press clips vol. 2, no. 3: fashioning new gods
press clips vol. 2, no. 3: fashioning new gods
This week, Deadwood, Entireworld, Inception, The Jews(!), Toobin, Julia Fox, Graydon, Epstein, Zendaya, Timothee, the Times, Roman Mars, and Antoni Gaudi — just to name a few.
Hey -
The third one! Holy shit. You’re still here, we’re doing this again, huh?
New people: If you don’t get it, that’s okay. Neither do the rest of us.
Deep breath.
Okay:
There’s a line from Deadwood: “You cannot fuck the future, sir. The future fucks you.”
Stay with me, here. This one’s fun.
Early August: The New York Times Magazine runs a cover story by Irina Aleksander titled “Sweatpants Forever,” which you might remember from Stephanie Gonot’s hilariously canny photo-illo alone:
It was a rundown of the various ways the fashion industry’s bubble is bursting. It was built around a rise-and-fall-and-rise-again profile of former CAA agent turned Band of Outsiders boy genius designer Scott Sternberg, whose new direct-to-consumer brand Entireworld saw a meteoric rise in sales since the pandemic started (of, yes, sweatpants).
But — and this is important to remember — at no point in the story is it stated by anyone that sweatpants are “the future of fashion.”
The closest we get:
[Scott] Sternberg was in a good mood. This was obviously not just because of an email. Nor was it simply because America had settled into sweatpants for the foreseeable future.
What the story argues is that the substructure of Fashion Week, department store buyers, four fashion “seasons,” fashion media, and all of their interdependencies were collapsing in on one another. Also, that we’re in lockdown and wearing sweatpants in lockdown. Duh.
All that’s to say: I knew before I finished Aleksander’s story — this rollicking Michael Lewisian-style rundown of a financial microcosm that zooms out to reveal tectonic shifts in culture and economics — that it’d easily slot itself among the best things I’d read this year.
But (and here’s where it gets fun) little did I imagine enjoying it even more, somehow, months later.
See: There are plenty of ways you can judge the success of something published online, and they all fuckin’ suuuuuuck and are just so boring. Pageviews, “engagement,” shares, inbound links, subscriptions, conversions, listens, streams, whatever, right? Most of them can be gamed/manipulated with varying degrees of effort/pandering. Most of them are lacking and stupid. They tell different versions of the same story, none of which offer good judgements about a story’s quality.
But my favorite way to measure a story’s success? It’s the kind of thing that can’t really be gamed, that you need a long view to see: Watching how much real estate an idea takes up in the heads of everyone who might have anything to do with it, consciously or (even better lol) unconsciously. Also, the amount of time it continues to do this.
I’m not talking about trolling and provoking a response, the easiest/dumbest shit there is. I’m talking about seeing different people lose their minds at the same thing long after it’s come and gone, like watching the result of a successful inception play out months after the job is finished (“BWOOOOOONGGGG”).
Which is why I had to laugh when barely three weeks after Irina Aleksander’s story ran, The Cut runs a column by contributor Cathy Horyn, the 64 year-old elder stateswoman of fashion criticism and legendary former NYT critic. [Metatitle: “Fashion Critic Cathy Horyn on the Future of Fashion.”]
And what was the very last line in Horyn’s piece? Guess.
Ready?
Somehow, this escaped the notice of most people? Fast-forward to this week, three months after Aleksander’s piece for the Magazine has run. The NYT Styles desk’s 53 year-old current chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman writes up Jil Sander’s new Uniqlo collaboration, in which a legendary designer revives one of her most successful capsule collections, for one of the most ubiquitous rack brands in the universe. Plenty to work with there, headline-wise. AND WHAT DID THEY GO WITH?
But of course:
LOL. Let’s assume, for kicks, that I’ve gone full red stringboard, and Horyn and Friedman or any of the people editing them didn’t intend their kickers and headlines to reference Aleksander’s piece — my god, all the better. Because all of them had to have read it. They’d be in dereliction of duty if they didn’t. One unignorable facet of all this: The 18 and 29-year age gap between Aleksander and (respectively) career fashion journo-doyennes Friedman and Horyn, whose relevance hinges in large part on the fashion systems of yore, those seasons and shows and catwalks and collections.
Remember: Aleksander’s story wasn’t about the sartorial value of sweatpants, but the shifting norms of how we clothe ourselves. It was about a new generation’s needs for environmental and economic sustainability, and the ways the world is rendering old modes of fashion obsolete. It’s hard to view the generational gap of all those involved, and these attempted subtle broadsides at refuting Aleksander’s premise, and not read the big-picture subtext of what their shots really say:
Ladies, you don’t dress the future. The future will dress you.
But yeah: That’s how you tell a piece was good.
These are the rest of your Press Clips for the week of Wednesday, November 18th. No, really: Those of you who’re back, I can’t believe you’re still here. Thanks for taking the time.
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Which Summer-of-Flambé-ousted Bon Appetit brass is rumored to have recently purchased a seven-figure Malibu manse? Couldn’t tell you! Don’t have the lawyers! But I can certainly point you to the one who just flipped their seven-figure digs in Bed-Stuy (Unit 1!), banking $142,936 in three years off the original sale price. Wonder where they’re headed? I knew cultivating toxic institutionalized pay-disparity and discriminatory work cultures of microfame paid well, but goddamn!
From the Dept. of Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To:
The most important piece of media reporting this week is the work of one Willa Paskin, over at Slate, who scored an interview with…this lady:
The interview is, uh, exactly what you’d expect:
In other words: Perfect.
So uh Buzzfeed has been widely misreported to be getting into the sex toys business just now. If memory serves me correct, they’ve been run by an overpriced dildo for years.
A Ham-Handed, Hog-Fisted Defense:
Add media stalwart/current MSNBC analyst Jonathan Atler along with The Intercept’s DC bureau chief Ryan Grim to a distinguished boys club that already includes senior Vox correspondent German Lopez and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf as people who have — voluntarily! — inserted themselves into the Jeff Toobin discourse on the side of handyman sympathy. Like so:
Yeah, man, congratulations on anointing yourself the Norma Rae of masturbating in public. You’re a real service to the legacy of labor leaders to come before you, fighting to protect someone whose job, like most of the rest of ours, when distilled to its most simple form, is to not jack off on a Zoom call at work.
He
jacked
off
at
work.
Not that anyone here needs to hear it, but for those in the cheap seats, likely with their hands in their pants: Toobin didn’t need worker protections from his employer, his colleagues needed worker protections from him. Also, can you imagine being anyone who knows that these guys said this shit? Let alone a woman, getting on a conference call with either of these two — and knowing that they think jacking off at work is a victimless offense worthy of being awarded protections? How do you see them through a Zoom, and not wonder what they think when they look at you? The absolute paucity of self-awareness, here, christ! I mean, is it any wonder our industry barrels towards insolvency when guys like these remain gainfully in power? Holy shit.
And Now, Another Random List of People’s Raya Profile Songs:
Julia Fox (Uncut Gems) - “Hybrid Moments” - The Misfits
Adam Richman (Man v. Food) - “On Verra” - Nekfu
Jessica Pels (EIC, Cosmo) “Pop, Lock, & Lemon Drops” - pinkcaravan!
Lucy Hale (Pretty Little Liars) - “Save Us” - Lennon Stella
Ruby Aldridge (…Lily Aldridge’s sister?) - “For J.P.S.” - The Freeze
Elise Taylor (Staff Writer, Vogue) - “The Obvious Child” - Paul Simon
Again, this is the kind of real plutonium-grade gossip you people get when you stiff me on tips. More where this came from unless you start sending over that good-good. Reminder: Your ass opened this email! Not me! That said, for those of you weirdos who actually like this placeholder feature, please, uh, send more songs, I guess? Truly, this well will dry up fast. Also, do you know how much celebrities get paid to be on Raya, and if they actually use it? TELL ME TELL ME NOW.
Appointment Listening: Kaitlin Phillips and Alex Vadukul on a podcast together the first episode of which airs Wednesday night. Vadukul is the gimlet-eyed New York Press Club award-winning scribe who just got transferred to the Times obit desk. Phillips is the Marie Colvin of Lucien. Can’t wait!
I’m desperately curious to know who — outside of people who work in media, for reasons other than to just STARE AT IT — actually subscribes to AirMail. Are they, like, the smarmy philandering Cool Dads of Monocle readers? Or sentimental George subscribers and Monkey Bar VIPs for whom Radhika-era Vanity Fair is a little too ahem “colorful”? This isn’t the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, or at least, it wasn’t, because now I won’t be able to sleep until I know who the fuck will actually buy these:
Whoever they are, I’m sure of one thing: They’ve almost certainly been on Epstein’s plane.
For as much as Harpers LetterWriter and (previously) horny EmRata profile writer Thomas Chatterton Williams is worried about the consequences of free speech these days, he sure doesn’t show it, demonstrating an uncanny ability to show his whole ass through a single Tweet:
The self-regard, my god, the self-regard. And here I’d like to remind you that I don’t charge you for this newsletter. All I ask of you is that, if I embarrass myself so publicly, if I ever become that oblivious, you will tell me. Seriously: Can that level of headassedness happen to anyone?
Speaking of piss-poor celebrity profile writers, Timothee Chalamet interviewed Zendaya for the December cover of Elle. I wonder what kind of word rate he stole from a working writer for this kind of Talese-esque interrogation:
Of course we didn’t learn shit about Zendaya! Timothee Chalamet can weep over penising some peach on cue better than any in “the biz” but will anyone ever learn anything of substance from two co-stars talking to one another? No. This kind of bullshit isn’t magazine-making as much as it is marketing, pure and simple. That’s it. I mean, if we’re just gonna hand magazines over to movie studios like this, we could at least get paid by a studio for running this kind of highfalutin sponcon (they won’t be, womp womp). This, of course, is not new.
As the NYT’s Jon Caramanica noted two years ago, this kind of thing is the continued evolution of Anna Wintour just handing Beyonce full creative control of her shoot, or, say, letting friends of celebrity subjects take the wheel. Or worst of all, those sycophantic writers who covet the approval of celebrity subjects continuing unabated.
This is what happens when people who work in media side continue to side with celebrities, when those celebrities get pissy on Twitter, over the way they’re (more often than not, accurately) portrayed. In exchange for journalists’ amateurish unmitigated stanning, not to mention all that shitty Celebrity Profile Discourse, and continuing to get it wrong, this is what we get: Marketing.
Look, celebrity profiles might seem like an ignoble, low-stakes playing field to invest the moral stakes of journalism in, but it probably also only seems that way to people who can’t remember a time when celebrities didn’t exert so much power over their own image (or when so many thirsty, amateurish writers were lining up to service them). Ask for more! Ask for more. Here’s how legendary NY Daily News gossip columnist Joanna Molloy once responded when asked about a spat with Sarah Jessica Parker, in which SJP asked Molloy how she could stomach doing what she did for a living:
“Getting into gossip, it was class war. These are people who have so much power, so much money, so much beauty a lot of times, and so much luck. Some of them abuse their power!” said Ms. Molloy. “They abuse power as much as bankers do, and they make the average person feel insecure about themselves: ‘Why am I not Sarah Jessica Parker?’”
Yeah: Celebrities are powerful. Celebrities continue to yield enormous control and influence over our culture, now more than they ever have. If you think I’m exaggerating for effect, uh, reminder: We just vacated a reality star from the White House. He surfed to prominence under the barrel of the incredibly insipid and equally successful NBC game show he hosted. Celebrities are one of America’s most consistent, influential, and profitable global exports. To not interrogate them honestly — to not try to understand them and their motivations, to not press them for answers — is to let the entertainment industry and flacks and subjects continue to wrest control away from media over the way they’re seen. Fuck that. We should know better, we can do better.
I’ll get to Clio Chang’s monster CJR piece on Substack, and all the Substack Dialogue that has come with it. Next issue! That said: How did anyone get past this line, in the third paragraph without, like, choking on the nearest particle of reality?
It took (literally!) clearing the $200K/year line for her to open a savings account? Holy fucking shit, clearly the financial literacy sector either (literally!) has a ton of room for growth or is (literally!) failing miserably. Incredible: Not only will people trust a writer who can’t open a savings account until they’re making $200K a year with stories about the long-tail fate of our planet, they are going to pay her for it. LMAO, people! How did some of you make it to adulthood?!?!
I finally got around to reading the big fortnightly New York Mag story on the State of the NYT. The review? It’s pretty perfect, and everything I understand to be true about the paper is there. The reporting’s wildly comprehensive, and Reeves Weideman dropping this story within the same few weeks as his book on WeWork — which he flipped in a relatively short amount of time — is just a flex. The guy’s a monster of a reporter and has the kind of prolific output at a quality level that puts most of the rest of us to shame. Hard not to enjoy watching someone putting on a clinic.
Anyway, the big takeaways:
The diversity issues at the Times manifest themselves in some really, really ugly ways. The most telling piece for me of the issues Black employees face at the Times was a bit about performance reviews at the paper, and a union-conducted study of them. There are five performance review rankings that aren’t “didn’t meet expectations,” Black employees received 24% of the lowest grade, and 4% of the highest, while only making up 10% of the staff. I’d be curious to see the rest of the ranking distributions across all other ethnicities, but I can’t imagine they’d make those numbers look that much better. That is fucked.
I want to know who was responsible for this quote about personal brand-building via Twitter (and subsequent burn)by Weideman: “There’s a very sad need for validation,” one Times journalist who has Tweeted tens of thousands of times told me.” LMAO.
Here’s a hell of a conflict: Union members put together a dossier of Times journalism they found to be “problematic” to serve it up as evidence of the paper’s diversity problems. They were then warned off of it because a union member pointed out that they were going after the work of their co-works who are, yes, other union members. Uh, sure, except one thing here: The overwhelming whiteness of the Times means the union, of course, is also overwhelmingly white. Which means staffers of color will have to battle the issues around diversity not just in the company but also within the substructure of the union as well.
The New York Times is uncomfortably over-beholden to its engineers, who as they code the paper’s pretty digital products now want more of a say in its moral purview and mandate. This makes everyone uncomfortable because while, yes, they are engineering talent, they are not journalists, or (despite having once sold their soul to startups, thus supposedly knowing better?) ethicists. I get the feeling this problem will resolve itself because the world’s producing more engineers, thus making them a less-rare quantity. Someone, please, drop this into #newsroom-feedback: If they wanna change the tone of the paper, they should learn how the fuck to write in something other than numbers! :)
Carolyn Ryan, a deputy managing editor, edits Nellie Bowles, Michael Powell, and Ben Smith. LOL! Must be special, being the kind of writer who requires so much handholding and/or bureaucratic protecting that they gotta have someone of Ryan’s caliber — basically one of Dean Baquet’s Designated Survivors — to look after them. As opposed to, you know, the editor on their respective desk, like everyone else. This is like hiring a Green Beret to take the kids from school to soccer practice so they won’t, like, commit insurance fraud, or start a nuclear war. Also, Powell is on the “identity politics” beat and Bowles is dating Bari Weiss. Hmm! Finally, flashback: David Carr was edited by media editor Bruce Hedlam, and not, like, the deputy managing editor of the paper. Carr also didn’t attempt to cast himself prominently into every single story he wrote, so I get the push, I guess? Seems like a waste of editing power and adult supervision to me, to me, but to each their own.
Again, it’s a must-read, and my favorite Timesology piece to be written in far too long. Bang-up job.
REGRETS ONLY: EDITS AND CORREX.
Last week, while giving shit to them over their Vogue profile, ‘got some reader feedback asking me what my beef is with How Long Gone, the podcast of Chris Black and Jason Stewart, which I called the podcast of “people between the ages of ‘did K in the booth at Cinespace on Tuesdays ten years ago’ and ‘did coke in the bathroom at Lucien two years ago.’” LOL. But also, to wind it back: I am a hat-wearing fan, and I root for those guys, I really do. For one thing, how can you not root for the guys who got a C&D from the Times after abusing the iconography for The Daily? Also, they’re doing the thing so many of us want to do: Start something for fun, with our friends, that ends up working out really, really well. Their guest-booking game has been canny as hell, and they’ve given voice to a lot of people in media who have long deserved to be heard from, with lineups sometimes surprising, but almost always ahead of the curve. They’re clinicians at disarming guests. They’re funny, and they’ve got a preternatural chemistry the way only truly good friends truly can — I’ve choked on coffee listening to them too often to count (one episode, which started with a rundown of Obama’s Summer Spotify Playlist: find it). And one more thing I should add here: I wouldn’t be surprised if, given the trajectory of the pod, neither fully return to their day jobs when all this is over. Their thing has legs; watch that space.
Last week I named some people in media who helped work the election. Among those I left off were former New York Mag editor/Black Table Co-Founder/Sy Newhouse School of Journalism professor Aileen Gallagher. Not that most people in media who know who she is don’t already know this, but she’s a mensch.
A reader wrote in to tell me the person who managed to book Tracy Chapman for Late Night with Seth Meyers the week of the election — the actual rare feat in late-night booking, even during a pandemic. It’s this guy, Jeremiah Silva (“Great dude, great ear, incredible relationships in the music industry”).
Also, it turns out that Twitter account which supposedly belonged to ousted Bon App editor Adam Rapoport was not, according to “sources close to him,” real. I’d love to know who did it, then. Or if Page Six got that wrong.
Goddamn. That’s almost it.
Again, I’ve really got no idea what I’m doing with this thing. It’s still in beta, I guess? Anyway, thanks for taking the ride with me while I figure out what the hell it is. FOSTERTALK is free as hell. All I ask: Don’t forget to send along your tips and ideas and feedback. Everyone who’s said something, and especially something nice: Thank you. Thank you for even reading. Seriously.
These will, I swear, get shorter, and maybe even begin to be coherent. At some point. I hope.
Okay.
Last thing:
At the beginning of 2018, as one run at a job was ending — back when Mashable got turned over in a fire sale to Ziff Davis — I was on borrowed time at my gig, full senioritis. A friend was also between jobs. We decided to take a last minute trip and meet up in Barcelona. I found a cheap flight, and had the time off to spend.
The morning the friend I was with skipped town, I had another day to kill, and finally ended up at Sagrada Familia, gap-jawed in awe of Antoni Gaudi’s ever-under construction hot mess of a cathedral. It was one of those few things in this world that actually lives up to the hype. Anyway: My experience there probably wasn’t all that different from most people’s, with the exception that I’m not religious, and had one of the closer things to a religious experience I’ve had in my life, staring into its contours, reveling in the thing’s messy fucked up history involving the Spanish Civil War, and parabolic arcs, and the aerospace engineering software that enable its ongoing construction, and so much more. It’s really something.
Anyway, I wouldn’t have had the same experience had I not, on the recommendation of god knows who, listened to the episode of 99% Invisible on the place. Truly: It’s a masterwork on a masterwork, just a simple, beautifully constructed piece of media we’re all luckier to have. 99% Invisible is the work of Roman Mars, who you might also know from another one of the most perfect podcast episodes ever, from Reply All.
Why all this? I remembered Mars, and Sagrada Familia, when he Tweeted this earlier this week:
Roman Mars’s father passed away last Saturday. Food & Wine senior editor Kat Kinsman’s mother passed away from Covid in August. David Lat almost died from it in March. Look, I’m not here suggesting some kind of schmaltzy industry-wide solidarity against the virus, or some feelgood We Are The World bullshit like that.
But these are people we know who make the things we love, that we aspire to, that we revel in. I know this isn’t the audience, necessarily, that needs to hear any of this. But, like: The person I was dating when all of this started is a long-hauler, the shit it did and is still doing to their body has nothing on what it’s done to their psyche. Max Tani just got it, and like so many other people, has no idea how. And me? Maybe more on this later, but I’m in that blessed class of people who, medically, have a reason or two to be more scared shitless by all this than the average bear.
All of which is to say: Most of us will be fine, even if we get it. But a bunch of us won’t be. And haven’t been. And we, somehow, are the idiots with the “platform” or whatever that’s professionally larger than all the rest of the idiots’. Let’s do what we can, as often as we can, to not fuck this up — on here, or out there.
Hey: Thanks for your continued support of Press Clips, and FOSTERTALK, whatever the hell it is. Take care of yourselves, and those around you. Mask on, stay warm, as ever,
-f.