Fashion

When we had dinner a few weeks ago, you declared yourself a fashion victim.

I did.

Judging from your sweater, it was sort of obvious.

I acknowledge that.

But is “victim” really the right word? It sounds a little passive. After all, you chose that sweater.

It’s an idiomatic phrase, and there is some truth in it. Though not in the way people usually apply the expression.

How come?

We have to draw a distinction: between fashion and luxury.

Give me examples.

Louis Vuitton, Hermès, and Brunello Cucinelli are luxury. Vetements, Demna for Balenciaga, Junya Watanabe, to name just a few, are fashion. Ralph Lauren is nothing. Tommy Hilfiger is nothing at all. The magnificent Japanese three — Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto — were and are fashion. By the way, we’re not talking about haute couture.

How and why do preferences for luxury and fashion differ?

The economist in you appears to be asking.

An economist working with choice and inferring preferences. Traditionally, it’s not an economist’s task to show how preferences are actually formed.

You wrote that preferences are masks. I liked that very much.

So, why does one person put on the mask luxury and another person the mask fashion?

Luxury has undeniably to do with bragging, showing off. The motivation to follow fashion is entirely different. The fashion theorist Otto von Busch says that fashion is not just about things. It’s not bound to clothes or goods; it is a place where you can go. An emotional space you enter inside yourself and another.

That reminds me of Anna Seidel – a poet with a passion for fashion.

Who studied economics.

And who argues that fashion is a route to identity formation.

She is working with luxury brands.

Chanel and Louis Vuitton among others, yes. But brands need deep pockets to engage in something like this, to finance the glamorous lifestyle of a poet …

In this case the correct argument should run: Luxury is a route to identity formation.

Ha. In any case, her poetry dinners do something that we also tried to do – to bring people from different walks of life together that otherwise wouldn’t meet.

She is stylish! You should invite her to your next workshop!

I shall. But let’s get back to your sweater. Why did you buy it? Because you liked it? Because you thought it would fit you well?

I subscribe to vanitas. But I have no illusions about the possibility of substantially improving my appearance. It was a Balenciaga sweater. Demna’s pieces don’t make you look better. People who wear these extremely oversized pieces hide. In their clothes. From the world. They form a sect — Eliza Douglas, Isabelle Huppert, and the other artists and actors who presented Demna’s creations. Now that Demna is with Gucci, the sect dissolves.

You hide from yourself?

Maybe. — I remember very well, during the workshops you initiated at UCL and later continued at the WZB you always wore rather special T-shirts. You were the only one who cared about their looks.

I think that’s unfair to Sir Peter.

Oh. Excuse me. Sir Peter was such a great and all-encompassing mind. He lived simultaneously in the past and the present. When I remember him, I recall the musical worlds he invoked, not so much the real-world situations.

For me the distinction between luxury and fashion is less clear. I grew up in a working-class environment. My senses may not be finely attuned to these distinctions. And I think I feel more positively about luxury than you do.

I have nothing against luxury. But I grew up being taught to keep one’s own luxuries rather private.

Perhaps that’s the difference. For someone like me, luxury was always eventually speaking to a public realm.

I notice your watch.

Ah yes. Watches also have something about sects.

Some watches. I’m not so sure, though, about yours.

Oh, why not?

Because yours is about lineage.

And lineage is the opposite of fashion?

By its very definition. With watches there are also sects, people that collect certain types of advanced stopwatches or perpetual calendars. Or simply Patek Philippe. But those who buy the Nautilus – also by Patek Philippe – or the Royal Oak by Audemars Piguet simply follow others that buy these prestige models.

You won’t get a Nautilus from a retailer if you haven’t joined the sect.

The club you mean.

Ok, perhaps the club. I mentioned that my distinctions might not be that fine. But let’s go back to the heritage point. Fashion strikes me as obsessed with heritage. Even Balenciaga trades on it. Even Comme des Garçons.

Well, Demna is a genius. But he is also a shrewd businessman. He uses lineage when it fits him well. Excuse the joke. When he was with Balenciaga, he preached: Christóbal Balenciaga is the father of us all. Now that he is with Gucci he claims to have grown up sartorially with Gucci and that he has returned to his family.

Does that disappoint you?

I’m not naïve!

I will have to get back to this point later.

I can’t wait.

Is fashion like Broadway? With Off-Broadway and Off-off?

There’s a difference. If an Off-Broadway show is successful, it gets to Broadway. But take Dover Street Market. As a chain of fashion stores it has no par. They can’t grow. They would lose their utterly exclusive identity.

But they now have stores, next to the mothership in London, that is, by the way, no longer at Dover Street, in New York, Paris, Beijing and LA.

You forget Singapore.

And Singapore. Do you think there could be a Berlin DSM?

Hell no. There’s no money in Berlin. There’s no economic power, there’s no finance, there’s no notable IT in Berlin. Only two minor DAX firms are domiciled in Berlin. No banking, no insurance. And, by the way, this explains the unworldly character of German politics. In London and Paris politicians, managers, and entrepreneurs attend the same places-to-be. Politicians can’t fail business. The German Wirtschaftsminister Robert Habeck, from the environmentalist party, once demonstrated on TV that he didn’t know what it means for a business to go bankrupt.

That was a funny scary moment. But you appear to presuppose that it takes money to be cool, to have style. Berlin has always been proud to be cool without money. In this respect Berlin has always been a special sect.

Has there been a meaningful development in Berlin since the early 1990s?

Rents have become higher.

Haha. But they are still far below the rents of any meaningful European capital and still way below the rents in Munich.

Munich harbors eight DAX firms and six MDAX firms. And my impression is: Munich never claimed to be cool. It never pretended to be about fashion. It’s a pseudo-Italianate city where the Führer had his preferred Italian restaurant that later became the preferred restaurant of the new elites.

Osteria in Schellingstraße. It still exists.

It also became Peter’s favorite restaurant.

I didn’t know this. Did he feel unease?

He believed in renewal. In the possibility to regain spaces …

Kudos to him. As fashion is concerned: the most elegant city is Milano. You literally don’t find one girl who is not well dressed. Who doesn’t fully use her aesthetic possibilities.

Milano always struck me as an open machine. People making money, people spending money. A machine that isn’t pretty on its surfaces but that has architectural gems from every single period of the last few centuries.

Corso Como 10 is a very stylish store. Not as austere as Dover Street Market. They also sell books and decorative art.

It’s a hybrid.

You’re right. Maybe that’s the thing about Milano: a hybrid marrying fashion and luxury.

What about fashion in other spaces? Music, literature? As we have been talking about the Führer, I note that anything Wagnerian, anything even faintly romantic, fell out of fashion after 45.

It did. But I’d prefer to talk about literature. For instance, about your youthful infatuation with Arno Schmidt.

I even travelled to Bargfeld and had a tour of the tiny house with the Schmidts’ charwoman.

What memories come to your mind?

I remember, above all, two things: standing at the foot of the stairs where he said something like, go up, and have a look, referring to his elusive translation of Finnegans Wake, and, perhaps more interestingly, how she described how Arno would mark all TV programs with the shows he wanted to watch and – that he archived these annotated programs, probably envisaging that one day somebody might produce a facsimile of these.

Which you would buy …

Which I would have certainly bought if Jan Philipp Reemtsma had financed the Hörzu facsimile. That purchase would have been the truest expression of my belonging to my sect.

Authors aren’t pop stars.

You say.

Maybe their morals matter more.

I violently disagree. When it comes to literature we should discard all admiration and – and that is important – all disdain of the author. I owe a chipped tooth to that.

Tell me.

Well, on my first ever dinner with Heike, my wife, who you know, she teased me about Thomas Mann’s morals; and when I responded very swiftly I sort of forgot that I had still a fork between my teeth. So down came my incisors. I can still hear the crack.

These days there are no tooth- and groundbreaking first-date experiences anymore!

Wanna see it? There, the one on the right …

I assume you don’t want to get it fixed.

Never!

Wonderful!

Let me try to disentangle where we stand right now. Does fashion matter in literature?

There are currents in literature. There are also currents in the sciences. But these currents don’t bear similarities to the structure of the fashion business.

At the moment celebrity books and autofiction are fashionable.

Publishers always have published books written by celebs. Autofiction – the blend of fictional and autobiographical elements – is also far from being a novelty. Tristram Shandy by Sterne and the Recherche by Proust – what are these texts if not autofiction?

The word fashion goes back to the Middle English fasoun meaning something like shape and form. It stemmed from the French word façon meaning appearance or construction.

You’re sooo erudite!

Are you trying to say that fashion is reserved to fashion?

Yes. Because there is always an economic system which produces fashion. The economic production systems for books and science are entirely different though.

I conceive of fashion as being forward looking. While luxury is more past-oriented. Nothing can be considered as luxurious without context. And context is always given. By societal practice.

I agree. Luxury lives in the approved. Fashion lives in the daringly unapproved.

I have one more question then.

Shoot!

What about mainstreaming? What about the ‘daringly unapproved’ that suddenly gets approved? I have my brother in mind who went to a concert with Nirvana as a support act. I think for Sonic Youth. He was so excited but then fell, arrogantly, I thought, out of love with Kurt Cobain’s band when it became the flavor of the month.

I envy your brother for that concert.

As do I.

Mainstreaming is a challenge. Mainstreaming is by no means always the end of interesting fashion. Take Miuccia Prada. She avowedly does not work for minorities. She wants as many people as possible to buy her items. Notwithstanding she’s the most important living designer for fashion and luxury combined.