The Best Magazine Articles About Fashion Ever Written (According to Me)
This one's a doozy
Many years ago, I was visiting a friend who lived in a cabin in the woods in upstate New York, when we found ourselves yammering on about our favourite magazine articles. Her now ex-boyfriend walked into the room, observed us for a millisecond and uttered, “Oh, I get it, you’re journalism nerds.” Clocked.
I have a borderline encyclopedic memory when it comes to the canon of longform literary journalism, beginning with Joseph Mitchell’s stories of downtrodden, dirty New Yorkers all the way through to stuff published within the last ten years. I have strong opinions when it comes to the best decades for magazine journalism—the ‘90s by far—and I can spend hours trawling through ancient stories on Vanity Fair’s website, with one leading into the next. I could probably spend the rest of my life in a single room filled with back issues of Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, The New Yorker, and New York magazine and be happy for the rest of my life.
Recently I felt a hankering to revisit one of my favourite stories ever, Buzz Bissinger’s astonishing “My Gucci Addiction,” and since I’ve already compiled exhaustive lists of the best fashion books and fashion movies of all time, I thought, why not do longform magazine articles as well? The list combines personal favourites with indisputably top-notch stories that changed the way we think and feel about fashion. It includes quirky stories about the late, great Karl Lagerfeld and the deeply moving story of the Black designer who made Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress. This list took me a really long time to put together (though I enjoyed every second of it), so I have put 3/4 of it behind a paywall. There is enough reading here to keep you entertained in an airport lounge for several days. If you enjoy this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
1. My Gucci Addiction by Buzz Bissinger, GQ (2013)
What I love most about this story is how accurately Buzz Bissinger conveys the propulsive urgency of being completely addicted to shopping. The story details his all-consuming, borderline sexual obsession with acquiring outrageously expensive Gucci clothing in a way that’s at turns sickening and thrilling. Reading this, you can almost feel the demonic presence that has taken up occupancy in his brain, twisting his thoughts into a careening joyride. He knows that his preoccupation with outrageously expensive designer leather goods is destroying him and yet he can’t stop. After this was published, Bissinger sought out help for his addiction and sold a lot of the coats, which is really a shame because this stuff should be on display in a museum somewhere. (Archive link)
A sample:
Before I left, I promised my wife I would be restrained. She is very concerned, because she knows what can happen. But inches from the runway, waiting for the smooth mannequin boys with surgically removed hips and buttocks swaying like sunglassed Gumbys with the newest designs from creative director Frida Giannini, I know the promise is useless.
2. Tavi Says by Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker (2010)
Fashion blogger wunderkind Tavi Gevinson was only fourteen years old when she was the subject of this New Yorker profile, and had already been writing about fashion on the internet since she was 11. At the time, Tavi was something of a mystery—most people had a hard time believing that someone so young could write so cogently about fashion. But author Lizzie Widdicombe captures Gevinson’s precocious intelligence, absurdist humour and niche interests (Rodarte, Edward Gorey, Rei Kowakubo, Grey Gardens, Harold and Maude) with aplomb. It preserves in amber the exact moment when “fashion bloggers” were the subject of fascination by legacy media, ultimately paving the way for the “content creators” of today. (Archive link)
A sample:
She favors busy, outlandish ensembles that mix items of different styles and periods, as if she’d been rummaging through the wardrobe closet at a Hollywood studio—clear-frame “Tootsie” glasses, a turban, a cartoonishly large chain-link-shaped scarf. Though the fashion world is accustomed to both youth and eccentricity, Tavi is a rare spectacle. Seeing her moving through the scrum backstage at a fashion show, elaborately costumed and surrounded by paparazzi, brings to mind a religious procession involving a Buddhist child deity.
3. Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion by Fiona Duncan, New York (2014)
If you’re sick and tired of everything being a “core”, you can blame this 2014 New York magazine story for widely popularizing the term. Fiona Duncan captured the long-tail zeitgeist of young, hip people appropriating the uncool uniform of middle America in an attempt to present oneself as a blank canvas. (See: today’s version of this is RealTree hunting camo.) Miraculously, the normcore style survived the performatively quirked-up pendulum swing best encapsulated by Alessandro Michele’s Gucci, and can still be sensed today both aesthetically in the “quiet luxury” trend, and spiritually in conversations about “clothing quality” and “timeless classics.” (Archive link)
A sample:
Normcore—it was funny, but it also effectively captured the self-aware, stylized blandness I’d been noticing… In fashion, though, this manifests itself in ardently ordinary clothes. Mall clothes. Blank clothes. The kind of dad-brand non-style you might have once associated with Jerry Seinfeld, but transposed on a Cooper Union student with William Gibson glasses.
4. Power Girls by Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York (1998)
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a 30-year old article about public relations co-ordinators might be boring, but you would be wrong. Writer Vanessa Grigoriadis spins this story about rich, privileged blonde NYC power publicists into a riveting Roman epic. Even if the names Lizzie Grubman, Lara Shriftman and Liz Cohen mean nothing to you, by the end you’ll be totally invested, and possibly have developed strong opinions on each one. These women pulled the strings behind the downtown NYC party girl scene that spawned Paris Hilton and ended up being fictionalized in the Gossip Girl series. The whole thing makes PR seem like a worthy and creative endeavour—albeit one that involves an awful lot of manipulation. (Archive link)
A sample:
Six months later, this bit of gossip made all the tabloids when Kluge filed for divorce against Cahan. “The day I threw that jerk out, he was crying and protesting and saying things like ‘But my heart found a home with you!’ ” says Kluge, fiddling nervously with the clasp on her Fendi bag. “Well, hon, your dick found a home somewhere else.”
5. Some Clothes of One’s Own by Ingrid Sischy, The New Yorker (1994)
Everyone loves to repeat the anecdote about Miuccia Prada being a card-carrying Communist in her youth, but very few people can actually identify its origin in this 1994 profile of the designer written by Ingrid Sischy. The longtime editor of Interview magazine, Sischy made a name for herself as an excellent critical voice in fashion writing for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In this story, Sischy plumbs the many contradictions within Miuccia Prada’s biography—her difficulties reconciling her feminism with her love of frivolity, her reticence to join the family business despite a clear knack for it—in an attempt to find out exactly who she is and shed light on her brilliant, world-shaking designs.
A sample:
She’s been described as a woman one might find in a painting by Modigliani. Her face veers between beautifully plain and plainly beautiful. She has brown eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair. It wouldn’t be true to say that she’s slim, or that she’s not; she’s what old-fashioned doctors used to call “the right weight.” Even back when Prada’s opinions of fashion were dismissive, she didn’t dress like the rest of her crowd. She wore antique dresses, not jeans, and even a few pricier outfits; her favorites were by Yves Saint Laurent.
