Rachel Tashjian

EO

We’ll start from the present and then work our way backwards. Why do you think you approach writing criticism at The Washington Post differently from how you wrote at Harper’s Bazaar?

RT

One thing that I do every season is think about, “How do I want to approach the criticism?” Do I want to do it in the same way or in a different way? It’s not every season that I do something completely different, but that’s something that’s become really important to consider, especially when you cover fashion, although there’s not really anything like fashion. But just thinking about, “Okay, is the way that I’m talking about this and the things that I’m thinking about, are those still the most important things to focus on?”

I don’t make a formal reading list, but I do read a lot in anticipation of some of the things that I might be thinking about or what I think some of the themes of the shows might be. More broadly, part of the reason why I do what I do now is I like to kick and scream and felt I’d want to kick and scream if I didn’t write the specific article I wanted. I don’t care if anyone reads it. If I don’t write this, I don’t get to say this thing or what I think about fashion, I’m gonna lose my mind. That’s what I’ve always felt from the first summer I moved to New York. I think, “Do I really want to review this show?” I decide I should review this show, because if I don’t say what I think about this Comme des Garçons show now, I’m gonna be regretting it in six months. I do have that sometimes. [Laughs.] I’m like, man, I really wish that I had written that review about that show.

EO

The way you structure Opulent Tips seems very conceptual, in terms of how you give each newsletter a rubric. It’s interesting to hear that you apply that kind of structure to the show season in the same way that you apply it to criticism. How does that structure manifest in the actual material of the shows that you’re reviewing? How are those rubrics executed? What are these rubrics? If you’re like, “I’m looking for silhouettes, I’m looking for material, structure, form, execution,” how are you then responding to this rubric when you’re actually at shows?

RT

You can do all of that work in advance, but it might be totally pointless, because what you think you might see might not happen at all. Just as an example, I had assumed that there would be a ton of celebrities at Fashion Week, because the 2023 Writers Guild of America and actor strikes were going on. I had a lot of conversations with celebrity stylists, celebrities, and publicists for fashion brands. They had all told me throughout the summer, “Absolutely there will be a ton of celebrities at all these shows.” So I had been preparing to talk about the spectacle of the front row and the inner workings of why a celebrity is at a certain fashion brands’ shows, but not another. But that hasn’t borne out at all.

EO

What is your impression so far?

RT

This theme that seems to have emerged for me is this smooth-brained luxury industry. That is what has become the spectacle this season. Designers are not taking any risks. Some designers are not taking risks because they don’t know how. Others are not taking risks because they’re being told not to take risks. It’s assessing an aesthetic and a spectacle as something that is becoming social media content, essentially.

I sort of anticipated that might be something that would come up, but it wasn’t something that I did a lot of research or reading or thinking about before the season had started. But you have to continue to talk to people at the shows. A lot of fashion reporting is having these casual conversations of asking other people what they are thinking then go and do something. Asking people on Instagram, “What does everyone think about Gucci? Drop in your thoughts.”

EO

How productive was that as an exercise on your part in terms of work that you do?

RT

It’s interesting to see other people who follow me responding to this. I saw this Gucci show and I was like, “Oh my God, this is so depressing. I can feel the air going out of the room.” But there were a lot of critics at the show who were saying, “I really didn’t like it, but I’m older and it seems like a lot of people who are 25 might like that.” And I was like, well, a lot of people who are 25 follow me. Let’s see what they actually think.

That’s helpful for me to know. It doesn’t even necessarily inform my criticism. It’s part of the community of fashion. Part of what is so amazing about fashion now is that it’s better than any other kind of medium or art form at using social media and harnessing that to actually democratize itself.

EO

With your newsletter “Opulent Tips,” you talked about the difference between opinion (taste) and then your job. You think of “Opulent Tips” as your taste, like a sandbox and you’re moving things around and it’s like a feng shui exercise where these are the things that you like and you’re pointing to them and telling people why you like them, but then there’s the professional you and the criticism you’re writing, and then taking temperature and scene report with your Instagram. All of us have been professionalized in some way. How do you manage writing for and to different audiences?

RT

When I think about who I’m writing for, I’m mostly thinking about people who are curious about fashion but want to understand it better and want a contextualization for what I am seeing. What is the history of this designer or this brand? What is the background? How can I understand this? In addition to that, my point of view, which they may disagree, agree with, or may loathe. But most of what I’m thinking about is providing the context.

People are primarily looking at fashion through social media, whether it’s an advertisement or stuff coming up on your feed because people are posting about it or you watch TikTok a lot as I do. You’re seeing people talking about things they’re buying or they’re describing things they’re wearing. There’s so much fashion content, but there’s not any of the history or the context of those items or designers. I’m thinking about how I can fill in the information that you’re missing, which I was thinking at the beginning of this past season. [Laughs.] I’m seeing this brand Khaite everywhere, and I really want to do a piece to explain what that brand is and how it functions, its place in the fashion world, and also whether or not I think it’s good.

EO

Is that exercise more project-focused or are you building a larger system and framework to understand what this all means?

RT

It’s really focused on season to season. You think, okay, who are the brands who I’m really interested in, who I either find really exciting or that I’m seeing come up quite a lot. I’ll focus on those and I’ll think, I’m probably gonna review that. If I don’t review it, I’m going to find some way to write a reported piece about it. For example, this past season, I wrote a couple of reviews and then I also had a profile of Ralph Lauren because I thought he’s at an interesting point in his career. He’s 84, but somehow all these young designers are like, “I want to be Ralph Lauren” – designers like Bode and Aimé Leon Dore.” The other thing that comes into this is—who’s available and who wants to talk?

EO

Ralph Lauren is the retail conglomerate blueprint. There’s no building an empire without following his rubric, especially considering he created the first luxury retail experience in New York. How were you contextualizing him in the present moment? What is Ralph Lauren’s story in 2023?

RT

With fashion, you’re constantly talking to publicists and designers about, “Is this the right time for us to talk? When should we talk? When should we do something?” And there have been designers where it takes years.

EO

Can you talk about the terms? There’s so much negotiating that goes on behind closed doors. You’re essentially selling your soul for the piece. [Laughs.] What is your process like?

RT

The ideal thing is what happened to me with Mrs. Prada’s Miu Miu. That’s the dream scenario. This woman is making these insane clothes, these chopped-off miniskirts and crop tops are taking the world by storm. This is really a revolutionary moment for Mrs. Prada, who’s had a number of revolutionary moments. When you work in a magazine, you have two meetings after each fashion month where everyone gets together and you say, “What were the great shows?” At the time, I was at Harper’s Bazaar, and Samira Nasr, who is the Editor-in-Chief said, “Rachel, what should be the fall fashion profiles?”

I said, “Well, everyone is talking about Miu Miu, so let’s try to get Mrs. Prada.” And she was encouraging, but like, “Good luck.” [Laughs.] I reached out to her PR people. I’ve interviewed Mrs. Prada before, so I already had a nice relationship with them. I reached out and I said, “She really needs to do this story about the miniskirt, where this came from, how she thought of this, and the virality of this item.” And they said, “Yes.” Which never happens. That’s the ideal situation! A designer’s at a historic moment, a news-making moment in her or his career and you reach out and it comes together.

When you’re working at a magazine, of course, you also have advertisers to think about. People get really up in arms about this in some cases. [Laughs.] I actually think it is fantastic because at magazines, I got to interview these incredibly famous designers. I always say this, especially to young writers, that a part of the challenge and the creativity of working at a fashion magazine is figuring out what makes this or that person, who is an advertiser, interesting and newsworthy in their career right now, contextualizing them. You figure out the way to tell that story. If you have to do a story about a brand, you have to figure out a way to do it with integrity, that also makes it an interesting subject matter. The reality is, if you’re working in a fashion magazine and you want to be a writer, there’s really not any brands that aren’t interesting. Every brand is interesting in their own way, especially the brands you might initially think are boring.

EO

So now that you’re working at The Washington Post, which is a newspaper, one can feel the difference in your writing. What are the parameters of working within a newspaper versus for working a magazine?

RT

The difference is speed. When I wrote this story about Miu Miu and Mrs. Prada, I spent all summer working on it.

EO

Why?

RT

[Laughs.] Because you’re writing a 4,000 word magazine story.

EO

In terms of dissecting this process with Mrs. Prada, how are you contrasting Miu Miu against Prada in that piece? What were you negotiating? You went in with this very specific focus of these silhouettes, the material of the skirt, production, and the quality of the fabric. But how did the story change as you were developing it over that period of time? Was there room for the piece to develop?

RT

There is so much that hinges on the interview itself.

EO

Which took place where?

RT

In her office, which has a Carsten Höller slide in it that goes out into the courtyard of the building. We spoke for a little over an hour and a half. She’s someone who has a lot of ideas and she’s very expressive. Because she’s constantly trying out ideas, you have to push back and argue with her.

Usually when I do an interview, I think about what I want this piece to be about and get at. As an example, Rick Owens did this Rizzoli book of all his collections he did during the pandemic, and a couple of other projects on the side, but that’s primarily the bulk of it. So I’m going into the interview with a clear understanding of these COVID collections. He calls them his “COVID quartet.” These collections were so much about aggression, masculinity, the comedy of aggression, and the ridiculousness of it. I knew that’s something I wanted to talk about. I went in thinking it’ll be a big focus of the conversation and it was. Whereas with Mrs. Prada, I had to be a journalist. I had to get to the bottom of these skirts. [Laughs.] I don’t have the answers to why she made these skirts and she doesn’t either.

She was sitting there like, “I don’t really know why people are so obsessed with these skirts.” At that moment, you have to think on your feet. Then we get into the history of fashion and how the miniskirt is the most important thing that ever happened in fashion.

EO

Do you think that it bears the same miniskirt phenomenon that took place in London in the 1960s? Is there any resonance with that at all?

RT

I would say she was probably the first designer to articulate this change on the runway, in contemporary times, that is happening with our understanding of comfort and our bodies. She was the first person to put her finger on that and identify a recent change that’s happening in terms of the freedom that we are currently dressing with.

EO

I’m curious about your process when you’re traveling to meet a subject for one of those pieces. I remember when I went to Rotterdam and I interviewed Rem Koolhaas. You’re kind of delusional until you arrive on the site. It’s not until that moment of initial contact that you’re like, “Oh shit, this is happening. I’m in this now.” What is it like for you doing traveling journalism versus reporting in New York?

RT

I try to binge-read everything about that person in the weeks leading up to it. I try to get into the mode of what that person is like. A lot of times I visit the stores kind of obsessively, if they have a store. And if they don’t, I’ll often try to find a store where their clothes are and I’ll try them on. I also read old stories and reviews, to see how other people have understood that person. The other thing I like to do, which depends on the person, I like to think of a lot of questions. I'll write them down and look over them. But I don’t like to be a student of my questions. Sometimes I’ll not even ask any of the questions. You have to follow the thread of where the person is going, unless they have an agenda and then you don’t want to fall in the middle.

When I interviewed Ralph Lauren, I thought to myself, “Okay, I’ve met him once for five minutes. But I really need this interview to be good.” [Laughs.] I need him to like me and I need this to be insightful. I got to the interview very early, and I walked up and down Madison Avenue and rehearsed my questions as if I were saying them in a conversational way. And I never do anything like that.

EO

But why the sensitivity with him?

RT

Because I’ve heard he can be really difficult to talk to. I read a number of recent Ralph stories and I was like, “Oh my God, he’s giving nothing.”

EO

[Laughs.] It’s giving nothing.

RT

How do I get him to give me something? I put on a very Ralph Lauren outfit. I wore a skirt that’s made of old quilts, a tweed blazer. Then I wore fancy jewelry.

EO

The old outfit-as-armor trick.

RT

Yes, he loved what I was wearing. While we were talking, I had my notebook open in front of me on my lap and I asked him a question, this was maybe a little bit more than halfway through the interview, and he said, “You know what’s interesting about you? You’ve got a paper in front of you with all these questions and you’ve never once looked at it.” And I said, “That’s because I was pacing in front of your office before the interview reading these questions to myself.” I needed to control this situation, because someone like him who has been interviewed a million times, they’re so media trained, they tell a story they’ve already told 9,000 times. How do you steer them away from that? Or if they’re gonna tell it, get them to tell it to you in a new way.

EO

Yes, it’s one of the primary reasons I got into the interview business. I was so bored by constantly reading the same story being retold across different media and publications. People get beside themselves when they get exclusive access to someone, so much so they forget they’re meant to execute a task and tell a captivating story. It’s not an easy feat! What’s your tactic in terms of earning that person’s trust?

RT

With him, I decided I was just going to ask really basic questions. This is something that I’ve had to teach myself. Because he’s such a sweeping great American designer, that’s how he would describe himself, too, so I can just be like, “What does style mean to you?” And he will tell you exactly what he thinks style means. [Laughs.]

Most people are really bad at talking about fashion, and most people are even worse at writing about fashion. The first couple of minutes of speaking it’s important to establish a little bit of common ground. I’m not going to ask you a dumb question about your inspiration. When I first interviewed Nicolas Ghesquière, I’d never met him before, but I really liked the "Irma Vep" HBO series. Nicolas had designed the costumes for Alicia Vikander. When we sat down, I was like I love "Irma Vep." That movie is so great. It’s like meeting someone at a cocktail party.

EO

When do you know when to let the freak flag fly? Whenever journalism and fashion come up it makes me think of Joan Didion. Her work is largely flattened when it enters the context of fashion because people don’t realize that what makes her writing effective is her adjacency to the industry–she was making sense of the world as a writer in the context of fashion, not as a fashion writer exclusively speaking to a larger public. You entered into the world of fashion having worked in Public Relations at Vanity Fair, it seems you have a more critical lens because of the clarity that adjacency afforded you. There are critics like Cathy Horyn of The Cut, Suzy Menkes formerly of Vogue, Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times, and Robin Givhan, senior critic-at-large at The Washington Post. Can you speak to the current writing landscape? Where are we in terms of literature and fashion?

RT

There’s been this surge of interest in fashion criticism. That’s actually a lot of what’s happening in social media. That’s different from when I was 20 years old, a decade or so ago. What people were doing primarily was posting about what they were wearing and then describing that item. Tavi Gevinson would borrow Comme des Garçons and explain the experience of wearing Comme des Garçons. Bryanboy would talk about the experience of buying this handbag and what it was like. Now you have something different, which is the currency. The social currency is not the access to the clothes or the experience of wearing the clothes, but the ability to critique or describe the clothes adequately.

EO

I was thinking a lot about Tavi’s Style Rookie and then Rookie. Her identity as a brand. She leveraged her currency and it became Rookie magazine, which became an entirely different machine. What do you feel is at stake for fashion criticism beyond your post? What are people even reaching for right now?

RT

There’s a big confusion in fashion between the people who are doing or interested in fashion criticism as it’s happening on social media—that fashion criticism is just saying something’s bad. That’s not what it is. This is something Robin [Givhan] has talked a lot about as well. Maybe a year or so ago there was this real ravenous desire for people to be like, “This designer is awful, and this show is stupid.” People have grown out of that. And now there’s more of an interest in being a skeptic of the industry and wanting it to be better and wanting designers to be better and to give us something more.

EO

More meaning?

RT

Give us better ideas. I think designers don’t have a lot of time to come up with these collections. A lot of times the ideas behind the collections feel quite thin. Something that drives me crazy, and I’ve written about this a little bit this season, is you have these really thin ideas, but then designers tell you, “Oh, this is about something I’m making up, but it’s also about ballet.” Then you go into the store–and I have a certain expectation of what a ballet costume feels like and how it might be used–then you feel it and you’re like, this is made of plastic, but it’s still $2,000. If you’re gonna make a ballet shoe, it should be kid leather or satin. I’m talking about the quality of things.

EO

On “The Business of Fashion” podcast, you told Imran Amed how you and Robin had been talking about the complicated web and influence of celebrity and fashion. You were specifically speaking to the culmination of Pharrell being at the helm of Louis Vuitton, which I think is neutrally fine, because he garnered notable attention for his style in the early 2000s while he was in the Neptunes, and set the tone for the aughts sonically, aesthetically, and albeit commercially. Can you speak to the influence of celebrity?

RT

I have to be honest, I think we’re blaming the celebrities too much. I was looking at what’s happening in Paris today and Kaia Gerber and Pamela Anderson are at the Row show. The Row is quiet and conservative and their ideas are complex but opaque. And I was like, “this rocks.” Pamela Anderson wearing the Row–this is what I want. [Laughs.] Their design is about the interiority of a woman’s life. If more people are paying attention to ideas like that, that’s fantastic.

Thom Browne is a great example of someone who has collaborated with celebrities to make these ideas that challenge our strict ideas about masculinity and gender, and make them feel a lot more mainstream. And also make people who object to a male-presenting person wearing a skirt seem really absurd for thinking that’s ridiculous. That’s on you! I think that there are a lot of brands and designers who have used celebrities really effectively. To me, it comes down more to the executives who are making these hiring decisions and to the designers themselves. I think that’s where the problem is in fashion right now.

EO

I just binged watched “The Super Models” docuseries. It was really interesting how eventually the models themselves were able to leverage the power they gained from the press and media, in terms of being able to choose the photographers that they work with for cover shoots of magazines and campaigns that they did, but so few people develop that kind of power. Who do you think holds the power now? Because power shifts every decade.

RT

Vogue has an immense amount of power. We still live in a world where it’s like, “Oh is it on Vogue Runway or is it not?” That’s good and bad. I think there are certain people who should be taken seriously as important fashion designers or important people who wear clothes wonderfully and they don’t get the credit that they deserve because the light of Vogue has not been shone upon them. Nicki Minaj would be an example of someone who I think uses fashion in an incredibly fascinating way. But the popular understanding of how significant she is isn’t where it should be. Part of that might be because she hasn’t been on the cover of Vogue. I hate to say that, but I think that’s true. [This conversation took place September 27, 2023 at the Karma Bookstore in New York. In fact, Nicki Minaj was later featured on the December 2023 cover of American Vogue.]

EO

In “The Super Models,” there was this part where Cindy Crawford wore a red Versace dress to the 1991 Academy Awards, while she was dating Richard Gere. To give context, fashion had been so overwrought in the 1990s specifically with the influence and rise of supermodels and women in Hollywood weren’t dressing as feminine because they wanted to be taken more seriously. Crawford was invited to present at the Academy Awards and she wore the fashion. She brought the fashion back to the awards. A lot of women were wearing, in my mind, Prada or Calvin Klein. More boxy and baggy suits. Fast forward to February, 2000. Jennifer Lopez is wearing the now iconic green dress at the Grammy Awards, also Versace, which is the sole reason why Google Images exists. [Laughs.] The search engine was created and launched the following year because the demand for images of the dress was so bonkers. It’s just compelling, to me, that Versace was able to shift the culture in fashion and Hollywood and has such a stronghold.

RT

Gianni Versace and Donatella were both way ahead of culture. They understood the movement and led it since the late 1980s.

EO

Can you speak to Versace’s mission as a brand?

RT

Gianni was murdered in July just before Princess Diana passed away in August 1997. He had this understanding of what was classic and beautiful to him that was different from the elitist, northern Italian, Parisian, and London idea of what was chic and elegant. He was a country boy who was taught how to sew by his mother. There was this great curator in the 1990s at the Met, named Richard Martin, who was one of Andrew Bolton’s predecessors. He has this great theory that for Versace, the sex worker and the nun are equally as exalted. For him, all women are fabulous and wonderful and there’s no sense of elitism that one woman is superior. It was all about the empowerment of women and making women feel sexy and enthralled by themselves. Both of them, especially Donatella, really understood that if we are looked down upon by northern Italians, which they were, and by the fashion establishment that is obsessed with Giorgio Armani and this conservative vision of clothes, then we can get celebrities to wear our clothes. That will be more powerful than just being.

EO

I’m curious about Alaïa, because everyone’s drinking the Kool-Aid of that brand right now. The shoes are everywhere. I’m feeling Alaïa, but I’m also feeling Bottega. Not in the same way. It’s different from Daniel Lee’s Bottega, but it still has its merits…

RT

I like both of them. Alaïa’s a little bit too much of a man who doesn’t quite understand women. Bottega I really like, but I think he needs to shake it up because the clothes look a little heavy.

EO

When you see a show that does a gimmick, where do you draw the line? How do you approach reviewing a show like that?

RT

I went to that S/S23 Coperni show, where they had the dress that they sprayed on Bella Hadid. And she walked out and the first thing I thought was like, “Oh my God, why is she naked? That’s really uncomfortable for her. It’s really cold inside here. That’s weird.” Then they start spraying on the dress, and I was like, this looks like something is assaulting her.

EO

That’s what it felt like.

RT

I went to dinner with a friend of mine afterwards and I was turning it over in conversation with her, and I was like, I’m not seeing any connection. I can’t play with this. The whole collection was garbage. Every gimmick doesn’t necessarily work. Like Elena Velez’s show where everyone’s rolling around in the mud. I’m like, I don’t know if this totally works, but this is something interesting to talk about or consider, I guess.

EO

How do you negotiate focusing on the clothes when there is so much spectacle present? These tactics are not inventive because they’ve been done before.

RT

There was a Balenciaga collection where the show was a red carpet.

EO

I was there! I remember how packed it was outside. As I walked in, celebrities, artists, critics and the like were posing on a red carpet in front of the theater before going inside. Initially when I got to the theater, I didn’t like how everything was set up because it was disorienting. It wasn’t until I went inside that everything clicked.

RT

Then they had this episode of “The Simpsons” mirroring the whole show after that. So you go into the theater and you’re watching people arrive on the red carpet. But I just thought that was really ahead of its time.

EO

It was genius! Also, it was just so sexy.

RT

Demna was making this incredibly hilarious commentary. Also, he was riding high at this point. He had just dressed Kim Kardashian for the Met Gala. I think he had just launched his first couture collection. He was on top of the world. And so we kind of know what the clothes are like for this collection. It’s much more interesting to talk about this piece of theater that he’s created for us. But rarely does something warrant that.

EO

What you just said regarding the Coperni dress stuck out to me: the room was cold. You didn’t get that from that dress. That’s what we’re missing–ahem, context! We’re missing the feeling of what it’s like to physically be in these rooms and what the actual environmental conditions are that dictate whether it lands in real time, in space. Once that’s projected onto the internet and you see her being sprayed, it’s cool. We all watched Alexander McQueen do the spray paint dress S/S 1999, but Coperni didn’t feel like it was about fashion. It also didn’t feel like it was about technology either.

RT

But with McQueen, you look at the precedents too, or things that are similar. That McQueen moment, to me, is always read as he’s creating an allegory for his relationship to the creation of fashion. The way that he creates fashion is, “I’m creating this thing that’s very beautiful, but I’m also torturing women and myself with my clothing and how do I feel about this? That I’m subjecting these women and my soul to my incredibly intense silhouettes and process.” These shows sometimes have these troubling and dark themes. That’s how I’ve always read that show. So then to be like, “Hey, we’ve got the coolest model in the world. and we’re spraying a dress on her. Like, doesn’t it remind you of McQueen?” Yes, but the McQueen thing is really dark. It’s this woman being tortured by these hoses of spray paint.

EO

The proliferation of trends is at a crazy point. Walking around in New York, where I feel like you see so much unique style, I’ve been seeing a lot of people who look the same because of how trends are now meeting the masses via social media. It feels like there’s such a distinct difference between people that are dressing for trends versus those dressing in a way that is representative of themselves as a person. People are either referencing Princess Diana or Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.

RT

When I moved to New York, which was in 2011, most people didn’t have style. I do think there are still people who have genuine style, but I think like a lot of people who are stylish and interesting and are really bad at social media, so we might not know who they are. I always do this Opulent Tips “Best Dressed List.” I started that because I was trying to identify people who do have genuine style. The other thing that I think a lot about with style is, “Do you live it?” As Raul Lopez, the designer of Luar, talks about this a lot. He always says, “Is she a bitch who lives it or not?” [Laughs.]

My friend Steff Yotka who works at SSENSE, Raul will say, “That’s a bitch who lives Rick Owens.” It doesn’t have to be that you’re dedicated to one particular designer, but is your style coming from a place of living this full and interesting life? That doesn’t necessarily mean like, I am going on vacation in Italy. It probably doesn’t mean that. Style, to me, means there’s something happening on the exterior that suggests an interesting interior. There are still people who have genuine style, but maybe they’re not in the expected places.

Speaker 1

Talking about “The Super Models” series and the fact that these four supermodels are on the cover of the September issue, what does that mean to you that we’re looking back to the ’90s in the ‘fashion bible’ right now? What does that mean about the present moment?

RT

Everyone is looking back in every way. A lot of movies or TV shows are reboots of earlier things. That’s something that is happening generally. Also, there are very few things in fashion that rise to that level of pop-cultural mass appeal. I thought it was a nice moment for them to be on the cover. I obviously didn’t like the photographs.

EO

Let’s talk about that. [Laughs.] A friend, an unnamed source, was like, “The photographer didn’t know how to shoot older women. He seems like he’s used to shooting youth.” I watched the Vogue “Behind the Scenes” video back and Linda was like, because he shoots digitally, they shot so quickly. It didn’t feel meditated. She was like, “It would’ve been nice to have more time!”

RT

I don’t know if this was on Twitter or someone told me this, but they called it, “Bravo-core.”

EO

That’s exactly what it was, the Kardashians.

RT

Like we’re holding the apple. We’re all slightly different sizes.

EO

Desperate Housewives? [Laughs.] Kardashian-core-2015-E!-Network.

RT

People don’t have time anymore. First of all, those four women have insane schedules. When are they supposed to get them together? They don’t have a lot of time. I actually wrote a column about the Zadie Smith photographs that were also in that issue. Tyler Mitchell took those photographs, and Tyler is incredibly meditative and spends a lot of time on set with a person. You can tell that in his photographs. They have a friendship. It’s harder to take an iconic photograph even when you have iconic subjects because no one has the time.

Speaker 2

You’ve written for all these fashion publications and your newsletter is very in touch with the reader who is obsessed with fashion and now you work at The Post. What have you learned from writing for that audience that’s not necessarily coming to the publication to read about fashion but is going to be exposed to it?

RT

I went to The Post because I always wanted to work at a newspaper. Being a fashion writer at a newspaper gives you the most amount of freedom and leeway. You can be really experimental and you can be a little bit of a Trojan horse. People are not opening the paper necessarily to read about fashion. Even if they’re opening the Style section, our Style section isn’t style like fashion. It’s style like writing. If someone is reading about senators who have retired and are loving it, I’m thinking, how do I get that person to read about fashion? Mostly what I think about is incisive ideas and observations, and knowing what is going on in the world of fashion and being able to adequately describe that. I think it’s a mistake to dumb down and be like, we all know this is silly stuff that doesn’t matter. That’s stupid. This is a huge business that the richest person in the world at any given time could be Bernard Arnault and he got rich from fashion. I don’t think that we should be excusing that, but I think you want to draw people in with these interesting observations and style of writing.

Speaker 3

As you were saying, Arnault’s about to become the richest man on earth. Because he’s acquired all of these brands and now has younger talents. But I guess the numbers grossed create freedom.

RT

There are designers of big brands who have a lot of creative freedom. I think Nicolas Ghesquière feels a lot of creative freedom, for example, and he is at the crown jewel of LVMH, which is Louis Vuitton. I think Alessandro Michele, for a long time, felt he had total creative freedom at Gucci. And Demna has a lot of creative freedom and probably Matthieu Blazy at Bottega does as well. This idea of actually coming into a house and making it your own and being in conversation with the legacy of the house is an incredibly new idea, and only emerged in the 1990s with Tom Ford.

I assume that it will keep going as it is. There’s no reason for it not to. But people get a little bit too worried about, “Oh, is this enough? Is ‘x’ and ‘y’ doing a good enough impersonation of ‘z’ person?” Someone like Demna or Alessandro Michele show that it’s really powerful to go in there and totally shake it up and do something that rises to the occasion of your most talented predecessors, but make it your own and find something unique to say. I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens at Alexander McQueen because Sarah Burton was Lee’s assistant, so even though he hasn’t been there for 15 years—

EO

There was a through line.

Speaker 4

Do you think Demna’s doing anything that carries Balenciaga’s legacy on?

RT

Yes.

Speaker 4

How?

RT

He’s obsessed with very strange silhouettes that look stodgy and incredibly futuristic at the same time. And he understands how to do that, specifically in the couture, but I think he also does that in the ready-to-wear, although that’s more his vocabulary. But in the couture you can see he does these shapes that look very like 1950s or early ’60s, but then also they look really futuristic.

Speaker 5

Recently you’ve been writing about “sexiness.” This idea of people being comfortable with their bodies, of shorter skirts, and that there’s a lack of sexiness in clothes today. I wanted to know what you think is sexy.

RT

To me, sexiness is freedom and confidence.

EO

Has it always been that?

RT

No. [Laughs.] But I think that’s what it is now.

EO

What was it?

RT

For a long time, it was sleaziness. In a fun way. But I don’t think we’re in a sleazy time. No one’s having sex. So that’s not really the point.

EO

[Laughs.] So it’s about looking cute but having nothing else going on–

RT

Yes, but it’s cute for you. It’s not cute for anyone else.

EO

You wrote that piece about how no one’s making interesting collections. We’re in this time and place where there’s an unseeable future and so much waste. How do you continue to believe in it and feel like it’s important to participate alongside the market?

RT

Look, there’s nothing that any of us in this room, even if we all got together, could do to end fashion. I think it’s really important to say, “This is really bad and you’re wasting all of our time,” when that’s the case. It’s more important than ever to say like, the stakes are really high. If something is bad, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and it’s bad for the planet and it’s bad, ethically and morally.

EO

It was refreshing seeing you engage Karl Largerfeld’s legacy at The Post. We’ve been conditioned not to ask those kinds of questions of those powerhouses.

RT

[Laughs.] Yes, I asked a question. Why was this exhibition organized, first of all, and why was it organized in such a way to highlight this person’s work, but not their personality when his greatest work was his personality? I think you have to keep insisting like, “Hey, if you’re going to say that I need to pay $4,000 for this handbag” – not that I could ever pay $4,000 for a handbag – “but you better make it worth my while.”

EO

Make it worth your while in what sense?

RT

It depends. Are they living up to their own values? If you’re telling me, “Oh, I’m creating the Italian version of Hermès,” then it better be really well made and nice, instead of a rhinestone handbag that I could buy on Shein. [Laughs.]