Fashion People
Eugene Rabkin on Postmodernism's Grip on Fashion and the Death of Meaningful Design
Summarised from Does Fashion Need Fixing?
Fashion has adopted postmodern principles from art with a 30-year delay, replacing critical standards with marketing-driven narratives that have drained the industry of genuine creativity and excitement.
Summary of Does Fashion Need Fixing?. Every timestamp links into the original audio.
The short version
00:17:05— The fashion industry feels progressively less exciting each year, with excitement that appears staged and managed by PR rather than driven by authentic creativity.00:20:15— Postmodernism has eliminated clear definitions of what fashion is, what constitutes quality, or what makes good design, allowing commerce and marketing to fill the void left by absent critical authority.00:23:43— Virgil Abloh’s design philosophy of changing something by only 3% to claim novelty exemplifies postmodern pastiche and represents a fundamental failure of innovation in fashion design.00:38:02— Young fashion designers today are poorly educated in fashion history and lack a visceral understanding of design evolution, having been taught that history is irrelevant.00:39:35— Designers increasingly reference subcultures they don’t understand, creating empty signifiers by mixing unrelated visual references without genuine knowledge of their origins or meaning.00:45:32— Social media and image-driven culture have supercharged postmodern fragmentation, making it harder for consumers to develop depth of understanding or sustained attention to design.00:55:22— Luxury and fashion should be separated as distinct concepts; reestablishing clear definitions of terms is essential before meaningful conversations about the industry can occur.00:57:34— An alternative fashion ecosystem of independent brands, stores, media, and consumers supporting each other represents the only viable path forward, functioning as modern counterculture.
In depth
The postmodern diagnosis: why Rapkin thinks fashion lost its plot
Eugene Rapkin’s central claim, laid out for Lauren Sherman early in the conversation, is that fashion’s creeping dullness has a single root cause rather than many scattered ones. He traces the industry’s malaise to postmodernism itself, borrowing Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of distrust in grand narratives 00:19:03 and arguing that this distrust metastasized into a wholesale collapse of standards. If nothing is objectively true or good, Rapkin reasons, then nobody is positioned to say a garment is well made or badly made, and the resulting vacuum gets filled not by better ideas but by marketing 00:20:37. That is his account of why criticism as an institution has withered: without agreed definitions of quality or design, brands and their PR machines become the only voices left setting the terms of what counts as good 00:20:45.
Sherman pushes back, but not by rejecting the premise outright. She grants that the fashion industry became fundamentally a business proposition sometime in the 1990s, and treats that as a fact of history rather than a tragedy 00:25:04. Her disagreement is with the value judgment: she asks directly why it’s bad that the old model of fashion-as-art ended and consolidation took over, framing fashion as inherently a commercial discipline that also happens to carry creative weight, not a pure art form robbed of its purity 00:26:52. Rapkin’s answer is unapologetically romantic: he says outright that he wants the small corner of the world he cares about to be better, and that
Virgil Abloh as exhibit A, and the disagreement Sherman won’t fully concede
When asked to name the single figure who embodies his thesis, Rapkin doesn’t hesitate: Virgil Abloh 00:23:17. He points to Abloh’s own stated method — changing a design by roughly 3% and calling it new — as the clearest possible admission that postmodern fashion has redefined innovation down to mere quotation, a copy of a copy of a copy 00:23:43. For Rapkin this isn’t a neutral description; it’s an indictment. If a 3% shift counts as design, he argues, it’s no wonder the industry feels drained of genuine creative energy 00:23:59.
Sherman resists this framing without denying the diagnosis of pastiche. She reads Abloh’s practice less as a failure of imagination and more as a form of commentary — an artist using appropriation deliberately to say something about how culture and commerce actually work, and she says she felt personally moved by him as a creative person and public figure, distinct from whether she bought his clothes 00:26:07. This is one of the episode’s clearest moments of genuine, unresolved disagreement: both agree on the mechanism (pastiche, minimal alteration, recombination) but split on whether that mechanism is bankruptcy or a legitimate creative statement about a bankrupt culture. Neither talks the other out of their position, and the conversation moves on without a resolution, which is itself telling — it suggests the disagreement isn’t really about facts but about what they’re each willing to forgive in the pursuit of commercial success dressed as creativity.
Nice clothes, exhausted consumers, and the limits of pastiche
Rapkin extends his framework to explain the so-called epidemic of “nice clothes” — the wave of quietly tasteful, unchallenging brands he name-checks, including The Row and Totem, and Sherman’s own comparison point of Studio Nicholson as a “mood board brand” 00:41:43. His theory is essentially arithmetic: if the industry has spent roughly twenty-five years doing nothing but recombining prior styles, eventually the well of things left to copy runs dry, and what’s left is a retreat into safe, palatable minimalism 00:40:46. He’s careful to say he personally likes some of this — he singles out The Row as something he respects even if he doesn’t love it — but treats the broader trend as a symptom of exhaustion rather than a genuine aesthetic movement.
Sherman complicates this with a consumer-side theory of her own that she raises directly to Rapkin: she suspects people aren’t just under-equipped to judge quality, they may actively dislike what they’re buying, and keep buying it anyway because alternatives feel invisible — the luxury retail strips of Fifth Avenue, Rue Saint-Honoré, and New Bond Street are interchangeable, staffed by the same handful of celebrity-endorsed brands 00:50:10. Rapkin’s counter to her related idea about consumer
Music, art, and the search for a way out of sterilized desire
The conversation’s most speculative stretch comes when Sherman widens the lens beyond fashion to ask whether any commercial creative industry — music, film, publishing — can still deliver the kind of pure, unmediated emotional hit that fashion once did, citing Chanel under Matthieu Blazy as a recent example of something that actually moved people 00:51:37. Her worry is structural rather than moral: she suggests that oversaturation and constant visual stimulation have sterilized desire itself, so that even when something beautiful is produced, audiences are too depleted by nonstop imagery to feel it the way they used to 00:54:23. Rapkin agrees enthusiastically and folds this into his own theoretical scaffolding, invoking Baudrillard’s simulacra and Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle as thinkers who predicted an image-saturated culture decades before Instagram made it literal and turbocharged 00:45:38.
Both speakers land on the same worked example — Blazy at Chanel — as evidence that authentic craft can still cut through, with Rapkin explicitly contrasting Blazy’s design talent against what he calls JW Anderson’s talent for creative direction and mix, implying a real distinction between someone who makes things and someone who curates references 00:54:42. But this shared example doesn’t resolve the deeper disagreement about causes: Rapkin still wants to blame the loss of historical grounding and critical authority, while Sherman leans toward a more diffuse explanation rooted in oversupply, media fragmentation, and simple audience fatigue. Neither claims their explanation is complete, and Rapkin’s own admission that he can’t recall the last time he was impressed by contemporary art suggests he sees this sterilization as advanced, possibly terminal, in the sister discipline fashion has historically trailed by several decades 00:45:20.
Fixing it: counterculture, critics, and where Sherman thinks the argument needs to go further
Rapkin’s proposed remedy has two parts. First, he wants a return to clear, agreed definitions — insisting that luxury and fashion are not synonyms and should be treated as separate categories before any productive conversation about the industry’s problems can happen 00:55:22. Second, and more ambitiously, he calls for rebuilding an alternative ecosystem of independent brands, independent retailers, independent media, and consumers who deliberately support all three together, explicitly modeling this on historical counterculture and acknowledging it as a romantic, long-shot proposal rather than a guaranteed fix 00:57:34. He’s candid that this won’t solve the industry’s structural problems wholesale, but frames it as at least creating a viable alternative for people who want out of the mainstream commercial loop.
Sherman’s response reframes the entire argument in structural, almost political terms that Rapkin doesn’t fully engage with. She asks whether counterculture is even possible within the current economic and technological climate, and then pushes past aesthetics entirely to argue that the real bottleneck is material: independent designers can’t experiment because they can’t afford to make samples, and that’s a policy failure, not a taste failure, gesturing toward ideas like broader social and economic support (she raises universal basic income) as the actual precondition for the kind of risk-taking Rapkin wants to see 00:59:17. Rapkin concedes the point, describing the current moment as a near-total victory of neoliberalism in which even the vocabulary available for discussing culture has become transactional 01:00:03, but insists optimism is still warranted: postmodernism’s illusion that we’ve reached the end of history is just that, an illusion, and alternative modes of culture will keep surfacing even under difficult conditions 01:00:25. It’s a hopeful close, but neither speaker resolves whether cultural rebellion or economic policy is the more urgent lever — they simply agree both matter, without settling which one has to move first.
Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.