011 Fashion should be as fresh as salad!
Gaby Aghion was so right, the case for "aesthetic danger", Chloë Sevigny is a "schlepper" like every other mum and fashion magazines were everything to small town teens (like me!).
Louis Vuitton spring/summer ‘25. Image courtesy of Louis Vuitton.
I’m writing this on a flight (solo) from Tasmania with my two children. I’d like to say they’re playing quiet STEM games and eating a bento box of nutritious snacks. But they’re both mainlining their iPads and only surfacing from the fog for periodic bribes from the genius packet of Mentos in my pocket. I’m doing my best!
Anyway, I loved when Chloë Sevigny told The Cut that she is “a schlepper.” Mums get this in their (weary!) bones.
While I was staying at my parents home in Tasmania I did three big interviews - a couple of CEOs and a fashion designer. One was fascinated by me being in Tasmania because he is, and he stressed, he really didn’t mean to name drop, friends with the King of Denmark (AKA husband of Our Mary). I do think my eighteen year-old self, who could not get out of this place fast enough, would have been kind of impressed that I would one day meet someone who was friends with the King of Denmark.
Fashion magazines, like they were for a lot of people from small towns or with zero access to this world, meant everything to me as a teenager. They were my escape! My portal. Proof of life beyond.
I loved listening to Nicolas Ghesquière, creative director of womenswear at Louis Vuitton, on The Run-Through with Vogue podcast talk about this very thing, of reading his mother’s magazines and feeling desperate to get to Paris, where all the action was. He also said this thing about seeing history through fashion, which is something I really believe in too - that if you see the world through the lens of fashion you can learn so much. Maybe everything?
Louis Vuitton spring/summer ‘25. Image courtesy of Louis Vuitton.
Anyway, another thing I loved that he said was that you need to be, as a fashion designer and I think as a creative person more generally, in a state of “aesthetic danger.”
“If you consider yourself a leader in fashion you will be dead!” Ghesquière said, despite him being, obviously, a leader and genius in fashion.
In a totally different way it made me think about how, as revealed in that Bloomberg magazine profile, the worst thing you could say to Mr Arnault, is that sales were good.
But what Ghesquière was talking about particularly was the idea of putting out ideas before people are perhaps ready for them. To have people question you. To have to stand in your convictions. He spoke too of hoping that creativity becomes revered again. Yes.
Aesthetics have, of course, gotten a bad wrap since people started describing things as aesthetics. Sally Rooney’s new book devastated me (in a good way). In it there’s a line about how meaningless aesthetics can be.
One line: “Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically.”
This is why I love the principle of aesthetic danger. It’s about pushing things. Not being afraid of weirdness or awkwardness or even ugliness.
Just so long as we don’t call pushing yourself ‘an aesthetic.’
It’s just living!
I also listened to Chemena Kamali, creative director of Chloé, on the Vogue podcast (imagine if fashion podcasts had existed when I was growing up in my hometown!) talk about how she wants women to feel in her clothes - that it’s not ‘transformative’ but instead feeling like yourself. And how she felt something was missing in fashion and I agree. That’s why we’ve gone totally gaga for her ‘70s spirit and the reactivation of the Sienna Miller obsession portal in our brains and the sudden and urgent feeling that you want to wear frills and flounce and pirate boots.
A Chloé look from 1972. Chicness!
Kamali spoke a lot about her admiration for the founder of the house, Gaby Aghion, too. With her ready-to-wear collections Aghion was a breath of fresh air in the stuffy worlds of haute couture. She revolutionised how women dressed, how they lived their lives! It’s not enough to eat lunch, she told her husband in 1952. She made clothes for women who wanted to do more than that. She also had a practically unparalleled talent for spotting talent (e.g. Karl, Phoebe, Stella et al all worked for Chloé). She once said that she thought fashion should be “as fresh as salad!”
YES.
Anyway, really wish I could have unearthed my impressive collection of wide studded belts at my parents’ house ever since boho made a comeback. Though as Kamali said in the interview, it’s not really about ‘boho’ coming back. More like it’s about a certain spirit of the ‘70s awakening in our consciousness.
In any case, I think it’s an appetite for living, and I’ve never wanted to wear a jangly coin belt more.
What happens to the status handbag when the ultimate status symbol is no handbag?
I’m still thinking about a fashion editor colleague who was at an event with me in Melbourne recently without a handbag at all. She looked so chic and confident and unbothered! And there’s me forever rummaging.
As Vanessa Friedman put it in response to a reader question this week,
“Indeed, you could say there is an inverse relationship between handbags and authority. The truth is, the bigger the job, the smaller the handbag — if a handbag comes into play at all.”
God!
Love,
Annie xx
Two things! I maintain that I am still a small-town, mag-obsessed teen. And second, I go handbag free a LOT. Like a lot. I use my pockets for toting my lip things and my keys, and the rest is in my phone. It’s liberating, but I also feel as if I’m committing some kind of sartorial crime when I do it