Haute Critique
Camille Okhio, Véronique Hyland, and Francesca Granata in a Tailor-Made Conversation About the State of Contemporary Fashion
- Text: Camille Okhio
- Illustrations: Sierra D'Atri
Where does criticism go in societies that no longer value it? Contemporary modes of thought position critique as needlessly negative—the unnecessary conversational apparatus of the nitpick. But what can improve without feedback? How can a flower grow without pruning?
As a result, contemporary fashion suffers—both for criticism and appreciation. How can any artist take their work seriously if it isn't seriously regarded by a single onlooker? How can we understand a visual moment without context? How can we dress effectively for the modern world without knowing what it takes to make a garment, and what it means to wear one?
Over time, whether because of prevailing patriarchal modes of thought or a collective desire to avoid vanity, we have shunned fashion as we have the icons, muses, labor, and intelligence involved in creating it. Due to this dearth, fashion has come to represent the least serious, least vital, least useful part of human life. We have made it a vehicle for overconsumption and pollution. We have lost a language, and forgotten what it can tell us of our past and our present.
In her book Dress Code, released in 2022, Véronique Hyland, fashion features director at ELLE, explores fashion and fashion criticism in relation to several social topics: health, attraction, envy, politics. The book is a quippy breakdown of the many areas of our lives touched by fashion, and makes a clear, strong argument for how revealing it can be. She offers several historical anecdotes as well as memories from her personal life—one chapter stood out for stories about her early work attire anxiety.
A natural companion to this read is 2021’s Fashion Criticism: An Anthology. Francesca Granata, associate professor of fashion studies at Parsons, compiles essays and critiques from Oscar Wilde to Hilton Als, showing the breadth of this area of study. Unexpected topics are explored through the lens of a garment: Jewish heritage and WASP envy, hair as style (specifically the Afro as a political statement in the 1960s and 1970s), and the lack of function in British nineteenth-century dress codes. She shares the stories of history’s numerous fashion advocates, like Guy Trebay, who always wore the garments from menswear collections before writing about them, using the phrase “embodied criticism” to describe the practice.
One afternoon, the three of us spoke about identity, desire, and farce as they play out within the world of fashion—from the impossible chic French female ideal to the sumptuary laws of the sixteenth century. We touched on misogyny’s role in infusing fashion with tension and self-loathing, and we named some of the people doing beautiful work regardless of the challenges. We imagined what kind of changes were still possible for fashion and the people who love it. In a word, we critiqued critique.
Camille Okhio
Véronique Hyland and Francesca Granata
Both of you have published such necessary books in different ways. I loved your choice in essays, Francesca, and how widely they range. Being able to start at Oscar Wilde and then get into Lynn Yaeger was a delight. You also start to notice patterns and shifts throughout time that are revealing and unexpected.
There’s a phrase that we’ve all heard many times before: the “democratization of design.” What does the democratization of fashion criticism look like?
Véronique: I write in the book about the rise of blogging, which is obviously no longer a new thing. Now there are more avenues for people to share fashion criticism. There are newsletters, there are YouTubers—there aren’t these hierarchies of who gets to weigh in on trends and who gets to critique fashion.
Things are presented without a sense of context or history. There really is nothing new under the sun, so sometimes it’s frustrating to see stuff presented as completely original. But other than that, I do think it’s an overall positive trend.
Francesca: In a way, the fashion critic is intended as more of a writer or an opinion person. It wasn’t historically a high-standing position, even within the realm of criticism.
The New Yorker was one of the few publications that had a fashion critic. The fact that people like Robin Givhan [at The Washington Post] or Vanessa Friedman [at The New York Times] were connecting fashion criticism with politics had an impact on the field. As does the younger generation, who write fashion criticism that weaves in identity formation and race and gender.
In the introduction to your book, Francesca, you note how little attention there was on fashion criticism in comparison to other forms, how it was not intellectualized and not given resources or attention.
Do you think that there are certain structures or elements that make fashion criticism effective across the decades since the nineteenth century? Véronique, is there anything that you can consistently identify that makes for an effective read?
Francesca: Perhaps it’s people that had a very strong point of view, which is true of any writer or critic. But also, the ability to be evaluative and give both negative and positive criticism. That’s still tricky for people who cover fashion.
Véronique: For me, the most successful writing is one that engages with the world outside of fashion. Like the way Robin Givhan writes about fashion, always keeping in mind everything that’s going on in the world. A lot of fashion writing never comes to a real conclusion. There’s no opinion.
You mean you want to see more writing that centers on what the outfit or garment actually does?
Véronique: Yes, sometimes you see a focus on what the designer was inspired by and what they said about it, but nothing beyond that. I’m just more intrigued by things that acknowledge what’s going on in the wider world. That’s what I try to do with my own writing and what I tried to do with this book.
Absolutely. Everything’s influenced, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
The fact that you note newsletters and how they’re similar to the blogs of the early 2000s makes me wonder if the trajectory of fashion criticisms has not necessarily been linear. Véronique, do you have any thoughts about how fashion criticism has evolved or cycled back in the last few decades?
Véronique: I did a story about this spate of fashion newsletters and I thought the tone was very similar to blogs. But I have also noticed everything online is so SEO-driven—things are done in such a short time frame, often by people who don't know what they’re talking about. Now we are seeing people become hungry for an explanation. Even as I was pitching my book I noticed that there is a market for explanation; people are confused. They are looking for real expertise as opposed to just, like, a 250-word squib.
Francesca: You can’t ask fashion not to be primarily visual. I was looking at the research I did: The early fashion periodicals were really fashion plates. Besides the caption and what the clothes were, there was no writing. The visual will always win when it comes to fashion. But yeah, I totally agree with Véronique, there is this niche. There are definitely different approaches for different levels of engagement and interest.
But on the flip side, something I discovered while reading your book, Francesca, was that The New Yorker’s initial policy was to not include photographs. Does that mean that the essays by Lois Long were published without accompanying imagery? How do you think that affects the message?
Francesca: Yes, there was no imagery. The early fashion criticism was all about the descriptive. They described the material in a way that nowadays maybe we don’t really do anymore.
I wonder how we can have criticism without description… I don’t think it’s possible. I have another question—do you remember the first piece of fashion criticism you ever read?
Véronique: Amy Spindler in The New York Times. I recently reread a bunch of her stuff. And André Leon Talley’s Style Fax column.
You were a brilliant preteen, weren’t you?
Véronique: Insufferable.
[laughs]
Francesca: It dates me, but I read Anna Piaggi in Vogue Italia.
She was amazing. What about any fashion-related texts or writers that you felt were extremely singular in their approach?
Francesca: Bebe Moore Campbell. She’s better known as a fiction writer, but she wrote a lot of fashion criticism in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, primarily in Ebony and Essence and a lot of other women’s magazines. Another one is Angela Carter.
Véronique: Someone I looked to a lot was Kennedy Fraser, who wrote The Fashionable Mind. She was The New Yorker’s fashion critic for quite some time. Some of the stuff that she wrote about felt very contemporary for having been written so long ago. She wrote one essay about the rise of fitness classes and how that tied into what was going on in fashion. People were not really wearing corsets or girdles or even in some cases, bras, to shape the body anymore. It influenced one of my essays in the book about filtering photos, extreme dieting, plastic surgery, and all these other things.
Also, Heather Widdows, the philosopher, wrote a book called Perfect Me, where she talks about beauty as a moral good attached to wellness and appearance.
You spoke to this really beautifully in subtle ways throughout the book, especially in the chapter about the French girl industrial complex—this intense repression of individual identity, which includes race, body type, hair texture, everything.
Véronique: The women who are lionized for aesthetic reasons are mostly white. It’s such a white space. And when you do see women of color, they are people who’ve had to achieve way more to even get to that point. Dorothy Dandridge, Josephine Baker, and Anna May Wong are examples. In that mid-century era a woman who was famous just for the way that she looked was always a white woman. It’s still the case today.
Everyone has a wonderful time when they go to Paris, but the last time I was there I noticed a lot of confusion and fury just around my existence. It makes you think about the idea of the individual and how threatening that seems to be to this French, chic ideal. That’s what I was getting from your book, Véronique.
Véronique: When I started looking into the origins of where this came from the thing that really stood out to me was a profile of Brigitte Bardot by Simone de Beauvoir in Esquire. She described her in a particular way that didn’t align with how I think of her, which is as someone who wears a lot of makeup and this complicated hairstyle with lots of hairspray. But for the time, she was seen as this natural woman who walked around barefoot and didn’t care what anyone thought of her.
That connects to the narrative we see today with the French woman—she knows more than you do about how to live life and enjoy life and dress and do whatever. But also, she’s like a child who’s innocent and doesn’t understand things. De Beauvoir literally described Bardot as a creature. So, you’re saying that this person is really knowing and also that they’re like a babe in the woods, who has no idea what’s going on, because the idea of a woman being self-possessed would be threatening. It’s harder for someone to be your muse or on your mood board if they are self-possessed.
Circling back to the politics piece of the pie. Véronique in the beginning of your book you mentioned reconciling your politics in high school, Marxism, with your consumerist urges. I’m curious how you have been able to reconcile these two things?
Véronique: It’s not easy. I wrote an essay about how I grew up shopping at the dump. A lot of the stuff I still wear is literally not even bought. It’s either thrifted or scavenged. It’s challenging because it’s an industry that’s built on consumption. People want novelty and they want to acquire new things and they love beautiful things.
I do think there are ways to be ethical with how you shop or design. I’m encouraged by the younger people I write about who are upcycling or using deadstock materials. I don’t think it’s a completely bleak picture or anything. But I also like to be mindful of the fact that our individual choices only matter so much.
Right. This is more the responsibility of corporations and governments.
Véronique: I’m horrified by seeing unused clothing in landfills, but I also think there is a tendency to blame women for consuming when we’re also under a lot of pressure to look a certain way, radiate youthfulness, radiate professionalism.
Even in the 1700s women were making like fake bustles out of cork and being critiqued for it, which feels like a conversation that we could also have now. But that’s what was seen as beautiful! You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The fact that this criticism of consumption falls so much on fashion, and not as much on things like other industries, like fossil fuels for instance, is interesting.
Your mention of the cork bustles in the 1700s made me think of sumptuary laws!
Véronique: Hottest topic of today!
Yes! As a history buff I’m just obsessed with that topic. Do you think there’s a contemporary equivalent?
Véronique: Oh, wow. I’m inclined to say no, only because I feel like anything can be knocked off and something that a celebrity or a wealthy person is wearing is going to be replicated and available.
But maybe it translates more to wellness, clear skin, all these things. I think health is maybe less accessible than clothes and dyes today.
Francesca: I think that’s where the next frontier is.
Absolutely. Véronique, in your book, you say, at its best fashion still has the power to be revolutionary and world changing. How can that power be wielded?
Véronique: Something that I have been thinking about is the T-shirt as a billboard and as a way to deliver a message, for example, in protest. Another thing that is revolutionary is how fashion has become more genderless. There are fewer rules about how your gender expression should fit with your clothing and people feel freer to disregard those rules. It’s hard because a lot of things are marketed as revolutionary, but are not, in fact, revolutionary.
Like the pink pussy hat.
Francesca: It’s true. Historically you see moments in fashion, like the zoot suit in the ‘30s, where these garments embody politics in a very challenging way. It’s harder to see it as it’s happening than in retrospect. That’s why I think the fashion critics have such a hard job, because they’re supposed to criticize things as they happen.
Véronique: Also, I talk about scammers in the book; people like Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes, and how they used fashion in service to these scams, and the way that we’re all kind of doing that. We can use fashion to pretend to an identity that we don’t necessarily have, which is something that I find fascinating.
Francesca: That’s interesting, Véronique. Historically, fashion was always criticized as artifice.
Artifice! That makes me think of The Devil Wears Prada quote that we all know and love, which you also include in your book, Véronique. Every choice that someone makes, whether they’re trying to ape someone else or not, says something about them. You can make the argument that fashion actually has no artifice within it. It’s just you telling on yourself, basically every day with every choice that you make. And therein lies the importance. And the use!
OK, so on to a much larger question: What purpose do you think fashion criticism serves? And do you think it needs to have a purpose?
Francesca: I think it’s vital to fashion as a culture and an industry to have a branch of criticism. It’s something that needs to be there for fashion to function properly.
Véronique: Fashion criticism increasingly serves this function of explaining things to people, giving context, giving history. The industry needs that critical lens. There is an aspect of criticism that keeps fashion in check.
Camille Okhio is a writer and art and design historian living in New York City.
- Text: Camille Okhio
- Illustrations: Sierra D'Atri
- Date: July 6, 2022
