Prototype's Launch, Venice's Spectacle, and the Chanel Memoir Changing Fashion's Narrative

Fashion’s power structure is shifting from celebrating individual designers as stars to prioritizing corporate brands, even as new platforms like Prototype attempt to reclaim editorial independence and creative freedom.

Summary of Watertaxicab Confessions. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:02:49 — Alistair McKim launched Prototype, a creative community that produces a magazine alongside collaborations with brands, artists, and product designers, with biannual issues and seasonal product drops.
• 00:03:47 — Each issue of Prototype will feature one major product push every six months, like a chair designed with Pierre Castagnola made from aluminum, available made-to-order at prototype.world.
• 00:08:44 — McKim deliberately excluded advertising from the first issue to preserve editorial purity and avoid the politics that come with accepting advertiser influence, though brands support the project through other means.
• 00:11:49 — The magazine evolved from an artist-in-residence section McKim created at ID Magazine during the pandemic, where he realized he could follow through on conversations and collaborations that previous jobs wouldn’t allow.
• 00:19:40 — The Venice Film Festival functions as a platform combining professional screenings with public ticket sales, creating a mix of celebrities, industry insiders, and regular people that differs from the closed-circuit experience of fashion shows.
• 00:48:50 — Dries Van Noten’s exhibition at his new Fondazione emphasizes handmade craft and process across multiple disciplines—including only three fashion designers among jewelers, sculptors, and furniture makers—as a statement that art requires diligent work and execution.
• 01:03:59 — Virginie Viard is releasing a memoir on September 30th called A Glance, A Life at Chanel, framed as a story of emancipation that will discuss her five-year tenure as creative director and her departure from the house.
• 01:05:57 — The shift in luxury fashion power has moved from celebrated individual designers as brand ambassadors to corporate executives and company-first thinking, with designers now functioning more as hired creative talent serving the brand rather than being its center.
• 01:13:32 — Chanel’s family ownership and management for over a century, particularly under the Wertheimer family, represents a unique business story that rivals LVMH’s modern dominance and deserves serious academic study of its strategic operations.

In depth

Why Prototype refuses to look like a magazine

Alistair McKim’s pitch for Prototype was less about launching a magazine than about resisting everything a magazine usually has to become. He told Lauren Sherman that after roughly 25 years inside magazine politics, he knew exactly what happens once advertisers, cover stars, and brand relationships enter the room: the project stops being a personal point of view and starts being a negotiation 00:08:53. So issue zero was built with no ads and no traditional cover, a decision he calls foundational rather than a marketing gimmick 00:09:14. The workaround for revenue isn’t absent, it’s just moved: brands support Prototype through McKim’s separate design studio, and money from that studio underwrites the publication, so commerce and editorial independence are kept in different rooms entirely 00:10:40.

The object that made this tangible before a single page went public was a chair. McKim released an image of an aluminum garden chair, made to order with the designer Pierre Castagnola, before showing anything from the magazine itself, precisely because he wanted the product-first identity to register before the editorial did 00:04:01. He’d originally wanted it cast in platinum, floated half-jokingly as an attempt to make the most expensive garden chair possible, before landing on aluminum for practical reasons 00:06:33. The chair is also, pointedly, the only thing in the entire issue that resembles an ad — a photo of the object and a URL, nothing else 00:04:20.

Structurally, Prototype isn’t one publication so much as twelve zines bound together, each with its own cover, each sellable on its own, which lets McKim sidestep the political minefield of choosing a single cover star or a single hierarchy of talent 00:09:29. That format traces directly back to a section called Artist in Residence that he built at ID Magazine during the pandemic, essentially discovering that if he handed over pages to an artist and let them run, something more alive came out of it than a conventional feature could produce 00:11:44. Prototype, in his telling, is that idea scaled up and freed from a corporate parent — including a standalone Tom Sachs zine built around his Chanel workshop project, made possible only because there was simply too much material to fold into anything smaller 00:09:52.

The Venice red carpet as a shared performance, not a velvet rope

Amanda Dobbins’s central observation about the Venice Film Festival is that its glamour is structurally different from a fashion show’s, because Venice deliberately mixes closed industry access with tickets anyone can buy. Journalists and industry professionals move through accredited screenings, but ordinary festivalgoers can also purchase seats to the same gala premieres the celebrities walk into, meaning the room genuinely contains people in couture standing next to people in cargo shorts 00:28:52. That openness, she argues, is what makes Venice feel less like an inner sanctum and more like a public performance everyone has agreed to participate in together 00:32:20.

The standing ovation is the clearest example of the show being staged in plain sight while everyone still plays along. Dobbins and Sherman describe watching audience members clap for many minutes after the Primetime premiere and later learning that people literally time these ovations for headline purposes, with insiders acknowledging the whole ritual is understood industry-wide to be theater rather than a genuine signal of a film’s quality 00:31:46. What struck Dobbins most was the physical intimacy of it — no elevated stage, just people standing shoulder to shoulder on a balcony clapping at each other, a scene she found funnier the more she watched people encourage each other to keep it going 00:31:39.

On the red carpet itself, both hosts noted this year lacked the singular star-power flashpoint of past festivals — the reference point being Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s reunion appearance years earlier, versus this year’s crop of respected-but-lower-wattage names like John Malkovich and the cast of Wild Horse Nine 00:39:38. Sherman singled out Malkovich’s Dior look as the week’s standout precisely because it read as personal style rather than dutiful ambassador dressing 00:40:41, while both agreed the Kendall Jenner Peggy Guggenheim-themed look didn’t work, less because of the dress and more because of a shared aversion to costume-y theme dressing generally 00:41:13.

Dries Van Noten’s Fondazione makes an argument for craft over spectacle

The exhibition Dries Van Noten curated at his newly opened Fondazione, titled around the idea that beauty itself is the only real protest, was built to make an argument rather than simply display objects. Of the makers included, only three are fashion designers — Rei Kawakubo, Christian Lacroix, and a recent Central Saint Martins graduate — set alongside jewelers, sculptors, and furniture makers, a curatorial choice Sherman read as a deliberate statement about where fashion actually sits relative to other forms of making 00:49:27. Van Noten personally walked Sherman and Dobbins through the show, and the phrase that stuck with both of them was his framing of the connective tissue across every object as things being made by hand — a simple description that Dobbins felt reoriented her sense of what capital-A art actually requires beyond inspiration 00:52:02.

Dobbins pushed this further, arguing that the exhibition reminded her that art, whatever its reputation for divine spontaneity, is inseparable from execution, engineering, and follow-through, and that this practical, unglamorous labor is itself a legitimate source of inspiration rather than a mere prerequisite for it 00:51:38. That framing directly answers a question Sherman had been chewing on from an earlier conversation with Eugene Rabkin about whether fashion counts as art or design — the Fondazione’s answer, in effect, is that the distinction matters less than the seriousness of the process behind the object 00:49:21.

What surprised Sherman most was learning that Van Noten still actively watches student runway shows, well past the point in his career where he’d need to for professional reasons, and that this is precisely how he found the young Central Saint Martins designer strong enough to be placed alongside Lacroix and Kawakubo 00:53:30. She read this as evidence that Van Noten still, in his own words, believes in fashion as a discipline, even as Sherman’s own reporting has repeatedly chronicled how the business side of the industry has hollowed out the traditional role of the designer 00:53:36.

The LVMH Prize ceremony and the shrinking centrality of the designer

The LVMH Prize ceremony became an unlikely viral moment when Jennifer Lawrence, presenting the awards in a Dior jacket, joked that fashion functions like fascism, sending Jonathan Anderson into a visible, extended fit of laughter that Sherman compares to the famous Oscar reaction shot when La La Land was mistakenly announced as the winner over Moonlight 00:57:01. The moment mattered less for the joke itself than for what it revealed: all of the house’s top designers were required to physically line up behind the joke, on camera, as company representatives rather than individual stars 00:57:28.

Sherman argues this ceremony crystallizes a broader shift in how power flows through the luxury industry. Where once designers like John Galliano were built into personalities bigger than the brand, generating the cultural attention that built LVMH’s houses in the first place, the current arrangement inverts that relationship: designers now show up, perform their role, and serve a company identity that is bigger than any individual name 01:05:37. A former LVMH executive told Sherman as much directly — that this ceremony, unlike prior eras, is now organized around executives rather than creative talent, with designers essentially attending to do their job rather than to be the show 01:05:19.

Not every viral moment from the day sat well with Sherman, though. She drew a hard line at Stella McCartney’s selfie with Bernard Arnault and his family, comparing it unfavorably to Ellen DeGeneres’s famous 2014 Oscars selfie and arguing it read as the visual proof of an industry that has consolidated past the point of good taste — she’d have preferred something as formal as a photograph with the Pope over a casual selfie with the man controlling most of the luxury sector 01:01:28. Even so, she and Dobbins agreed the overall spectacle — the memes, Anderson’s laughter, the awkward staged warmth between generations of Celine designers — suggests fashion is finally opening itself into the kind of public pop-culture moment that film awards shows have had for a century, and floated the idea that LVMH, Kering, Chanel, and Hermès might do well to formalize and elevate a shared industry-wide award rather than leaving the LVMH Prize as the only real analogue 01:03:16.

What Virginie Viard’s memoir might — or might not — reveal

News that Virginie Viard, Chanel’s creative director from Karl Lagerfeld’s death until 2024, is publishing a memoir in France on September 30th caught both hosts by surprise, partly because her five-year tenure ended without any public explanation and partly because the marketing rollout appears to be timed deliberately close to Chanel’s next runway show 01:06:30. The book’s framing — described in its promotional copy as an intimate answer taking the form of a story of emancipation — leaves open whether it will actually address the circumstances of her abrupt exit or simply narrate her creative partnership with Lagerfeld and her years running the ateliers on Rue Cambon 01:07:23. Sherman is skeptical it will be dramatic in the tabloid sense, though she notes the timing and the notably stark cover design suggest the publisher knows exactly what narrative appetite it’s playing into, given how visibly Viard’s successor Matthieu Blazy has reignited cultural interest in the house 01:08:21.

What Sherman actually wants from the book has little to do with palace intrigue and everything to do with the business machinery behind Chanel — she hopes for insight into how the Wertheimer family, which has privately owned Chanel for roughly a century, has actually run the company, since so much of the public record so far comes from Bruno Pavlovsky’s press interviews rather than from anyone inside the creative side 01:13:32. She goes as far as to argue that Chanel’s ownership structure and longevity deserve the kind of serious case-study treatment business schools give to companies like LVMH, precisely because Chanel’s independence from the conglomerate era is itself the anomaly worth explaining 01:14:20.

Dobbins, notably, admits she has no personal nostalgia to bring to the book, since Viard’s Chanel never registered for her the way the current Blazy moment has, complete with its own wave of new-designer narrative energy across the industry 01:11:27. That gap between the two hosts — one grounded in the brand’s business history, the other responding purely to the cultural moment a design era creates — is left unresolved, with Sherman guessing the book will land more with French readers steeped in Chanel as cultural fabric than with an American audience more interested in the brand than in who happens to design for it 01:14:48.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.