Pop Culture Did Not Die in 2009

29:54W. David Marx: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 in Ginza. They're going to some other smaller neighborhood. But Tokyo is 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 uh what it means is just that if one neighborhood does become over-touristed or to overdevelop there's just some new place it's still going to be cheap that that people can can turn into cool boutique little stores so uh tokyo's still dynamic and i think that uh 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.

30:57Okay. 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 is comprehensive in a way, but then in another way it's not. You couldn't get every little bit of this in there because every single part of culture could have been a book from the last 25 years. She could have done a book about fashion the last 25 years, about music, all of that stuff.

31:44So how did you, when you started plotting this book out, how did you think about it?

31:51W. David Marx:I mean, the first 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 book. 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 uh what i noticed in thinking about these 25 years is you do have people i mean especially kanye west and um and then others like gavin mcginnis or terry richardson i mean joe francis these aren't always they're mostly not good good guys um but you know people who kept popping up all the time and i just thought that was a fun thing to to follow them um one of the earlier views calls it like a system novel in the sense that these characters kind of like keep interacting um and so i mean the way i thought about it was uh i did try to be as comprehensive as as possible and and cover as many things as possible uh but i knew that i wanted to talk about music and fashion and internet uh 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 you know men's fashion is way over indexed versus women's fashion there's a lot of you know 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.

33:33W. David Marx:But at the end of the day, I had read David Halberstam's The 50s to kind of prepare for this, to think about 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 to at least give more of a this is the thing we're following and the thing we're following is this uh 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 at Lollapalooza.

34:18W. David Marx: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 to write, like I cut out names of like all the characters and started to like tie them and uh through the chapters and make sure they were kind of moving through and i i did some of that kind of organization but um you know then your editor comes in and and says why is terry richardson on like every third page and and then it's like good point we we should remove uh most of these terry richardson uh by the way terry richardson again not not the good guy of this book it's definitely definitely a villain in this book but well i mean so the thing also was 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 um dov charney is getting evicted from his home and he's living in the home with um with milo yananopoulos and and kanye's production staff or something it's just the the the funny thing also just the intersection of all these people um that you you don't know exists unless you've read some really deep deep web pages but yeah I don't want to yeah I don't want to get off 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.

36:12But 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 it at 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. Right. It's like because 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.

36:58W. David Marx:like the the challenge of writing this book terry richardson lives upstate with this and hangs out with this kid like every time i bring him up someone's like you know he still shoots for blah blah blah uh yeah uh the fashion industry cannot cannot quit terry richardson so i guess the the point uh of this 21st century history which you know the the controversy would be do you want to over index a character like joe francis who did girls gone wild right yeah and the the truth is that this has been a completely fragmented fracture 25 years in which is hard to create narratives there's there's a lot of creative activity out there what rises to the top what people remember um is maybe different than where the quality is which is one of the problems that we all think about.

37:53W. David Marx: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 it 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 era defining aesthetics.

38:44W. David Marx:I mean, I don't think we can argue with that. But, you know, 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 summarized.

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40:00Okay, I want to talk about this idea of selling out. 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 yeah um does that idea still exist and because it comes up occasionally for me especially in europe where people still seem to like have um i don't know if morals is the right word but they like are very um sincere right whereas there's no sincerity in america i don't think um 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.

40:56I do feel a my boss is always like we're 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 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 25 years where selling there was there was no everyone was selling out like 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 you want to ladder it back to fashion it's a big topic in fashion because like all fashion is about selling out now so yeah i might

41:56W. David Marx:definitely agree that selling out is a dead concept and it is one of the motivating things behind this book, which is it to me, you know, they had not done a book of the aughts. There's 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's felt like a blur, but there must be something where you could say, well, that's really changed in the last 25 years.

42:28W. David Marx:And I think selling out to me is the clearest example of that and 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 and uh I I unfortunately couldn't read it because there were so many footnotes that I couldn't get through it okay my big feedback of that book is like it's too many footnotes I really I had to stop like I would say and it was during COVID when I was reading a lot but I just just my feedback work but um sure but anyway that that book got me thinking about it i look i think there's a side of selling out where it was uh it was pretentious and it was too much and i understand that um 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 uh artistic and good and earnest that the market won't understand and so there's a 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 um 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 in 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 uh loved to support the music that the kids liked and suddenly they 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 um version of this art form that's not going anywhere.

44:46W. David Marx:And so poptimism 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?

45:24W. David Marx:Obviously, if you have an artist like Jay-Z, who's made his entire identity on being an entrepreneur, that played a major role. And in the lyrics themselves, there's this real commitment to business success as being a sign of his artistic success. um so all these are kind of boiled together to where selling out it becomes no longer not not only not a taboo but can become becomes the goal or this uh 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.

46:13W. David Marx: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 swing 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.

46:46W. David Marx: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 as something, this kind of old crusty Marxist idea of, you know, capitalism is obviously bad for us and bad for the human psyche. 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 and like the increased individualism in in the U.S.

47:41in particular like it's crazy it's it's everything is about about you and so where do you think like you stopped at 2025 where do you think it's moving now?

47:55W. David Marx: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 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 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.

48:42W. David Marx: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 or 600 000 a year to be well off um compared to like you know 250 000 for everyone else so uh i think we have this issue where we don't know what uh the actual amount of money or how to live on the actual salaries that companies pay or that you can be expected to make.

49:20W. David Marx: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. And so that's a big problem. Look, I think the book ends on an incredibly pessimistic note because it was written, you know, as Trump 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.

49:56W. David Marx:But I think even since that time, I've seen some signs that 2024, 2025 were a peak of a lot of these trends. One of them is, I don't think that 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 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.

50:46W. David Marx: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're going to 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.

51:36W. David Marx: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. 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.

52:18Like, but also my whole feeling is, you mentioned intervention and then we're going to talk about fashion and then I'll let you go. But you mentioned intervention And the thing is, like, sometimes I kind of think this stuff is inevitable. If there's a bunch of screens in kindergarten, it is what it is. And like, your kid's going to be fine. I watch TV from nine months old on like, and I'm fine. so it's it's sometimes I kind of think well this is the way that culture is 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 and then you get back to the haves and the haves nots and this this bifurcation of our culture which has happened so greatly so it's interesting I mean, I think the one great data point is that social media use has declined a lot in the last year, right?

53:23So, or two years. So that is a good optimistic trend if we think that it's rotting our brains because it's definitely rotting mine.

53:32W. David Marx:Yeah. I mean, I always try to avoid the kind of psychological, you know, these things are happening. That's why culture is moving in certain ways. um but it's just i don't know 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 like quite optimistic about 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's been, had been incredibly anti-fashion for a very long time, especially with men, you know, there's just all this energy there.

54:18W. David Marx:And so if you look at the major brands, I mean, Dana Thomas's Deluxe to me was, you know, 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 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, you know.

54:58W. David Marx: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. Yeah. I mean, there are a couple of 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.

55:43This woman, Laura Vinroot 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 Pert does really well because she understands her customer. And she's really beautiful. And she had on head to toe orally. And because 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 Orly is 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.

56:32Like I like it and it's very – and it is the price is also obviously better in Japan. But even here when you're looking at designer clothes, 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 is willing to spend. like the the higher end stuff but it's not it's twenty five hundred dollars for a dress not four thousand or or what have you and the thing that kathy said on this podcast they were talking about margela and that era and she was like you know margela wasn't that expensive like like now and that is the interesting thing that's happening right now with the pricing at with the mega luxury brands, but then also just generally$6 ,000 for a leather jacket when most people would be willing to pay two.

57:35And 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 know 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 i the only way i knew about this stuff was like british vogue and and so So now there's a different level of access.

58:23But 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.

58:50W. David Marx:yeah i mean so i just did this uh i helped popeye translate an entire issue it's the first english ever in all english issue of popeye ever and there was a store it's called morrison king in i 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 um and i keep telling the 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 uh 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 i think it's not unrelated to what we're talking about in terms of digital trends just because a great leather jacket is a tactile experience it's it's not just a fleeting kind of digital piece of slop and so So sure, there's, I mean, fashion and there's problems there, et cetera, et cetera.

59:49W. David Marx:But still, there are more people engaged with really high quality brands and really high quality design than ever before. And I mean, 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 of culture and there's still a lot of great talent in that it's not all cynical it's not all uh just selling you know making anonymous products and and factories in provinces of China that you've never heard of and marking them up for insane prices.

1:00:43W. David Marx: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. 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 what have you. Okay, two-part question, and then we will end soon. One, how much were you looking at the consolidation of the luxury industry when you were reporting this out.

1:01:29Because 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. Yeah.

1:02:07W. David Marx:I mean, most certainly hip hop had a major role in, 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 in menswear for these big luxury houses unless you go back to the origin the the crossover between japanese and american streetwear in the early 21st century um but yeah i mean the 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, and 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.

1:03:02W. David Marx: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 libubu i mean 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 uh that really boosted it in the last couple months but um in general china has had a much bigger indirect role on fashion which is that they are the growth market.

1:03:58W. David Marx: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. The 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.

1:04:42W. David Marx:I think it's that direct of an influence. And so, yes, all these things happen. 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. Okay. Really, two more questions. Sure. 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.

1:05:26They 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 understand what you're saying about the La Boo Boo's 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 La Boo Boo so I that's the that's the best thing that's come out of it for me but um what do you think about that like do you think that they are going to start exporting like that all of this stuff that's happening I mean we've seen it with Korean culture obviously China is a different story but like do you think that China is going to start that their own brands and that's going to change the fashion industry as well where they're not going to need like right now the the luxury brands are just like sort of waiting and seeing LVMH is opening like four new big stores in Beijing because they think that the consumer is going to pick back up.

1:06:40But 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?

1:06:57W. David Marx:I mean, it's probably just a cop out answer, but probably a combination in the sense that yes there'll be local brands but that the 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 uh there's really not a competitor to it um so So that's all happening. I went to China recently. I mean, 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?

1:07:43W. David Marx:and you know the stores they're they're really looking at japan quite a bit i think japan's the biggest influence on on chinese retail and um i mean i'll see trends in japan and i've seen 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 uh 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 in japan so the the japan influence is big on china uh and china is getting cooler uh it has more of it's getting a little bit more of the indie hipster aesthetic um but whether it's starting to produce things that other people will want i think is a big question and and this is kind of this is often called soft power and i think it's probably the wrong word but you know japan and korea have become incredibly cool in the 21st century and this is 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 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 uh these these values of of a korean lifestyle and i think china the question is when will people find that same aspiration for china um and because china's just a different political situation than these other places and it's quite still cut off from the world in the sense of uh my my vpn did not work on my phone so i just didn't have the internet for five days, basically.

1:09:28W. David Marx: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. 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 part of it. 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.

1:10:16W. David Marx:It was kind of like French. There's some like cool French cinema and Britpop 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 - You don't like aloe leggings? Or, you know, Jake Paul or Jake and Logan Paul or whatever, you know? So I don't, 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, it 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.

1:11:06W. David Marx:But to young people, yeah, there is something really exciting about East Asia in general. I think that's Japan and Korea at the moment. Lububu's, yeah, or 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.

1:11:42W. David Marx:So, 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. Okay. Final question. So everybody read David's book, Blank Space. You should buy it. It comes out Tuesday. 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. they had a big deck in their financial reports about how they're going to expand J-Press in the U.S.

1:12:25And 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. No, I was just visiting.

1:12:36W. David Marx:Oh, you were visiting. Someone was doing a talk that we knew. It was G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. G.N. and I used to do rolling blazers and all 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 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.

1:13:19But 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?

1:13:55W. David Marx:Yeah. So I think prep and IEV 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 so hard so i think prep has that i think what jack did that was really smart um and what's kept prep alive is that it needed to be hybridized with the streetwear hip-hop actual youth culture and it needed any prep can go between being really bland in terms of its color and it can be really pop um i i think it's slightly underrated how much ralph lauren's whole innovation to to prep clothing was that he brought in color to it that you know if you compare polo to brooks brothers there's just no question that everything is just this vivid vivid color with with ralph so i think um j the the rowing blazers did that really well it made 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 call kind of historical value that there seems something grounded and authentic about prep culture because it's uh 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 the uniform for wasps old money you know groups that that 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 what jason jewels did with black ivy to show the degree to which um the ivy league style really was cool back in the day even because of black jazz musicians and black americans rather than just wasps uh 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 um and so it can kind of go the direction of if things are streetwear escape skate, it can go kind of that way.

1:16:42W. David Marx:If things are really brash colors, it can go that way. I'm thinking about the rowing blazers, rugby's, the cut up patchwork rugby's were pretty extreme, but they were, they hit it the exact time that people were wearing flashier clothes. So I think that's, what's keeping prep alive. And if, you know, 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 one week super pink i mean it's always going to be black and and and gloomy uh where i think prep it can again it's just super adaptable and i think that's what what what makes it work in in the long run but i mean i obviously there's i grew up in a time i grew up in 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 button down shirt and when i went to university uh it was not that cool to wear that kind of clothing and i wore street wear uh and i and then prep came back and i i think it's 100 tom brown that brought it back he he kind of put a spirit of designer fashion into it but um it goes back and forth but i think again the adaptability is what's kept it in the conversation 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 it's fine you come back for a news day when when taylor is back on and and we you can weigh in when she wears something that i care about i am definitely not the expert on Taylor Swift, but I wrote a book called Blank Space.

1:18:33W. David Marx: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. 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 editorial operations, It's Gobby Grossman. An additional thanks to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Bob Tabador. Your call has been forwarded to voicemail. Hi, this is Zoe Deutsch. And Nick Robinson.

1:19:14W. David Marx:Our brand new movie, Voicemails for Isabel, is all about those little moments that feel like the universe is looking out. Feeling homesick, then your sister calls. Hearing that perfect song exactly when you need it. Please stay. Sometimes life rigs things in our favor, like learning about your new favorite rom-com voicemails for Isabel, now playing only on Netflix.