The hard truth about journalism, from Eugene Rabkin

It’s noon, and we’re in a slightly hipster café in Paris. I’m waiting for Eugene Rabkin, a fashion journalist known for the independent fashion media platform he founded in 2006, StyleZeitgeist, and for the eponymous podcast. He says about himself: “I was born in the USSR. At the age of fifteen I came to New York, where I still live, to pursue the American dream. It took ten years of soulless Wall St. existence for me to realize that the dream sucks. I said goodbye to all that and found my passion in writing about fashion and culture.” When he enters the room, I don’t notice him at first, but his all-black outfit should have given me a clue, you wouldn’t expect a different colour from an avant-garde enthusiast with a long-standing partnership with Rick Owens. We order a cappuccino and start talking. An hour later, we’re still talking. No fashion journalist has ever been so honest with me, especially knowing that I was recording. This must be what it feels like, I think to myself—building a career and following where you’re no longer afraid of losing anything by being truthful. This must be what it’s like to be truly independent, accountable only to your own words. The power of words, something we’ve forgotten in a culturally schizophrenic society, where we no longer have time to look, analyze, and form a thought, let alone an opinion. In fashion journalism, it seems we’ve lost the right to an opinion, or maybe it’s been deceitfully taken away. With Rabkin, we took the right amount of time to understand where and when this happened, and whether there’s hope to fix it. 

In an interview, you mentioned a time when a designer’s pieces could only be understood by those who listened to a certain kind of music, those who were part of a specific culture. Only those familiar with that culture and music could catch the references and understand the aesthetics of the designer. Nowadays, that genuine connection seems completely blurred. Do you agree? 

I just finished writing a chapter of the book I'm working on about this. I think that over the past 20 years, the relationship between fashion and culture has gone from symbiotic to parasitic, where fashion—especially luxury—clings to the arts to create meaning. All of a sudden, for example, we take literature to give meaning to clothes that no longer have any because they’re just commodities. When the relationship was symbiotic, there was a genuine connection between the designer, artist, musician, or whoever it was. Today, that rarely happens, and it’s a very sad story because I fell in love with fashion when I realized there could be genuine cultural connections between fashion, music, art, and literature. Before that, I thought fashion existed only to show off status, which, nonetheless, is absolutely true. 

I think some brands are trying, maybe out of nostalgia, to recreate that connection, almost rebuilding the subculture from the outside, but in an artificial way. 

I think it’s all fake, and you can tell. You see, it’s the typical postmodern attitude. Because there’s no historicity, you don’t remember, you don’t know where things come from. You don’t know history. So all you can do is plunder the past for aesthetic cues, and you create this pastiche, because you don’t know where things come from. I founded the StyleZeitgeist Academy in 2023 for this reason, the same reason I have taught criticism and fashion writing at Parsons, so that students would have the tools to understand and analyze reality. All these companies making cold calculations based on consumer data - another expression of a neoliberal mentality, where a non-human entity like a brand is given human traits. And the fact that kids can’t distinguish real from fake is a victory for neoliberalism. It’s a victory for late capitalism. In other words, companies exist for one reason only: to make money. They answer only to their shareholders. They don’t answer to anyone else. Everything else is PR. 

I’m curious to ask you, as an independent media, do you think that a media platform backed by an agency, that works directly with brands, can still provide genuine criticism, or if it ever could, for that matter? No negative comments on any show, personal dislikes justified only by some slight or failed deal. Do all magazines follow the same script? 

It’s not possible if you’re in the situation you just described, where you constantly have to work with brands. Because brands today have become incredibly sensitive about their image, and it wasn’t like that before. Everyone forgets what criticism is for. Criticism exists because the goal is to improve things. We just need to go back to recognizing this very simple point. 

And will that ever happen? 

I think everyone will realize it soon. We’re in the middle of this realization—that if fashion becomes boring, that applies to the entire industry. It was Galliano and McQueen who made LVMH interesting, not the other way around. The kids—who are the aspirational customer, the core —they’re realizing it, moving away from fashion by choosing to buy vintage. This should send a signal to the entire industry: you’re not doing exciting things, and if you keep making boring things, you’ll lose people because no one likes to have their intelligence insulted. 

I think this uniformity we see in campaigns, in collections, all these white backgrounds with huge logos and ordinary clothes, is a clear sign that creative directors are scared—scared to have a vision, to take a stand. All this nostalgia because they’re afraid of the future. 

And do you know why they’re afraid? Because they want to appeal to the largest possible number of people, and you end up with this boring, bland mass. 

Journalism, too, has become a boring, bland mass. 

The rise of influencers is killing the editorial side. There’s no more journalism; there’s only “content.” And when people confuse journalism and “content,” it’s a serious problem because content is not journalism. I just came from a show before sitting down at this café—I was stunned by the number of influencers in the front row and editors in the second row. I was fascinated by how many people were looking at their phone screens while filming instead of looking at the clothes. But that’s their job—their job is to record and broadcast to the audience, not to think. What brands want is a broadcasting channel, an amplification of their message. They don’t want any kind of response. They don’t want any kind of intelligent conversation. But do influencers really sell? Indeed, I have a question for influencers: if your entire audience is made up of 13-year-olds, who exactly are you planning to sell those expensive clothes you’re filming to? 

Let’s talk about independent journalism and new media. I know you’re using Patreon a lot, while in Europe, we might be using Substack more. How are you finding it? 

I love Substack, and I’m glad it exists. It allows journalists to bypass the magazine system and speak directly to their audience. Now the task becomes: how do you build a following without the backing of a magazine? But it can clearly happen—just think of Amy Odell, for example. I’ve never been against the internet in general. I’ve never been against these platforms. I mean, it’s the reason I’m here. At the end of the day, the issue is about the quality of journalism. The next generation of journalists may use Substack. The big issue here is: how will they make a living? I think young people aren’t used to paying for the content they want to consume. Young people need to be educated that for the price of a cup of coffee (French, not Italian), you can support a writer on Substack, contributing to a journalistic ecosystem that can become richer thanks to you. 

To conclude: a piece of advice for young people (designers, creatives, thinkers). 

Take your laptop and throw it at the nearest body of water. Go to the library, go to a bookstore. You’ll discover incredible things.