On Everything #60: The Avant-Garde Post-Mortem
On Everything is a weekly newsletter from Eugene Rabkin, our founder and editor.
When I founded StyleZeitgeist in 2006, my aim was to build a forum for people who genuinely love fashion as a creative, cultural discipline. I did not mean for it to solely concentrate on the fashion that I loved, the forward-thinking, boundary-pushing, connected to youth culture, especially music, especially of the goth / industrial / postpunk-tinged kind. But it kind of morphed into that, because it attracted like-minded people. And so StyleZeitgeist became a hub for what’s come to be called the avant-garde – the truly IYKYK stuff, a fashion subculture.
A large part of what we championed on StyleZeitgeist was what we used to call artisanal fashion – small brands that produced high quality work, often in-house, whose esthetic was often too out there to be understood or even known about not just by the lay, but also by the fashion establishment; brands like Carol Christian Poell, Carpe Diem, Boris Bidjan Saberi, m.a.+, Geoffrey B. Small, and Paul Harnden. I will never forget the collective laughter elicited on SZ after John Galliano mentioned in a 2010 interview to Women's Wear Daily that he loves Paul Harnden but doesn’t know anything about him, and when the fashion girlies from the Cut scrambled to find out who that Paul Harnden guy is, swiping pretty much all the info from StyleZeitgeist, because there wasn’t much to google. And when GQ writes an article about any of these designers (Paul Harnden, Geoffrey B. Small), they still call yours truly.
