Fashion criticism is now dead according to Tim Blanks

«I was never a fashion person, I will always choose music over fashion,» says Tim Blanks sitting in a beautiful greenish marble-floor room of Villa Favard, where Fiorella Favard de Langlade used to host artists’ meetings in 18thcentury Florence.  Immersed in this artistic context, together with the Business of Fashion’s editor at large we talked about his views of the future of fashion both as a business and as a creative escape for young artists to flourish, the funniest part of a fashion conversation in which he is actively partaking as a mentor of the prestigious Fashion Writing and Curation Master Course by Polimoda in Florence. Contextualization, unpredictability, and the death of criticism are the main highlights of this interview I have the pleasure to call a conversation.

Approaching his career as a fashion writer, Blanks used to work with people who are nowadays considered the icons of an age that still inspires creativity, for which he is very grateful. But the thing that kept him working for years in the fashion industry was its unpredictability, a value that only exists thanks to the beautiful creative minds that build this system from its foundations, before billions of dollars began to revolve around products and creativity. Blanks has a radical view on what fashion after the pandemic needs in order to protect this unpredictable vital power and keep it relevant and interesting: «Fashion after the pandemic is not as thrilling as it used to be, it's a bigger machine with less personality now, with trends and “cores” popping up every minute. How about apocalypse-core? This strain of humankind is ending, whatever is here on earth 50 years from now will be so different. I feel there will come a time when billionaire status won't be the goal when we’ll come back to tailors, dressmaking, cobblers, and fashion will go back to being a village rather than a jumbo empire. But I think we'll need some kind of  apocalypse to get back in contact with nature.»

Like any overloaded system that is killing the planet and becoming always less relevant to the eyes of the non-fashion community, fashion needs change. Fashion has always been built on change, but the change it actually needs comes from the foundation of the system, its core: talented designers and people who are able to communicate their values to a wider public. The time of fashion magazines driving opinion and communicating the enchantment of fashion is not finished yet, but it's changing in structure: everything is going digital, runway reviews matter less, and printed magazines will become precious fetish objects to treasure. But what about the label of fashion critic today, the one Blanks has been identified with since the era of Style.com? «To understand the role of a fashion critic, you have to be clear about what a critic should do, that is give people a sense of something to guide them in their decisions, give them tools to form a personal opinion.  Maybe that leads to better understanding, maybe it even makes the buy something. But I think criticism in the sense of ranking someone's work as  good or bad is dead nowadays. I might say something is brilliant, but I would never presume to say something sucks. That has never been my style.» In this context, I suggested Blanks to see The Menu, the recent Mark Mylod movie that is in line with his tabula rasa concept to overcome the constricting establishment and dusty standards creatives have to respond to, to be considered relevant.  It's a movie about death, and especially about the death of criticism, the same thing Blanks is talking about. Together we agreed that in the age of digital dominance, guided by the tons of content we get bombarded with every day, there is the big need to respect others' creativity as the only way to build meaningful conversations and allow young talented designers and writers to build a new environment where the role of fashion can evolve. This can be done only through empathizing with the objects and the concepts of fashion one comes in contact with.

«It is all about finding a point of contact with what you’re watching, thinking relatively,  it’s the curiosity with which you approach life.  But you can’t grab it if you don’t have it to begin with». So says the mentor of the Polimoda ‘s Master in Fashion Writing and Curation about the way of thinking that unites the 4 graduating students who presented their final projects during the Relative Thinking exhibition in the majestic Villa Favard, a soirée which showcased their evolution from students to magazine writers, editors, curators, artists, photo editors and graphic designers. The four editorial projects were printed magazines narrating a concept connected to the students’ inner conflicts and feelings, which vision was brought to life from print to immersive installations at the Villa. The installations aimed to engage the viewer in a multisensorial path towards understanding the student's individual visions, like the “Impossible Conversations” Between past, present and future created by Maria Callaba, or the “Anthe” roundtable happening created by Rhiti Choudhury around the subject of cultural taboos or Heide Julie Halama’s “Body Claim” which scrutinized image and body positivity.   Florina Jacqueline’s  “mUSED” took a startling look at the think line between pleasure and pain.  The way the students wrote and structured their ideas responded to the way Tim Blanks sees fashion nowadays: «When reading about  fashion, you want to understand what the designer wanted to say. And you want to see what the designer wants you to see. Christian Lacroix used to call me his therapist because through my writing he could read in words what the concept he had in his head represented to the world».

Talking about his writing experience, he summarized fashion’s role nowadays, a concept similar to what the Polimoda students followed with their work in helping the reader, and the viewer, to empathize with their point of view and find themselves in it too. Blanks defined the night as a “Biennale Arte” situation, where the primordial steps of  creatives that will perhaps be shaping the industry in the future are shown to a selected audience, able to embrace – and hopefully understand - their views.