I came across this old interview with Stefano Pilati (still in his reign at YSL) where he discusses the validity of fashion as part of a contemporary culture. It’s a fascinating, or more so, a perspective shifting discourse addressing, and I think admitting, the fashion industry as a system, a corporation; and its “deified” designers recycling old concepts and following a particular language to feed people’s dreams. At one point, he explains the fateful placement of designer figures at the center of the brand, the face of the entire system—which is questionably inauspicious when one’s private excess clashes in the public sphere (i.e. the tragic fall of Galliano at Dior)—while there are actually hundreds of people and whole factories involved, and unseen. He talks about why he designs a certain way and why only a specific way is understood. Defining true elegance as ”not showing off”, he make us think about the doubtful existence of elegance today. “Fashion is not fashion anymore,” Pilati exhausts. But because we are, in a sense, romantics, we want to continue to believe in it.