On Style And On Paper Magazine 20th Anniversary

[faust]

Here is a good piece from an ever-witty, sarcastic, and precise Guy Trebay reflecting on what an aesthetically pathetic world we live in...

From NY Times:

Two Decades Uncovering the Next New Thing
By GUY TREBAY

What is the next big thing? That Fuji blimp of a question tends to hover in the air over the fashion world, never more ominously than at the kickoff of the twice-yearly New York Fashion Week, which starts on Wednesday. Compulsory novelty is a given in fashion, of course. But is it always a good thing?

Possibly not, said Alex de Betak, the fashion producer turned furniture designer, in what amounts to a fashion koan.

"The problem," Mr. de Betak once told this reporter, "is that there are so many designers and stylists trying to find the next new thing first that the new thing is already the old thing by the time anyone hears about it, because everybody is already onto something that's the newer new."

Few people have kept a closer watch on the new over the past two decades than Kim Hastreiter, an editor of Paper magazine. Paper recently celebrated its 20th anniversary with a commemorative issue and a book, "20 Years of Style: The World According to Paper" (Harper Design, 2004) that is a compendium of every trend that was new once, or even more often if you factor in revivals.

By now anyone of a certain age (that would be middle age) has come to the realization that the funky and lush bohemian New York that gave rise to The SoHo Weekly News, the alternative paper that was Paper's forerunner, has gone the way of cheap rents and Danceteria. Yes, creative stuff still manages to get done here despite an urban landscape grown as homogeneous in its boring chic as the Friday night look-alikes in the meatpacking district. Yes, bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs still find a way to get heard, too, although, let's face it, Blondie they are not.

And, yes, offbeat little fashion careers are also still possible here, with the emphasis on little. But even designers resigned to their own insider status have trouble hanging on these days. A couple of seasons ago, the designer Maria Cornejo became an unexpected and impressive addition to a Fashion Week calendar dominated by luxury brand behemoths and glorified stylists whose designs amount to little more, as the columnist Josh Patner once put it in Slate, "than a front and a back and maybe a zipper on the side seam, if they're feeling creative."

Yet economics made it impossible for Ms. Cornejo to continue showing as part of Fashion Week and so she retreated to her fine small shop, Zero, in NoLIta, there to await discovery. Economics are only part of the problem, however. It is not just big money but the insidiousness of good taste that has conspired to sap New York of creative juice, according to Ms. Hastreiter, who, along with her coeditor David Hershkovits, has presided over Paper through the Pyramid Club years, the hip-hop era, logomania, the invasion of the Atlanta drag queens and the ongoing crypt-movie serial that is vintage.

Paper was never the rag of record for the mainstream rag trade. But it was a journal that counted if one was tracking the intersection of uptown and downtown, formerly so organic a part of social New York that Mick Jagger memorialized it lyrically and repeatedly. Uptown and downtown do not get together much lately, except perhaps during Craigslist hookups. And boring hip tastefulness has become a kind of wallpaper, or even Wallpaper, one might say.

"I was in Chicago recently and there are Eames chairs in the airport!" said a shocked Ms. Hastreiter. "You can get espresso everywhere. There's just too much good taste in the world." Yet Ms. Hastreiter would not have lasted two decades at the vanguard of trend-spotting without a dose of Tony Robbins-style optimism. And she certainly has that.

"The new doesn't just happen, boom!" she explained last week, as she headed to Barneys to check out the store's windows, which are dedicated to Paper's anniversary.

She added, "Subcultures don't come around reliably every year, but they do come around." "The next big thing will probably start up in a garage somewhere with people who are totally fed up with everything that's going on," Ms. Hastreiter said. "It will come from people we've never heard of who, like, totally hate everything that went before."

 

[metal-on-metal]

I agree with the statements about "too much good taste" and trend overload.

Paper, however, has no room to b*tch about mediocrity and a lack of new blood in NYC. If they feature Ben Cho, Zaldy, or Chloe Sevigny one more time I think I may jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Christ!

 

[softgrey]

well...that article sounds very familiar...we've had some of that discussion right here...and the whole 'good taste' issue is what i call the 'oprah-fication' of america...
i blame her for doing all these spots on style and stuff...and now everyy middle american housewife who watches her also watches dr phil...and it's all one homogenous mass...market...

 

[faust]

Originally posted by metal-on-metal@Sep 8 2004, 11:18 PM
I agree with the statements about "too much good taste" and trend overload.

Paper, however, has no room to b*tch about mediocrity and a lack of new blood in NYC. If they feature Ben Cho, Zaldy, or Chloe Sevigny one more time I think I may jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Christ!

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lmao . I've actually never looked at the magazine, I just like Trebay's writing.

Softie, don't forget a certain criminal named Martha

 

[luvkoshi]

Paper's cool

I think that article also serves to define the thrill of fashion.. it's the rush of being on the edge of the future, of making a new statement or, hopefully, inventing something all your own that keeps it interesting- as well as that slight bit of panic at the prospect of not-quite-pulling-it-off