The Weekly Roundup (week of 3.4)
PANTS
1. Why There Are No Famous Artists
This is a common issue I come across, though it is often expressed in two opposing ways. One asserts that our current malaise is the audience’s fault. People today simply lack the taste profile to appreciate good cultural products. The other asserts that more avant-garde and niche products are actually inferior to more (monetarily) successful mainstream cultural products.
But there’s a missing ingredient here that no one dares consider: what if the decline in interest in avant-garde culture and contemporary pop culture share a common cause? I believe they do. No one wants to pay to market anything anymore. I think it might be that simple.
An excellent piece from Sean Monahan about the evaporating phenomena of famous artists. Why aren’t there any more Basquiats, Pollacks, Koons, Hirsts, or Warhols? Well, one part of the issue is that the traditional structures, critics, and publications that helped contextualize and platform important work have all been swallowed up by the market dynamics of the internet. Critics are mainly a relic of the past, Pitchfork’s shuttering is a clear indication of a wider trend at play. Without critics, and the symbiotic relationships between publishing houses, magazines, and galleries it’s very hard to create a new great lasting artist. The only criticism young people are exposed to now is on TikTok, where the brain rot is deep, engrained, and unoriginal. Engagement-based algorithms produce shit criticism and hive-mind mentalities. A problem one user duly noted with the platform’s armchair fashion runway critics.
The other glaring obstacle is a continuation of the one described above, a lack of marketing dollars. No one wants to pay to market anything anymore, as Sean noted. A great point he makes in this piece is that “social media is no longer optimized for organic virality.” Across the industry, marketing budgets are getting slashed. Executives have this idea that marketing isn’t necessary and that you can just organically post your way into relevance and virality. That isn’t really the case anymore. As I’ve discussed in the past, we’re in a post-viral world where people’s feeds are individualized and siloed. There is no mono-culture on the internet, so how can you effectively reach people existing in different audience verticals with organic posting alone? Read the full piece here.
2. Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?
“Whatever style pants look like [expletive] to you are the pants you’re supposed to wear,” he wrote, “and as soon as they start to look normal to you, those are not the right pants anymore. You should always be wearing pants you think look stupid.”
An amazingly written and routinely thoughtful take from the man I’m always referring to,
. Make sure you read his NYT slapper on PANTS!3. WHY IS STÜSSY STILL SO GOOD?
Stüssy is one of the big three pillars of contemporary streetwear alongside Supreme and Palace. They all operate in similar territories, have similar histories, and are commonly lumped together as similar brands. And, yet, they really are not.
While there'll always be people buying, coveting, trading, and talking about Supreme and Palace, Stüssy has evolved beyond streetwear. It is not the same.
Stüssy consistently turns out surprisingly viral layering pieces with influence uncontainable within the antiquated streetwear blogosphere. Its iconography isn't as passé as a Box Logo or as brash as a Triferg. Young shoppers crave it as much as stalwart fans admire it; it can be discussed in the same breath as Respected Fashion Brands.
It’s hard to deny Stussy’s greatness. Read more here.
4. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE COPERNI KIND
Worth nothing because, in recent seasons, the Paris-based brand has become known for its headline-spinning technological stunts—spraying Bella Hadid into a chemically engineered liquid-fiber dress, placing supermodels on the runway with robot dogs, and integrating AI into its fashion before the conversation about it, culturally, reached fever pitch. All of this has driven hundreds of millions of likes and views across the internet.
The role of tech in the creative duo’s work isn’t a bit, pandering to of-the-moment debates and trends tethered to digital innovations (if it was, they would’ve dipped a foot in the fleeting—and aesthetically questionable—world of NFTs). It’s been fundamental to the brand from the off, since it first launched as Coperni Femme in 2013, honoring the Renaissance-era astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus. “We like to surf in this world,” Vaillant says. “But it’s still fashion.”
