Is Counterculture in Fashion Still Possible?: An Interview with Eugene Rabkin The founder of StyleZeitgeist tells us everything that cannot be said out loud

There’s a generation of fashion critics who have seen better times. Literally. In the 1990s and into the early 2000s they lived through a different kind of fashion: freer to take risks, more independent, more accessible, more imaginative. Today things have changed a great deal. Between investment funds and quarterly reports, entire administrative departments that have descended on the creative world with all the chill of bureaucracy, and economic obstacles springing up on every side, fashion has entered a new and strange phase in which this dream factory has progressively lost its soul.

We notice it every time the runways fill up with names, hype and collaborations, and every time we ask ourselves, with a mixture of weariness and nostalgia, where that uncomfortable and rare thing once called vision has gone. Few observers have managed to bring this disorientation into focus with the sharp lucidity of Eugene Rabkin, founder of the magazine StyleZeitgeist and for years a dissenting voice in a system that prefers compliments to uncomfortable questions. After many years spent in the trenches of fashion, Rabkin has published his first book, Torn: Fashion And Postmodernism, in which he offers a comprehensive and unified look at a global industry whose mechanisms he has had the chance to explore at length. The volume is published by Zer0 Books, the London-based publishing house founded by the late philosopher Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative.

This interview, which we publish today, actually dates back some time: we conducted it precisely when Rabkin was writing his book, as he himself told us, and it seemed natural to present it in this new context now that, with the new volume, Rabkin’s discourse has found its most complete home. His theses on postmodernism as a key to understanding the creative impoverishment of the sector, on the short-circuit between image and substance, on the power that has eroded authorship anticipated with surgical precision a debate that today, between one red carpet and another, we hear erupting again at every fashion week.

Rereading it now means discovering how little, in the end, has changed and how much we still need voices willing to call things by their proper names.