Youth has the power, Barack Obama recently wrote in Time magazine, ‘to see the world anew; to reject the old constraints, outdated conventions and cowardice too often dressed up as wisdom’. Words that seem to reflect much of what is currently driving the fashion industry. In the six months since System’s last issue, it feels like fashion’s constraints, conventions and cowardice have been challenged. Preparing the foundations for a new era, as exemplified by our Gen-Z cover star Sadie Sink. But historically speaking, generational change is often a bumpy and uncertain ride, and right now seems no exception. With this in mind, we set out to explore the idea of passing the baton – wilfully or otherwise – in this issue.
Firstly, incoming Dior Homme artistic director Kim Jones met with Undercover mastermind Jun Takahashi in Tokyo. In their conversation, Jones mentions the excitement of discovering the world of Undercover while working in a streetwear warehouse as a student. Takahashi then spoke with Nobu Kitamura, his spiritual ‘elder brother’ and the founder of one of Japan’s original streetwear brands Hysteric Glamour. Nobu arrived with a photo from a 1988 party for his label: in the background, a teenage Jun in a Hysteric Glamour T-shirt on the night the fashion bug bit. Proof that inspiration can pass between generations – Nobu to Jun to Kim – and just how important it is for established designers to send the elevator from the ivory tower back down to the ground floor.
Another long-time influence on Jun, Vivienne Westwood has, unsurprisingly, a less orthodox passing-the-baton story. In Alexander Fury’s tender and revealing feature, Westwood and her husband Andreas Kronthaler openly discuss how their 30-year love story has blossomed into something new, inevitable, and perhaps, taboo: a business succession plan for, as Westwood deadpans, ‘when I die’.
On the other side of the world, Anna Wintour’s Condé Nast environment in New York has stereotypically been depicted as one of corporate elitism and fear. Phillip Picardi, the 26-year old behind Them, Condé Nast’s new LGBTQ platform, paints an altogether different picture: one with Wintour enthusiastically championing new media voices culturally light years from her own long reign as Vogue’s be-shaded ‘editrix’.
Meanwhile, much has been said of late about the questionable practices in the making of fashion imagery. But beyond the obvious, necessary shifts in conduct, we’ve been asking ourselves a logical if uneasy next question: ‘What’s the future for nudity and sexualized imagery in fashion?’ Sixty young designers, photographers, stylists, models and others rapidly becoming fashion’s new establishment shared their thoughts.
And finally, to this issue’s cover star, Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink. Conspicuously not an established fashion designer nor an authority on where the industry’s going: simply a talented, just-turned 16-year-old actress, experiencing the realities of entering a new age while navigating the turbulence of public exposure. Fragile, yet powerful – the embodiment of these, our stranger times.