Have you ever looked at runway collections and thought, if you took away the logos and the models and the labels and just showed me the CLOTHES, I couldn’t tell you which brand was which? 

Eugene Rabkin’s new book, Torn: Fashion and Postmodernism, out Sept. 1, attempts to explain how fashion got to that point. He argues that the industry is in the throes of an utter creative collapse. A critic and the founder of StyleZeitgeist, he traces that collapse — the replacement of innovation with pastiche — through postmodern theory. 

He called Kim Kardashian “the poster girl for postmodernism,” adding that she “is a simulacrum. There is no such thing as Kim Kardashian.” Essentially, she’s an image of a celebrity — famous for being famous, a product with no real person underneath. 

Rabkin joined me on the latest episode of the Back Row podcast, and I’m sharing an edited portion of the conversation here. The bonus episode — covering the Met Gala, Bernard Arnault, and Karl Lagerfeld — is available to Back Row Premium subscribers. Follow the show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube and please leave a rating and a review if you like what you hear.

I might describe your book as searing. You write that “by the mid-aughts, fashion devolved into a consumerist spectacle of half-baked ideas regurgitated over and over again, its lack of innovation papered over by relentless marketing.” Explain the decline and what caused it.

I’ve been a fan of what we call designer fashion — which used to just be called fashion — since walking into Barneys accidentally in 1998 and discovering all these amazing, creative designers. From then on, it seemed like every year things got worse and worse — consistently less and less creative, commercial interests winning out more and more, until what we call fashion, the product of these corporate brands, started to look like logoed merch.

There are so many reasons for this, but I kept trying to find an underlying one. Time and again my mind came back to postmodernist culture — these ideas of leveling the hierarchy of taste, pure subjectivity, defanging the critic, the idea that the world is getting more and more mediated, more and more simulated, that people don’t really care for tangible things but for signs and symbols first and foremost. Each year I’d think, “This cannot get any worse,” and then it would.

Why should anyone care? I care because I write about this every day, but I’m not the average consumer. Then again, we all wear clothes. 

I don’t think the average consumer cares, but there are so many fashion enthusiasts who do. And we can see it in the current dissatisfaction with luxury fashion — a lot of consumers are turning away. One of the things I talk about is the erasure of all markers of quality in the clothing itself. No matter how much PR spin the LVMHs and the Kerings of the world put on it, we’ve seen a significant diminishing in their revenue. So people do care. And the not caring of the consumer is exactly how we got here.

But do you connect your argument to the larger culture?

I do. My thesis is that fashion has been trailing the art world by several decades. In the 1980s, art was already pure postmodernism — this idea that we’re embracing pop culture, that art is what we say it is, not what the critics or curators say. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s pure subjectivity. If you decide something is art, it is art.

That’s how you get a banana duct-taped to a wall, which Sotheby’s sold at auction for $6.2 million to the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun.

That is how you get a banana taped to a wall — which is the equivalent of an $800 T-shirt with a logo that says, “I am a luxury.” If we don’t have an apparatus by which to support true creativity, then we end up with this really banal world we live in, which a lot of people are dissatisfied with but may not quite know why. My book is an attempt to answer why.

Let’s talk about greedflation — luxury brands raising prices out of greed because there’s no real reason, in terms of quality, for the price to go up. You note that a nylon Prada bag is $2,300 now, a price shoppers in the past would have paid only for leather. And there’s the Dior cruise dress that costs $140,000. A designer friend of ours has said to me that these prices are just designed to go viral. 

Our friend was entirely correct: The price is arbitrary and used as rage bait. Remember the $1,000 Prada cotton tank top a couple of years ago? In the book I talk about the breaking of the signifier and the signified — what Baudrillard called simulacra and simulation, where the signifiers no longer have a referent. A price has become a signifier in itself. Prices for luxury fashion no longer have any meaningful connection to the cost of materials, labor, construction. They’re arbitrarily assigned signs that signify: This is luxury because this is expensive. It keeps the brand in the cultural conversation. The logo is the signifier, the price is the signifier. The thing itself doesn’t matter.

I see this all the time in short-form videos — people saying, “What I love about this bag is the craftsmanship.” That’s the luxury industry’s greatest con and invention of the modern era — that it’s about craftsmanship. It’s generally not. The cost is marketing. Dana Thomas outlined this in her book Deluxe, which you cite.

Exactly. What she says — and this is what I quote — is that people pay for an idea of a garment, not for the garment itself. If the luxury industry wants to go back to growth and relevance, it needs to stop selling luxury stories and start selling luxury merchandise. Craftsmanship has become a story instead of the real thing. Those infamous Louis Vuitton ads from the mid-aughts showed suspiciously good-looking craftsmen building bags by hand — and the UK’s advertising authority told them to take it down because it was misleading. They’re not made by hand. Hermès bags are made by hand; Louis Vuitton is industrial production. 

And now we know how much, since that famous bust of the sweatshop in Italy that paid [€53] to construct a Dior bag they sold for $2,800.

I cite that Wall Street Journal story again and again. What fascinates me is that so many brands have since come under scrutiny in Italy — Chanel, Valentino, Brunello Cucinelli. Bloomberg did a great piece on Loro Piana, owned by LVMH, about the vicuña fiber in their $9,000 sweaters, harvested by indigenous farmers in Peru. But every time these stories come out, it doesn't seem to dent the perception. I interview luxury retail workers for my series Retail Confessions, and someone who worked at Loro Piana in Beverly Hills told me they were upset when the story came out, fearing it would hurt sales. But the opposite happened — people came in asking for vicuña.

There you go. That’s advertising. Negative publicity is still publicity. Critics like you and I are going up against very significant cultural forces already outlined by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 in The Theory of the Leisure Class: People buy fashion not as an expression of creativity but to show their monetary status. The Loro Piana consumer isn’t a fashion consumer — it’s a guy in his 40s or 50s with a lot of money who wants to show his friends he has a lot of money. 

These are amoral decisions. We keep trying to infuse morality into fashion, but fashion is amoral. This is the proof.

Podcaster Sam Sanders said the same thing about Hollywood — that cancellations are just paid vacations, because it’s an amoral industry.

Any industry is an amoral industry — it’s capitalism. It’s concerned with making money. I think the big victory of neoliberalism, of which postmodernism is the cultural logic, is that instead of looking at businesses directly and realizing what they are — money-making vehicles — we keep wanting them to be more human. They’re not.

You write about how Maria Grazia Chiuri commodified feminism for her collections at Dior and got a lot of praise for it. I don’t think the point of feminism was to be reduced to slogans on T-shirts that LVMH made money from.

Why are we asking one of the biggest fashion brands, in the business of making money, to be a proponent of feminism? What does that tell us about our culture? The two women I’ve known who bought those T-shirts are not examples of feminism in any meaningful way — but they were the first to buy into this fake, commercial expression of a political movement that is gravely important. It trivializes politics instead of meaningfully contributing to them.

You lament the death of criticism and include examples of the kind of criticism we so rarely read today. Here’s Eugenia Sheppard, in the International Herald Tribune on a 1971 Yves Saint Laurent show: “What a relief at last to write that a fashion collection is, frankly, definitely, and completely hideous.” And Eric Wilson in The New York Times, on Lindsay Lohan being named designer at Ungaro — that her appointment was something akin to a McDonald’s fry cook taking the reins of a three-star Michelin restaurant. Someone can’t say something like that about Yves Saint Laurent today. What happened?

The balance between the power of the media and the power of the brands has shifted decidedly toward the brands. The internet and social media gave brands other avenues for advertising, so the advertising and subscription money traditional media relied on has significantly diminished — which lets the brands dictate more and more what coverage the fashion media offers. In the ’80s, when John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily said something he didn’t like about Yves Saint Laurent, Saint Laurent pulled all his advertising and banned him from the shows for two years — and Fairchild said, “Fine, whatever. I have other brands advertising with us, and I’ve got the subscriptions. I don’t need you.” No editor-in-chief of any fashion publication has that power today. Now the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal all have weekend magazines that bring in a lot of fashion advertising revenue. That’s why we can't say anything. Plus there’s the postmodernist view that critics are elitist snobs, which has contributed to the toning down of criticism.

Did you read the six-part Le Monde exposé of Bernard Arnault? He didn't dispute the reporting, but he posted a response on X thanking Le Monde for “the investigation,” which Elon Musk retweeted. I liked the series because they tried to find humanity in him. Asked why he liked a Toulouse-Lautrec hanging in a room off his office, he said, “Because I got it at a very good price.”

That tells you everything you need to know. For my money, he’s probably the man who did the most damage to creativity in fashion. He led the transformation of the fashion world into the fashion industry — he industrialized production, concentrated power, and then began throwing his weight around. He led the takeover of fashion by a business mentality. He’s a pure capitalist; there is only the profit motive. If he could sell detergent tomorrow and make more money, he would.

Dior detergent.

Look at the pipeline of executives into fashion. Luca de Meo, the CEO of Kering, came from the car industry. Arnault came from a building company he turned into a real estate company. Pinault came from lumber. I’m not saying these people don’t have a cultural or aesthetic education — of course they do, they come from the French elite. But their motives are not aesthetic. They’re not driven by creativity.

Preorder Eugene Rabkin's book (if you can grab it from your local indie bookstore, that's the best way to support it). Follow his work at StyleZeitgeist and follow him on Instagram.

Anna Wintour Heaves Vogue World Over to San Francisco

In what was surely a “Yikes, an antisemitic Met Gala?” distraction tactic, Vogue announced last week Vogue World would take place in San Francisco in 2027. The New York Post reminds us that fashion writer Guy Trebay once called the city “the land that style forgot.”

The funny thing about the timing is that this SF edition is two Vogue Worlds away. The next Vogue World is slated for next month in Milan when, you know, people are not drinking on the beach and have the bandwidth to tune into this stuff.

San Francisco’s mayor Daniel Lurie rushed to Instagram to post a video, the Golden Gate Bridge behind him, Vogue headline in front, to say, “This is a huge event, it’s going to show off our creative community to the world, show that San Francisco is on the rise — let’s go, San Francisco.” Big words for a YouTube fashion variety show that a declining publishing company uses as inventory for Eli Lilly ads.

In a statement in a Vogue article that was unsurprisingly short on details, Anna said nothing that couldn’t be applied to any other city: “Vogue believes in celebrating cities, and San Francisco is a city like none other.”

San Francisco, of course, is known for its tech industry above all others. I’ve talked a lot in Back Row about the merging of tech and fashion, which we saw on grand display at this year’s Tech Gala. Tech needs to project taste to sell us wearables, and fashion needs money because, well, fashion companies don’t have as much of it anymore. I’d be surprised if we didn't see a tech company sponsor this and throw its wearables on the runway as part of the deal. 

Phoebe Gates Allegedly Knew Phia Was Taking Commission for Sales It Didn’t Generate

Things are only getting worse for Phia, the app and browser extension that promises to help shoppers find the lowest price on clothing items, co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. After Bloomberg reported it was taking affiliate commission for sales it didn’t generate, new reporting shows that Gates “pushed for” the coding and features that enabled them to do this seven months ago. Bloomberg cites people with knowledge of the matter and a review of internal company Slacks.

This contradicts the company’s earlier statements on July 8 that it had only been made aware of the code within the previous 24 hours and that it was a bug. (An expert who previously spoke to Back Row and who helped break the story said he did not believe this could have been a bug.)

Bloomberg also found in a Slack message posted by a data scientist that after Phia disabled the features in July, revenue dropped from $80,000 - $100,000 to $28,000. (A Phia spokesperson claimed this information was inaccurate.)

None of this seems great for Phia, but it also seems like nothing matters anymore! The company raised a $35 million Series A round in January.

Brad Pitt Covers Esquire

Brad Pitt has one of the best crisis PR teams in the world, so you can bet that if he’s doing an Esquire cover story, it’s going to help him in some way — even if that’s just by steering the conversation away from whatever is going on with his ongoing legal dispute with Angelina Jolie over their shared winery. Or his six kids, four of whom have either formally dropped his last name or filed to do so.

Esquire’s Ryan D’Agostino asked him about that, but Pitt didn't answer. Instead, Pitt offered him a glass of wine, leading to the obvious questions about his sobriety and a rash of headlines about how he’s drinking again. Which is probably better than more headlines about how his kids seem totally uninterested in associating with him or reminding people of legal filings relating to his disputes with Jolie, including how, she alleged in 2022, on a private plane flight, he “choked one of the children and struck another in the face.”

And then there’s InStyle, which went with a totally different headline about “the Unexpected Reason Why He ‘Can’t’ Watch Porn.”

Spoiler alert: It’s because the acting is bad.

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