Re: The Fit, The Fab and The Face: Outfit and Inspo Thread
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Leaving this here - long read, but I think it's inspiring (kindness) and something to think about. Even with the recent passing
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Leaving this here - long read, but I think it's inspiring (kindness) and something to think about. Even with the recent passing of Giorgio Armani, it's a reminder that looking good and feeling good is for everyone.When Cruelty Is In Style, the Most Promising Fashion Pushes BackFresh off her book about Virgil Abloh, Robin Givhan reflects on designers who embrace optimism and communityBy Robin GivhanPublished: Sep 10, 2025For a little sliver of recent history, fashion seemed to be creative and welcoming, as well as increasingly profitable. In short, fashion was everything that most anyone could want it to be. It wasn’t perfect—far from it. But it seemed to be making real strides toward being the best possible version of itself.The body-positivity movement successfully pushed for a range of physiques to be celebrated on the runway, in advertising, and in magazines. Corporate gatekeepers were making a conscious effort to open the doors to those who had been historically marginalized. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were desirable aspects of the cultural conversation. Gender was a big, beautiful, blurry spectrum. And Virgil Abloh’s rise, from 2013 until his death in 2021 at the age of 41, was proof that if fashion only widened its aperture, a lot of talent on the periphery would come into focus.Fashion exuded optimism, and optimism looked good.I’ve spent the last two years devoting much of my time to understanding the fashion world that Virgil Abloh created. Abloh, of course, was the first Black artistic director for Louis Vuitton menswear and the founder of Off-White. He made history and broke barriers, all while helping a great many disenfranchised people who loved fashion, who especially adored its big designer brands, feel as though they were part of an exclusive universe. He somehow managed to make the rarefied feel welcoming.Abloh’s incredibly short but impactful career was the subject of my research, which resulted in Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. The book is a biography but also a cultural history of the changes within the fashion landscape that allowed Abloh—who hadn’t gone to design school, boasted a long list of apprenticeships, or been the scion of a fabulously wealthy family—to succeed.There were many reasons for Abloh’s success. The first, of course, was that he was talented. The others had to do with the rising importance of menswear, sneakers, social media, and Black men in the fashion ecosystem. But a significant contributing factor to Abloh’s success was his sense of optimism.“A little bit of how I got to where I’m at, I’m even keel. I’m also an optimist. I do believe the world can be a better place. I formally say yes to that,” Abloh once said.Abloh understood that optimism was foundational to the clothes he created—some great, a lot just okay, and others that were, well, not good—but, more importantly, it was fundamental to the way in which he engaged with his customers. If he could achieve, they could achieve. He relished his success, but he delighted in the success of others with undeniable gusto. His Instagram page was akin to a group chat about creativity and possibility. Abloh was nice. This was the word, more than any other, that people used to describe him to me. Kindness was his currency, and it was a down payment on his achievement.“I’m not saying that Abloh was successful because he was nice,” said Fraser Cooke, who worked with Abloh on a sneaker collaboration at Nike. “He seemed to be genuinely open and evenhanded with everyone.”“I think that made people warm to him and want to work with him,” Cooke told me. “And unfortunately, not so many people are like that. It’s very special.”Indeed, kindness is rarer than it need be in fashion. But right now, it’s in short supply for the whole country. We are moving deeper into a presidential administration that brags about its meanness. The modern tech industry is less interested in subscribing to a motto that once warned, “Don’t be evil” and now seems perfectly happy to break both things and people. Along with these political and business shifts, the aesthetic mood has taken a turn too. It’s moved toward gender stereotypes with tradwives and the misogynistic villainy of the manosphere. Money has become a measure of human value rather than a form of security and a means to buying cool stuff that brings delight.Meanness has ceased being an unfortunate by-product of striving for a pot of gold; it’s become the point of the journey itself. Many images exemplify the current political, social, and aesthetic climate, but one of the most searing involves Kristi Noem and a gold watch.Noem is the secretary of Homeland Security, which is the governmental agency tasked with overseeing the Trump administration’s goal of deporting some 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day. Attempts to reach that number have involved masked federal agents corralling men and women on the street, in parking lots, and during traffic stops. Housing these detainees has proved challenging. Before the administration unveiled Alligator Alcatraz—a somewhat wobbly detention center constructed amid the Florida Everglades, with its hurricanes, mosquitoes, and aforementioned reptiles—much of the public’s attention was focused on the government’s decision to send its detainees to an enormous warehouse prison in El Salvador known as the Terrorism Confinement Center.“FASHION is truly fashion when it INSPIRES US to be more AUTHENTICALLY OURSELVES rather than some PRESCRIBED version.”As Noem toured the Latin American facility and talked to the gathered media about crime, deportation, and immigration, she was wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt, gray drawstring trousers, a Homeland Security baseball cap … and an 18-karat-gold watch that sells for roughly $50,000.The watch might have gone unnoticed, but Noem recorded a video in which she stood in front of a cellblock filled with prisoners stacked on top of one another like cords of wood. As she warned migrants who might be considering coming to the United States that the Salvadoran prison could well be their fate, light reflected off of the watch’s gold band. Her brown hair cascaded past her shoulders in Utah curls. And her makeup was camera-ready, if not downright glamorous.There was something vicious in Noem’s flirtations with old-fashioned Breck-girl glossiness and her display of wealth. Everything about Noem’s appearance delivered the message that not only was she more privileged than the imprisoned men, she was also more human. She was all-American, the way it used to be defined back in the 1950s. The prisoners staring into the camera had had their heads shaved. Many of them were shirtless. Those who were fully clothed wore white prison uniforms whose overarching purpose is to destroy any sense of individuality and autonomy.Over the years, there’ve been a lot of fashion trends that gave those who embraced them a 🤬 froideur. Fashion has churned through all sorts of buttoned-up, trussed-up styles that were meant to convey wealth and status and s3x appeal but also had the effect of glazing the wearer in ice. I’m thinking back to the Masters of the Universe era, with its social X-rays and its Wall Street titans. The clothes back then, the power ties and Armani suits, as well as the Christian Lacroix poufs, were about extravagance and power, but there was also something louche and, well, good-humored about them. They were a celebration of personal success.Now the clothes seem to be celebrating others’ failures or their inability to measure up to a backward standard of femininity or masculinity or patriotism. Or whatever.The tech bros of the past reveled in their ability to move through the halls of power as schlumpily as they liked. Those hoodies and saggy jeans suggested a kind of idealism about power—that it shouldn’t be passed along through bloodlines, that it didn’t have to be bound up in traditions and assumptions, that it could be nimble and aimed at opening the world and connecting people across boundaries. But so many of the tech leaders have now draped themselves in MAGA meanness—a style of dress that is almost cartoonish in its malevolence.During the height of his slashing of government programs and jobs, Elon Musk stood onstage at a conference for conservative activists in his Dark MAGA baseball cap and held up a chainsaw like a trophy. Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook has made distinguishing between fact and disinformation increasingly more difficult, has given himself a makeover. Now, instead of looking like an idealistic adolescent with a crew cut and wearing a hoodie, he’s grown out his hair, he wears a gold medallion engraved with a Jewish prayer he sings to his children at bedtime, and he occasionally wears a gold chain that he said was gifted to him by the rapper T-Pain. The combination gives the effect of cosplaying a cyber tough guy—not a dad prepping for an evening lullaby. And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos long ago transformed from a bookish entrepreneur into a sunglass-wearing, tight-T-shirt-sporting, pumped-up billionaire who has insinuated that all the regulations aimed at protecting the environment, the less fortunate, and democracy as we know it have somehow held back financial growth in this, the richest of all countries.Meanness is in style. Cruelty has become a kind of aesthetic flourish. So many of the cultural references touch on strict gender iconography. Women: long flowing hair, formfitting dresses in bright colors, heels, jewelry, big furs, tight dresses. Men: power suits, pomaded hair, guns (whether biceps or otherwise), red ties, red ties, red ties.But fashion is truly fashion when it inspires us to be more authentically ourselves rather than some prescribed version. Fashion is at its best when it pushes back against pessimism and celebrates optimism, when it finds inspiration in outsiders—the eccentrics and goofballs—not the privileged.Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowThe most memorable recent collections have come from designers who aim to delight their audiences with quirkiness and youthful energy. Or those who embrace the seriousness of the times but also express a stubborn belief that the way forward is with determination and kindness.Jonathan Anderson approached his Dior debut for the Spring 2026 menswear collection with respect for the house’s history but a willingness to be playful with it, to mix Easter-egg colors into Dior gray, to not get bogged down with gender traditions, to leaven fussiness with ease. It was a collection that left you wanting to lean in to see everything in greater detail. Willy Chavarria’s beautiful Spring 2026 collection, also shown in Paris in June, dramatically acknowledged the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants. To the strains of “California Dreamin’,” sung in both English and Spanish, Black and brown models in oversize white T-shirts walked down the runway and knelt in formation like so many deportees had been forced to do after they were shipped off to prison without due process. But the collection, which was titled Huron, after the Mexican-American designer’s hometown in California’s San Joaquin Valley, also included elegant, confident men and women in shades of sunshine yellow, persimmon, and teal. It celebrated the swagger, vibrancy, and optimism inherent in being of recent immigrant stock. Fashion is at its most remarkable when it helps amplify, rather than drown out, that tiny voice in the back of your mind saying that just maybe, a dream can become reality.Abloh knew that to be true. For a long time, he was an outsider peering into a glamorous, cool, sophisticated world. He loved fashion, not because it made him feel more powerful than others or better than anyone else. He loved it because it made him feel like he was part of a community. A community built on optimism. Something that’s not only good for fashion, it’s also good for the soul.This story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.©2025 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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