been just like you know instagram put a turbo engine in turbo in that engine and yeah everything is fragmented but what i would on the hopeful side i mean the amount of feedback i get there is a contingent of fashion enthusiasts who are intelligent who are inquisitive and who are dissatisfied and that's probably like my primary audience who i speak to but i think those people influence other people as well

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48:23I had a question for you, actually, because I have a new theory and I wanted to run it by you. Is that okay? Tell me. Yeah, of course. So one of the things I talk about in the book is the diskilling of the consumer, right? Because we talk about diskilling of producers all the time. It's that things are getting worse in quality, et cetera, et cetera. I talk about the disckeling of the consumer, what I mean by that is that contemporary consumer is not equipped really to tell quality, to talk about quality, to say that, oh, this garment is quality, to acknowledge quality in the garment. anyway uh my new theory is that that actually you know people who are making this stuff don't like what they're making but my new theory is that that actually people who are actually buying you know luxury fashion today they don't really like it either like inside it's just they don't know what else to buy because you go on like fifth avenue rue saint-en-reille new bond street it's all the same stores it's all the same stuff all the celebrities advertise all the same brands but it's so they don't know where alternatives are and i have a like it feels like no one really likes what the contemporary luxury fashion industry is producing and calling fashion yeah what do you think i wanted to bring up the skill thing with you i i personally think that in some ways consumers are overeducated so they know too much about all the different things that happen and they might not be able to tell if a stitch is good or not but they think they know and they know too much about every little incremental thing that and not just because of of media but because of just the way that we operate the product is the marketing now in especially in mass goods.

50:21But yes, 100 % do I think people are sick and don't like the stuff they're buying? Definitely. And that started really in earnest at the end of the pandemic when they just, I think everybody just was like, well, I don't want this anymore, but they think they should buy it. And there's less desire, which is why I think Chanel was so successful because it created, it was beauty. And I think the thing I do have to run soon, but I want to ask you about music because I think that to me is a even better music or the, or film industry. But I think people are seeking, are always seeking beauty, but the dopamine hit that you get from a beautiful thing feels less important a because more things that are like conventionally beautiful are accessible because of fast fashion, because of technology and also visually were so overstimulated so i think the reason chanel was so emotional for people was because there was something there it got to that thing that fashion used to give people which was this like pure love or pure pure beauty in some way whether or not you know that we could go on forever about yeah about why but um but i think the the thing that i think is going to get harder and harder is is the seeking out that feeling that it gives you and and that's why it that a real fashion garment can transform you as a person yes like and and so but because we are so overstimulated and there's so many things it's it's hard for me to believe that fashion is going to be the vehicle to ever do that again i find i still get a lot of pleasure out of art because of the fact that when you go to see it like i'm not being stimulated by a screen and and also even though you know artists are so have to be very disciplined like successful artists to get the work out.