🇬🇧 Is Counterculture in Fashion Still Possible?: An Interview with Eugene Rabkin - Cool Haunted by nss magazine

The founder of StyleZeitgeist tells us everything that cannot be said out loud

There’s a generation of fashion critics who have seen better times. Literally. In the 1990s and into the early 2000s they lived through a different kind of fashion: freer to take risks, more independent, more accessible, more imaginative. Today things have changed a great deal. Between investment funds and quarterly reports, entire administrative departments that have descended on the creative world with all the chill of bureaucracy, and economic obstacles springing up on every side, fashion has entered a new and strange phase in which this dream factory has progressively lost its soul.

We notice it every time the runways fill up with names, hype and collaborations, and every time we ask ourselves, with a mixture of weariness and nostalgia, where that uncomfortable and rare thing once called vision has gone. Few observers have managed to bring this disorientation into focus with the sharp lucidity of Eugene Rabkin, founder of the magazine StyleZeitgeist and for years a dissenting voice in a system that prefers compliments to uncomfortable questions. After many years spent in the trenches of fashion, Rabkin has published his first book, Torn: Fashion And Postmodernism, in which he offers a comprehensive and unified look at a global industry whose mechanisms he has had the chance to explore at length. The volume is published by Zer0 Books, the London-based publishing house founded by the late philosopher Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative.

This interview, which we publish today, actually dates back some time: we conducted it precisely when Rabkin was writing his book, as he himself told us, and it seemed natural to present it in this new context now that, with the new volume, Rabkin’s discourse has found its most complete home. His theses on postmodernism as a key to understanding the creative impoverishment of the sector, on the short-circuit between image and substance, on the power that has eroded authorship anticipated with surgical precision a debate that today, between one red carpet and another, we hear erupting again at every fashion week.

Rereading it now means discovering how little, in the end, has changed and how much we still need voices willing to call things by their proper names.

In an interview you spoke of a time when a designer’s pieces could be understood only by those who listened to a certain kind of music, who belonged to a certain kind of culture, and only those who knew that culture, that music, could grasp the references and understand the aesthetic. Nowadays this kind of concept, this connection, is completely blurred. What do you think?

Yes, that’s right. I’ve just finished writing a chapter of my book about it. I think that over the last 20 years the relationship between fashion and culture has gone from symbiotic to parasitic, in which fashion—especially luxury—clings to the arts in order to create meaning. To literature, for example, out of the blue, to infuse sense into clothes that no longer have any, because they are merely commodities. When the relationship was symbiotic there was a genuine connection between the designer, the artist, the musician, whoever it was. Today it happens very rarely, and it’s a very sad story, because I fell in love with fashion when I realised that there could be genuine cultural connections between fashion, music, art and literature. Before that I thought fashion existed only to flaunt status, which, however, is absolutely true.

I believe that some brands are at the same time trying, perhaps out of nostalgia, to recreate this connection, almost reconstructing the subculture from the outside, but in an artificial way.

I think it’s all fake and you can see it. You see, it’s the typical postmodern attitude. Because historicity is missing; you don’t remember, you don’t know where things come from. You don’t know the history. So all that remains is to plunder the past for aesthetic suggestions and you create this pastiche, you know, because you don’t know where things come from. I founded the StyleZeitgeist Academy for this reason, for the same reason I started teaching a course on the History of Contemporary Fashion at Parsons.

So that students would have the tools to understand, to analyse reality.

All these companies making cold calculations on consumer data—another expression of a neoliberal mentality, where a non-human entity, such as a brand, is endowed with human characteristics. And the fact that kids can’t distinguish the real from the fake is a victory for neoliberalism. It’s a victory for late capitalism. In other words, companies exist for one reason only: to make money. They answer only to their shareholders. They answer to no one else. Everything else is PR.

As independent media, do you think a media outlet with an agency behind it, which therefore interfaces directly with brands, is still capable of doing criticism, or whether it ever essentially was even in the past? No negative comments on any show, open dislikes aside and justified by some slight or transaction. Do all magazines follow the same pattern?

It’s not possible if you find yourself in the situation you’ve just described, where you constantly have to work with the brands. Because brands today have become incredibly sensitive about their image and it wasn’t like that at all before. Everyone forgets what criticism is for. Criticism exists because the goal is to improve. We just need to go back to recognising this very simple point.

And will it ever happen?

I think we’ll all realise it soon. We’re in the middle of this realisation: that if fashion becomes boring, it applies to the entire industry. It was Galliano and McQueen who made LVMH interesting, not the other way around. The kids (who are the aspirational customer, the pivot, the base) are starting to notice; they’re moving away from fashion, they’re choosing to buy vintage. And this should send a signal to the entire industry: you’re not making exciting things and if you keep making boring things you’ll lose people, because no one likes feeling their intelligence insulted.

I think this uniformity we see in campaigns, in collections—all these white backgrounds with huge logos and ordinary clothes—is a blatant sign that creative directors are scared, scared of having a vision, of taking a stand. All this nostalgia because they’re afraid of the future.

And do you know why they’re afraid? Because they want to appeal to as many people as possible, only to end up with this boring, bland mass.

Journalism too is a boring, bland mass.

The rise of influencers is killing the editorial side. There’s no more journalism, there’s only “content.” And when people confuse journalism and “content,” it’s a serious problem. Because “content” is not journalism. I just came out of a show before sitting down at this café: I was amazed by the number of influencers in the front row and editors in the second row. I was fascinated by how many people were looking at their phone screens while filming instead of looking at the clothes. But that’s their job—to record and broadcast to the public, certainly not to think. What brands want is a broadcasting channel, a mere amplification of their message. They don’t want any kind of response. They don’t want any kind of intelligent conversation. But then do influencers really sell? Question mark. In fact, I have a question for influencers: if your entire audience is made up of 13-year-old kids, who do you plan to sell the expensive clothes you film to?

Let’s talk about independent journalism and new media. I know you’re using Patreon a lot; in Europe maybe Substack is more common. How are you finding it?

I love Substack and I’m glad it exists. It allows journalists to bypass the magazine system and speak directly to their audience. Now the task becomes: how do you build a following without the support of a magazine? But it can clearly happen—think of Amy Odell, for example. I’ve never been against the Internet in general. I’ve never been against these platforms. I mean, that’s why I’m here. At the end of the day, the question is about the quality of journalism. The next generation of journalists will perhaps use Substack. The big problem here is: how will they make a living? I think young people are not used to paying for the content they want to consume. Young people need to be educated to the fact that for the price of a cup of coffee (French, not Italian) you can support an author on Substack, contributing to a journalistic ecosystem that can become richer thanks to you.

To conclude: a piece of advice for young people (designers, creatives, thinking people).

Take your laptop and throw it into the nearest body of water. Go to the library, go to the bookshop. You’ll discover incredible things.