February Style News & Reviews
Bri buys and packs for the trip of a lifetime. Jordy interviews Kimbino Universe creator Kim Russell. Elfy chews on the Schiaparelli lion heads. The giveaway is a $150 Emma Lewisham gift voucher!
Good afternoon from my hotel in Queenstown. In another 48 hours I’ll be at sea on a giant icebreaker sailing off the southernmost tip of New Zealand, heading towards Antarctica. ‘Excited’ is an understatement. I feel like I’m on the precipice of one of the most extraordinary adventures of my life. I also feel—despite physically having just departed—an immense sense of arrival. This voyage, this incredible experience, is my job. I’m researching my second novel. I have found a way to make my work take me around the world learning and creating. If someone told me a decade ago that I would be here now I would weep. I’m getting weepy just thinking about it. I wish the word ‘blessed’ hadn’t been so thoroughly dragged through the bougie-hippy mud. I’m awash with gratitude.
I have been told different things by different people about what internet will be available to me throughout my four weeks at sea. I suspect it will come in pockets or windows, and limited megabytes. Paying subscribers will receive whatever dispatches I can manage to send home. Voice memos? All-text dumps? A polaroid of me with a penguin? We’ll see. The giveaways for these Nerd editions will be generous: gorgeous big books from Thames & Hudson Australia related to the trip.
Before we dive into this month’s Style edition, please join me in giving a huge round of applause to our very own Elfy Scott because she’s just published her first book! In March we’ll do a big giveaway of copies of The One Thing We’ve Never Spoken About. In the meantime, follow Elfy on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with her events and the great interviews and articles coming out around the release. Debuting is a super exciting but stressful time, especially with a book full of such important and personal material. We are so so proud of you, Elfy! And I feel very honoured to have you writing for News & Reviews each month!
Okay okay okay, let’s get to the Style goods. It’s a jam-packed edition and the three of us have been bubbling over with ideas since missing January. Here is the freshest of freshly-baked content coming straight from our hearts and brains to your eyeballs:
In my editor’s letter I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to steal from the latest ‘menswear’ trends, about what it means for Robert Pattinson (Batman!) to wear a skirt to Dior, about binaries and spectrums and subverting style expectations, etcetera
Jordy has interviewed the Kimbino Universe creator Kim Russell about how she is basically a digital archivist and artist, blowing our minds and keeping the fashion dream alive with a combination of attitude, taste, and encyclopedic knowledge
In Elfy’s report card we go from the very excellent (who thought KMart would ever take out the top spot?) to the very terrible (stop stealing people’s diabetes medication!)
Great recommendations for things you’ll want to buy that aren’t brand new
My three words have changed, so I’m talking about everything I bought for this trip including my new luggage, a gnarly heirloom, and what I’ve packed and why
What I’d buy if I had $100, $1000, and just for kicks, $10,000
The giveaway is a hugely generous $150 Emma Lewisham gift voucher
This is basically a mini magazine. Being digital means the only thing you’re really paying for is the people who work hard to bring you this excellence—no bulky overheads or shitty PR expenses to cover. And aside from receiving donations from certain brands that allow us to offer you excellent giveaways, Style is totally ad-free and uncompromised and genuine. How good. We love making it; we hope you love getting it!
An Editor’s Letter
First of all, on 11 January Donald Glover at the Golden Globes in a Saint Laurent suit-slash-robe gave me some deep personal revelations. GQ said this year’s Golden Globes show was ‘the year’s first menswear vibe check’ and I agree, because what has followed in the weeks since has been nothing short of inspirational. Everyone is talking about menswear right now and so am I.
Jordy does this wonderful thing on his Instagram stories where he posts his favourite picks from the runway shows, and two I was particularly struck by this month were: Look 2 from the Dries Van Noted Fall ‘23 Menswear show which you can see here with the wide neck and multi-strand belt; and Look 50 from the Rick Owens Fall ‘23 Menswear show you can see here with the cinched-waist hide jacket and wide-leg pants. A third strong look that Jordy shared weeks ago was this one-shoulder grey situation from Fendi that, lo-and-behold, Divya Venkataraman at Vogue Australia just listed as the first of her ‘5 looks I’ll be stealing from the menswear shows this season’. Not! A! Coincidence! Menswear is where it’s at right now!
The Dries look is deceptively simple, but the wide openness of the neck makes the full length of the outer-edges of the collarbones an erogenous zone, and it’s the triple-belt that brings in the faintest whiff of kink, breathing life into a classic black pant. Get a load of this from Vogue’s runway coverage of Rick Owens:
‘He wanted to imbue his collection with an “elaborate modesty,” partially drawn from the British queen’s 19th-century reign. Said the designer: “It’s a Victorian silhouette. There’s a prudishness. We remember that era so much for suppressing sensuality, but doing it in such an elaborate way that you couldn’t help but think about it.”’
Huge wow from me, and much nodding.
After the menswear shows I got an email from Vogue Business saying ‘This season, the men’s shows in Paris and Milan were a big, star-studded spectacle as designers drift away from the co-ed approach.’ And it got me thinking: really? What does that mean? I truly believe the future is non-binary. The waves of feminism that have come before me have taught me that usually if we’re fighting for a version of ‘progress’ that further separates genders, or encourages biological determinism in any way, it’ll be cooked and doomed. So how does this apply to fashion? Alessandro Michele did a lot of heavy lifting removing the binary from Gucci’s creative direction for years. What does it mean to have the binaries of ‘women’s fashion week’ and ‘men’s fashion week’ in place, but have so many women frothing the menswear looks, which are deeply inspired by womenswear elements, right now?
As the now-famous Derek Guy said recently, this is the best thing to happen to menswear in ages.
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