In high school, I plastered the walls of my bedroom floor-to-ceiling with glossy magazine images. One of my favorites was a mid-aughts advertisement from the fashion designer Stella McCartney. It featured a Polaroid image of McCartney herself, probably around age four. She’s bedecked in dozens of necklaces and sitting on the floor with an adorable, albeit rather petulant, expression on her face. I liked how different this ad looked from the slew of others I had up on my wall; there was something deeply personal and almost endearing about it. Being granted a view into a private moment from someone’s childhood was in a way more arresting and shocking than the sexually provocative advertisements that ran elsewhere in magazines. This private expression of someone’s life in a highly public and commercialized sphere also hinted at something universal about the tone of her brand, though at the time I couldn’t put my finger on it. I now realize what it was that grabbed my attention about that photograph and how it speaks to what sets McCartney apart: her brand is dictated by her own steadfast personal values.

While researching for my interview with the designer, I came across something that seemed to confirm her emphasis on leading with what’s meaningful to her. In a 2012 profile in The New York Times Magazine, the designer’s husband Alasdhair Willis says to McCartney that “ultimately, what you offer the market is derived from how you live your life.” Perhaps this ability to hew to her personal values in an immensely public arena isn’t so surprising based on the publicity any child of a celebrity musician receives, no matter how sequestered they were as children. But the result of McCartney’s emphasis on what she believes in can’t be underestimated: to date, Stella McCartney is the longest-running high-end luxury fashion brand that is completely vegetarian.

Her commitment to using leather and fur alternatives is a goal she’s stuck to since her first collection, in 2001, and in this regard, McCartney is a lone island in a sea of brands that espouse ethical intentions, but are far from actually committing to them. I spoke with McCartney about how she weaves her personal values into her public work, what influenced her decision to create a fully vegetarian fashion brand, and how there isn’t that big of a difference between farming and fashion.

Eugenie Dalland: Can you tell me about the first few seconds of inspiration for a collection, garment or project?

Stella McCartney: At the start of the pandemic last year, when we were first getting used to being in isolation, I had the opportunity to reflect about the creative process and how usual it is for artists, musicians, architects and designers to create in isolation. Innovation often comes during times of solitude, and I found myself getting back to those moments. I’m used to working with a team, and I suddenly found myself during these insular moments rediscovering what made me want to be a designer.

ED: How has your creative process changed over the years? What piece of advice would you give your 2001 self?

SM: If I could give any advice to my 2001 self it would be to follow through on your promise: it’s a constant journey, but it will have a massive positive impact. You know, at the beginning, the way I approached fashion wasn’t trendy or cool. I was ridiculed for wanting to work sustainably and people doubted that I would see success without using leather or fur in my designs. By committing to sustainable practices, we have definitely faced challenges and made sacrifices along the way, but I’m proud of how far we have come.

ED: What is something you remember vividly from your time working with tailors on Savile Row?

SM: I remember working with those guys and thinking that they were like the builders of the fashion industry. You know, the nuts and bolts. Making a jacket is really like building a building. I’m constantly referring back to the skills I learned in those three years, and tailoring is and always will be completely part of the Stella McCartney DNA. “Staying power is the most important thing.” I have carried that all through my life. But you also have to be responsible in every way, that’s how you will stand out. I want the way I do business to become the norm in this industry—so I am no longer an exception.

ED: What forthcoming projects are you most excited about?

SM: It’s not a project per se, but one material I’m particularly excited about, that we used in our Winter 2021 collection, is the responsible and traceable wool from regenerative farms. This is an area we are putting a lot of focus on at the moment because we see regenerative agriculture as the future of the fashion industry and a real solution in helping to make the industry more sustainable. Regenerative agriculture is also referred to as “carbon farming” because it increases biodiversity, regenerates topsoil, improves watersheds, enhances ecosystem services and sequesters carbon in soil. The farm we have been working with is based in Australia and has been practicing “Natural Intelligence Farming” for over 10 years now, honing their approach together with leading soil scientists and local indigenous communities, after years of trial-and-error on their lands. They have restored thousands of hectares of degraded lands through their farming practices, and also place animal welfare at the center, which was one of the main reasons we chose to partner with this particular farm.

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“How did you develop your observational skills?” I’m speaking on the phone with renowned culture writer Robin Givhan, fashion critic for The Washington Post, in late July. I’m so curious about her methods that I don’t realize I’ve presented a question that sounds rather like something a student in Journalism 101 might formulate. She doesn’t miss a beat though, and speculates that her skills were perhaps the natural result of a shy demeanor. After a pause, however, she adds that they were also first cultivated as a pleasure, by means of a wonderful, unusual tradition with her father. “He and I used to have this ritual of going to the mall on Christmas Eve day. It wasn’t to go shopping. We’d come up with a random excuse to go—‘We need more ribbon to wrap presents!’— but actually it was just to sit in the mall, have a cup of coffee and watch the chaos. My father is a great people-watcher.”

No individual can be defined as the product of one single experience, but sometimes there are anecdotes from our past that feel symbolic, synthesizing many strands of our pursuits or personality into a sort of archetypal narrative. In a way, sitting patiently in a crowded place defined by furious consumerism is exactly what comprises her work today: Givhan has been writing about the meaning of appearances, particularly in the political sphere, for over twenty-five years. I could easily picture that young woman sitting, drinking coffee, silently pondering a stranger’s mad gestures, another’s frayed overcoat, a businessman’s untied shoelace. Clothing provides us with the subtitles of whatever story it is we’re being told (whether it’s authored by a politician, celebrity, influencer or your neighbor) and Givhan is an expert reader.

She joined the Post in 1995, where her fashion reporting expanded from seasonal collection reviews to the analysis of cultural events, public figures and social phenomena through the lens of clothing. The Detroit-native did not set out with the specific goal of fashion criticism in mind and an early interest in biology nearly guided her to medical school. After receiving her masters in journalism from the University of Michigan, she joined the Detroit Free Press (deferring law school for two years), where she covered the burgeoning techno music scene. When a colleague who covered menswear reporting resigned, Givhan applied for the position, despite having no formal knowledge about the fashion industry. Sometimes an initial lack of acquaintance with a field can serve you well: in the absence of knowing what you’re supposed to do or think, you fill in the blanks with your own intuition.

Today, Givhan’s name is spoken with a kind of whispered respect, and not just by those who work in the rag trade. By fashion insiders, she is appreciated for her straightforward, unapologetic reviews of shows, and by readers from all other backgrounds, she is a welcoming interpreter of a world that sometimes seems to pride itself on not making sense to anyone outside of its glittering, archaic walls.

She is known particularly for her analyses of political figures based on their attire, which zero in on the small, seemingly mundane details and transform them into layered, complex social commentaries—a feat which earned her a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2005. (She is the only fashion writer to ever receive the award.) Equipped with highly refined tools of observation, Givhan draws conclusions that feel not only preternatural in their critical acuity, but also remarkable for the transparency of their logic.

I ask her why she thinks such clarity of method is important for the critic. “If you are offering up an opinion, the greatest gift that you can give to readers is, as they used to say in math class, to show your work. If people can understand how you came to your assessment, then whether or not they think your assessment is correct, they will at least understand why you got there. They might quibble with some of those steps, but if you don’t show them, then you’re sort of giving people this tyrannical rant, that if they disagree with, all they can really do is rant back at you. You create a situation in which you’ve eliminated all the tools that you need for thoughtful conversation or thoughtful debate, and it gets reduced to emotional yelling.”

You might attribute this modus operandi to the simple fact that Givhan writes for a general interest readership; her readers are not necessarily fashion-savvy individuals who already know the key players and are familiar with the context, and therefore more explanations are, naturally, required. But relegating this journalistic standard to mere populist appeal could even be described as hazardous, because it sanctions the desire to rely on one’s personal opinions and emotions for critical analysis without questioning where they come from.

Showing her work doesn’t weaken her delivery: it strengthens it. Givhan talks about our current president’s proclivity not to hire people, but rather to cast them like actors based on whether they look the part, “as in the stereotypical idea of what that part is,” she explains. “It tells you a lot about how the administration values people, and who the administration values. So much comes through when you start talking about the aesthetics.”

Givhan’s analysis of the fashion choices of political figures brings into sharp focus the similarities in logic between the industries, namely that reality can very easily be warped and manipulated by perception. Politicians and fashion executives alike make use of the fact that the public is often not able to differentiate between fact and appearance, which is something that the Trump administration—as well as most major luxury fashion brands—have exploited to disastrous effect. We buy into brands, for instance, based on what the brand represents to us, not for the quality, beauty or functionality of the physical product. “Appearance doesn’t change fact,” Givhan explained in a 2018 interview, “but it certainly can alter the way in which we perceive the fact; sometimes, it alters whether or not we believe in it.”

In the early 20th century, political critic Walter Lippmann wrote in his book Public Opinion that “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.” By no means should this be passed off as a platitude: most of the time, we really do fail to acknowledge how much of our understanding of the world around us is based on perception and assumption. Many of the very metaphors in our language urge us to avoid what is characterized as superficial judgement, and to see substance and image as completely unrelated. Givhan correctly argues that they are indeed not the same thing, but that their relationship is far more interdependent and complex than we think. It’s worth asking whether the injunction against judging a book by its cover really has more to do with the judge’s prejudices than with the cover itself. The link between analysis of someone’s clothing and a heightened ability to understand something is made plain by Givhan’s writing. “The muscles I’ve built up over the years covering fashion—having to really look at things, very closely—are helpful when I’m looking at and writing about other situations.”

Givhan’s reviews frequently present rich, razor-sharp examinations whose point of origin is clothing and appearance. Her brilliant article about the “Wall of Moms” protest in Portland, published in The Washington Post Magazine in August 2020, featured a probing, personal rumination on the concept, and problematic terminology, of the white ally. “This modest, bland word feels inadequate to the breadth and complexity of what it means. It’s a burdensome yoke that presumes a desire to be identified and acknowledged. To be self-congratulatory when all most people want is to be helpful.”

The tone of Givhan’s writing often strikes me as novelistic: human nature constitutes the nucleus of her stories. The people who populate her articles, as well as their settings, are described in language that is blunt and economical yet intimately detailed (even her headlines read like aphorisms: “Trump’s rally looked like his vision of America: Limited and pitiless”).

Earlier in our interview, I ask about books that made an impact on her as a child. “I had this fantastic English teacher in high school who pulled me aside freshman year and handed me Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It wasn’t on the reading list for class that semester, but she handed it to me and said, ‘I think you should read this book.’” Similarly to the way in which Givhan’s people-watching ritual seemed like a precursor to her future career, the influence of a book like Morrison’s 1970 debut novel also seemed notably foretelling. One of the main themes of the book is the tremendous (and devastating) power of appearance on our perceptions, especially on how we see ourselves and how we wish to be seen by others.

Her fashion show reporting is no less focused on the human element, and often this vantage point yields deeper insights into a brand’s collection or identity than do standard critiques of the clothes themselves. “I often find that the most telling detail is not on the runway. It’s that little sliver of the backstage that you get a glimpse of if you happen to be seated at the top of the runway, or it’s the look on the audiences’ faces, not in the front row, but the fashion students standing in the back.” Due to the pandemic, critics now base their reviews on live- streamed videos, a development that has shackled Givhan’s roving point of view. “You can only look where the camera is focused, and obviously it’s focused on the action on the runway, the center of the centerpiece. Not being able to take in the entirety of the room is really frustrating.”

When I ask what has kept her interest in fashion fresh after so many years of reporting, I’m fascinated to hear that it has a lot to do with human vulnerability. “It’s an industry that feels like it’s always in the throes of existential angst. Certainly now with all the incredibly consequential issues about its path forward! But it’s always been insecure in many ways.” She points out the irony between the fashion industry’s “sense of insecurity in terms of its place in the world, compared to the fact that [many believe] the industry’s prime objective is to make consumers around the world feel insecure,” enough to buy products that they believe will improve their lives. “It taps into every aspect of human nature. It’s an industry that no one’s really immune to, which gives you the ability to write about a huge range of people. Fashion is an entrée to basically everything.”

In a way, Givhan’s example makes a strong case for the generalist’s approach over that of the specialist. “I’ve always wanted my writing to be accessible to as wide a range of people as possible. Since I write for a general interest publication and not a fashion publication, part of my job is not to put unnecessary barriers to enter into a fashion story. I want those stories to be readily inviting, even to someone who may be incredibly disengaged from fashion, or resentful of it.” This positioning allows her to draw clear and substantiated connections between disparate industries, events and social figures—abstract leaps between cultural phenomena that might not be as readily accepted in more specialized criticism. It’s not that more targeted writing about changing hemlines, celebrity sponsorships and the latest trends is unimportant; for fashion designers, stylists, merchandisers, etc., such technical details are vital for staying afloat. But fashion criticism that weaves bigger issues into its fabric seems to better reflect the changing reality of the industry—and of our world.

Recently my boyfriend and I compared our ideas of etiquette for crossing a street in New York City. His belief is that one must step into the street with intention, so that oncoming traffic will recognize that intention and consequently respect your right to cross. My approach is to make eye contact with the driver or bicyclist and maintain it as I proceed, so that we both acknowledge one another in a silent, mutual exchange.

It dawned on me that one could easily define these two responses as unequivocally gendered: the stereotypically male inclination for self- assertion versus the stereotypically female inclination for collaboration. But are these attitudes biologically inherent, or have they been bred, slowly, socially, over the course of millennia? At a certain point, is there even a difference?

These questions came to mind recently when I had the opportunity to interview one of the most successful female entrepreneurs today: Eileen Fisher. The clothing designer founded her namesake label in 1984, inspired initially by practical reasons. At the time, she was working as a graphic designer and interior decorator, with many clients in Japan, and needed to look the part for her meetings. This meant a simple, chic ensemble—something that would endow confidence but was also comfortable, functional and required less effort than was normally expected for a woman to invest in her appearance. She wanted the process of dressing to be as straightforward as throwing on a uniform, similar to her experience in Catholic school. Inspired by the refined, geometric shapes of Japanese garments such as the kimono, she cobbled together a four-piece collection and arranged to participate in a trade show with some friends in NYC. The first day didn’t go terribly well, and not because buyers weren’t interested. Eileen was so nervous that she couldn’t respond to their questions; she couldn’t speak at all, in fact. Her friends asked the buyers to come back the next day, which they did, and she secured 3,000 dollars’ worth of orders.

Many people told her that the clothing wouldn’t sell because it was too simple; boxy tops, comfortable trousers and loose-hanging jackets were some of her staples. At her second trade show, however, buyers were lined up out the door to place orders, this time in the total amount of 40,000 dollars. The immediate popularity of her work spoke to a gap in the market, especially for a growing demographic that was offered few options by the fashion industry: women in the workforce.

Power dressing wasn’t for everyone, and the minimalism of Calvin Klein and Donna Karan, while instrumental, still broadcast a sexier and more luxurious image than many women were comfortable with (or could afford). Very few womenswear brands existed that conveyed a sense of modernity and sophistication but were not trend-oriented. Eileen’s philosophy was aligned with a new kind of femininity whose goal was neither to camouflage women as men, nor to objectify their bodies through form-revealing silhouettes. These were clothes that acknowledged the waist, hips, legs and bust, but did not flaunt them. They were intended to make women feel at ease in their own bodies, assured that their appearance was chic and smart without needing to be fashionable. The brilliant cultural critic Glenn O’Brien stated in a 2011 interview that “fashion is about conformity, and style is about non-conformity.” Today, there is an unspoken compliance that is inferred by following trends involving body ideals, age ideals, race ideals, socioeconomic ideals and so on. Even fashion brands that champion underrepresented demographics are still functioning within this framework. Eileen’s brand is not immune to these forces, and her aesthetic is certainly unified. Yet, by appealing to a variety of body types as well as to timeless design and the longevity of the product, her clothes become more about individual sensibility.

Our interview was conducted over the phone on a sunny day in February. I was tucked away in a warm studio in Bushwick, and Eileen was somewhere in Midtown near the West Side Highway. “The traffic outside is really loud,” she said. “Could you please speak up?”

As we spoke, it struck me how unlikely a candidate Eileen was for the role of fashion designer. For one thing, she seemed not to have lost much of the shyness that had prevented her from conversing with those buyers thirty-five years ago, and she’s surprisingly candid about her insecurities. She didn’t appear to have the sense of ego or opportunism that is so necessary for making it in the cut-throat rag trade. I was also surprised by her humility, as she often referred to how instrumental her colleagues and staff are to the company’s success. Her priorities are remarkably equitable in terms of environmental concerns as well (most brands employ sustainability promises purely for marketing reasons). Her clothing is designed and manufactured to last decades and recycled into new items once they are no longer wearable (her initiative Waste No More addresses this with unrivaled efficacy). She waxes lyrical about natural fibers: “Even the scraps are worth saving because the integrity of those fabrics is so incredible. In their third life, they make the most beautiful things!”

Despite these ostensible shortcomings for the career of an entrepreneur (humility and equity), her business has been wildly successful. This begs the question: were her achievements accomplished in spite of these things, or because of them?

On the phone, Eileen made frequent self-deprecating remarks about the meandering tone of her responses and she worried that she wasn’t being clear, or that her feedback wouldn’t be useful. It was nice to speak with someone who was so sensitive to my questions, to the goal of the interview and even to the quality of our communication. On more than one occasion she asked me about my own experiences and opinions, and commented thoughtfully on my answers. A mentor once told me to wait until an interview subject had finished speaking, and then to wait a bit more: thoughts have a way of bubbling up to the surface at the last minute, and this patience often rewards you with more profound responses. Instead, however, an idea in the form of a question came to my own mind: “What is the importance of listening?”

“You learn what you don’t know! When you’re the one talking, you’re only learning what you know. Listening expands what you know, and it expands what is possible,” she says.

Perhaps when we shed the desire for authority, we’re able to see things more clearly. Practicality can be confounding—and evidently quite profitable too.

So what does this business actually look like, helmed by an extremely shy woman whose priorities include listening to others, questioning her own opinion and judgement and admitting publicly to her insecurities?

Today, the company reaps approximately 500 million dollars in sales. There are sixty Eileen Fisher stores globally and the staff numbers around 1,200 (another 10,000 makes up their manufacturing demographic). The majority of people who work at the company are women. Eileen has retained sixty percent ownership of the business she founded (something most designers this far into their careers cannot boast), but the remaining forty percent isn’t owned by an investment firm or corporate conglomerate: it’s owned by her employees. In a New York Times interview from 2018, she explained the rationale: “I’m really convinced that it works for the business. It engages people and their sense of ownership… They’ll say in a meeting, ‘Don’t spend my money on that.’”

As much as my interest tends to gravitate towards a designer’s creative philosophy, I’m utterly fascinated by her business model. I kept trying to imagine a representative shape to describe the Eileen Fisher power structure, since the immutable pyramid seems hardly applicable. The best I could land on was a slinky: ideas and questions are shot round in a spiraling circle between Eileen and her staff, oscillating and transferring energy until somewhere down the line, a decision is made. “Certainly there’s some hierarchy, because at the end of the day someone has to take responsibility,” Eileen tells me. But when a call is made, it’s generally not the result of one individual’s opinion: “Oftentimes it’s a small team of two to three people who are making decisions together.”

She’s quick to explain that this is by no means an easy approach. “It’s something that needs to be constantly thought about. How does this structure work? What are we actually trying to do? Who’s in charge?! It’s the eternal question at the company!” she laughs.

“We’ve also struggled, as we’ve got bigger, with the need for more clarity, more definition of roles. It can be quite cumbersome and confusing, especially for new people. We’re trying hard to create order from the chaos.”

“Maybe constant questioning isn’t such a bad thing,” I chime in. Communication is key, after all.

Journalists have often pointedly detailed the difficulty Eileen has with explaining her business approach, sometimes even characterizing it as evasive or flighty. Usually the logic of these profiles follows that of a “success-despite-the-odds” story, the “odds” more or less referring to her inability to draw clear lines around her business practices. This judgement misses a greater point: the price of a business that champions the collective over a single authority might inevitably entail an amorphous disposition, due to the degree of constant flux. It’s something we’re just not used to envisioning or discussing—yet.

Is it fair to say that the Eileen Fisher approach to business is categorically “feminine”? That the circular business model and the emphasis on equity for employees as well as environmental concerns are aligned with the traits that characterize women in Western society? The criticisms of her amorphous disposition and lack of clear explanations could certainly be considered proof of this.

“I do think [women] do things in a more collaborative and inclusive way. Listening and connecting, bouncing ideas off each other, those kinds of things. There’s a wonderful man who works for us and he told me that when he first started at the company, he was shocked because people don’t interrupt each other! I think it’s because it’s women’s culture. We let each other speak,” she says, before adding, “I think we’re used to being talked over.” The results of this method certainly speak for themselves, regardless of how you categorize it. “It’s how we get to better solutions.”

I ask her which designer, of any genre and time, has most influenced her. “Bauhaus,” she says. “The whole philosophy— the idea that it was a collective of people working together—and the aesthetic.” This might feel like an obvious response coming from a minimalist, but there’s more to it than the similarities in communication and simple, refined design.

There are those people, few and far between, who manage to ignore the strictures delineating practice from ideology. Bauhaus, specifically personified by its founder Walter Gropius, represented this navigation between utopian ideals and entrenched practicality. Eileen also has this rare ability to mediate fluidly these purportedly conflicting tendencies—to perceive that, while far from harmonious, they need not be mutually exclusive. The constantly shifting dialogue at the brand may appear unproductive, even irresponsible, yet without this quality it might cease to maintain its balance. Gropius’s tenure didn’t last, but Eileen’s has.

I recently ran into some old high school acquaintances of mine from upstate New York. Many years had passed since we’d seen each other and I was curious to hear what they’d been doing with their lives. “I started a cattle farm,” said one. “I’m a milk-maid,” replied the other. In recent years, a lot of my friends have joined the “return-to-nature” movement in similar fashions—which I concede is thoroughly applaudable in light of the environmental catastrophes that we face today. But sometimes I can’t help thinking about Marie Antoinette and her play-farm, Le Hameau de la Reine, in the Versailles gardens. There, she and her coterie would collect eggs from chicken coups which had been pre-cleaned by servants, and tend to sanitized lambs, indulging in what she believed to be the picturesque life of the peasant who lives close to nature.

In any case, this movement has prompted a greater diversity of responses today, one that isn’t reserved exclusively for the haves over the have-nots . One of the most dramatic examples I’ve experienced is housed at the luxury resort Azulik, in Tulum. Set in an oceanfront jungle, Azulik floats like a giant tree house atop thousands of stilts. At night, the guestrooms are lit exclusively by candles and the lullaby of the waves is ever present. Rustic bungalows and open-air restaurants (and a club) are connected by walkways made of branches, and the floors of the ground-level spaces are paved with undulating vines that were set in place with the same technique used to shape boats.

It’s an exceptional locale. Azulik was envisioned by its founder, a self-taught Argentinian architect known as Roth, as an interdisciplinary space—the hotel is touted as an “eco-sensitive, architectural destination,” committed to “developing unusual initiatives.” Translation: an exclusive luxury hotel with good intentions and a robust exhibition component for nature-centric art. There is also a gift shop that stocks a remarkable amount of Christian Dior merchandise.

The exhibition space comprises two locations: SFER IK Museion, a stand-alone structure 20 kilometers away in Uh May (Roth lives in a similarly-designed house on the property), and its sprawling sister space on the resort. The architecture of these buildings follow a Gaudi-esque, biomorphic layout: curved flooring that follows the natural inclines and dips of the forest floor, sloping walls made of smooth, buffed cement, thatched roof paneling, and enormous circular glass doors that spin open from an axis in the center. None of the trees on the location were cut down to erect the buildings: holes are instead cut into the flooring to accommodate their trunks and limbs.

Earlier this month, SFER IK launched their new permanent program dedicated to performance mediums, Sceno by SFER IK. As part of the inaugural programming, LA-based group Data Garden presented a series of events based on their previous work creating “plant music,” a process which uses technology to translate plant biorhythms into audio frequencies. These sounds (which bore a remarkable resemblance to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports) were fed through speakers that echoed the melodic tunes throughout the exhibition space.

We arrived at Azulik on a Thursday evening to cover the events of the weekend and speak with exhibition curator Claudia Paetzold, and Data Garden artists Joe Patitucci and Jon Shapiro. Over dinner, our conversation drifted from subject to subject: plants to dogs, the illusion of time to near-death experiences, before finally landing on ayahuasca, which Roth has purportedly taken over a hundred times.

On our second day, I was seated at a low table on the beach, alongside Claudia, Natasha Stagg, and Kaitlin Phillips. We were soon joined by the amicable and extremely chill performance artist/dancer Cecilia Bengolea. It became difficult to hear Claudia’s voice over the wind, so we moved our cell phones closer to the German curator, practically flanking her plate of fish in order to better record her voice.

“Art projects us to a more sublime version of ourselves, and artists use matter in cosmic ways,” she said. “When an artist inscribes himself into matter, the matter comes alive. The molecules in an artwork are animated, as in Leibniz’s idea of monads, which is an image of the world where everything is composed of little units that have a soul.” A few receptors in my brain lit up—I’ve heard of Leibniz, sure. She’s discussing the rapport between alchemy and art, a theme that is central to the performance that would conclude the programming (“Midnight Alchemic Dance Soiree”), but the wind blew particularly hard at that moment, and her voice was lost.

Sometimes I wonder if the goals of artspeak and the goals of basic linguistic communication are incompatible: artspeak emotes impressions more than it elucidates ideas. The key to interpretation, I decided, was to hone in on specific words and phrases. The talking points surrounding the “activation” (ie., performance) of “plants making music” (ie., hooking a plant up to a polygraph) were ultimately intriguing enough.

“An artwork is kind of like a prayer, a communication with the universal. An attempt at going very deep inside to reach that which connects us all,” Claudia continued, as a nude, and rather pudgy man walked by our table (Azulik is clothing-optional).

Later that afternoon we attended a “plant music workshop,” presented by Joe.

“What is your relationship with plants like?” he asked the group.

A buxom woman from Ibiza, a self-proclaimed naturalist, started the discussion. I promptly forgot everything she said; while sincere, her response read like a string of the same keywords we’d heard all weekend (“cosmic,” “healing,” “plant power”). The journalists were also called upon to describe the contours of their personal rapports with plants (we were caught thoroughly off-guard by this). The first thing that came to my mind was a flower from my childhood called a Bleeding Heart that, when dissected, formed the silhouette of two pink rabbits. My neighbor recalled being warned against touching the brittle skin of a cactus, and her neighbor spoke of the cultivation of crops and selling corn by the side of a road. Claudia spoke about growing up near the Black Forest in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm were born in a monastery, a fact that she had related to us the previous night as we discussed the bliss of having a dog.

I realized that these off-the-cuff tales felt more honest and to the point than the abstract discussions about humanity’s “cosmic” relationship to the natural world. The most profound responses came from a group seated at the back of the space, half concealed by shadow. One young man wore a floppy hat made of tech material, and he sat beside a woman with a buzz-cut, chunky black spectacles,and biker shorts. Her name was Ana. Of the group, her English was the most proficient so she translated what her friends said before responding to Joe’s query herself.

Part of Roth’s vision of functioning like a “tribe” included the manufacture of certain products on-site, and one of these was macrame, a textile made of natural fibers and produced through a knotting technique. In that moment, it dawned on me that this was the most effective implementation of Roth’s sustainability mission. The young men and women who created the macrame products (everything from jewelry to extraordinary door hangings) are touted on the website as “talented local artisans,” and indeed they were. The young man with the hat, Cesar, had been making macrame since he was a child, and his friend, a lanky youth with jet black hair and kind eyeshad worked at it for fifteen years. Despite the fact that they all made enough money to live in the city of Tulum, they had chosen to live nearby so as to be closer to the jungle, to nature. The slow practice of knotting fibers, the closeness of their lives to the flora of the jungle, and the organic material that they worked with daily, were deeply intriguing and meaningful in context of the plant-themed programming. Ana, Cesar, and their colleagues weren’t well-known, experimental musicians-cum-artists who’d had installations at major American museums, but there was a quality to their art that was inspiring, grounded, and perhaps even radical.

There were certainly laudable aspects of Data Garden’s project, foremost of which was the emphasis they placed on something our society has largely forgotten how to do: listen. It is also indeed true that plants respond to us in ways that are truly miraculous, and I suspect that we have much to learn from them. The acoustics were excellent, and the experience of sitting in a space that literally featured no 90 degree angles produced an effect on one’s mood that felt like an expansion of consciousness. The cynic in me was ultimately won over by the effort that went into creating such a different kind of spatial experience.

The macrame artisans brought into focus a question about contemporary art that I often consider: why does it need so much verbal context in order to be considered worthy of our attention and deserving of an exhibition? Why do we feel the need to explain art so much, describe it’s every contour, illustrate in no uncertain terms the reason for its existence? What differentiates the work of people like Ana and Cesar, and the work of Joe and Jon?

I was pleased when Roth made special note of them in his opening remarks at the culmination of the programming later that night (an “Interspecies Concert”). He talked about the importance of the work of Data Garden, and the other performative artists who participated in the event, but his recognition of Ana, Cesar, and their friends was tender in its appreciation. The singer Pascale Caristo closed the evening with a hypnotic vocal performance that had a pleasantly soporific effect on all present.

Mozhdeh Matin and I are Skyping on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m at my desk in a corner of Upstate New York; she’s situated on a bustling street in Lima. As we speak, I hear birds chirping in the background, cars driving by, the barking of dogs. An image forms in my mind of Matin, surrounded by the noise and clatter of life and its vibrant energy. I’m so engrossed by her descriptions of the history of textiles in her native Peru that I forget that I’m conducting an interview with a fashion designer and feel rather more like an eager pupil soaking up stories of an illustrious past.

“For the Incas, textiles were always the place where you wrote your story and what it represents. Your community, your family, your heritage. It was sacred. It was like writing.” The Incan civilization valued its textiles so much more than its gold that its leaders purportedly offered the latter to the Spanish invaders with little hesitation, in order to protect the textiles. “[Textiles] were so precious to the Incas,” she tells me, “that they even burned some,” rather than give up the stories of their heritage to the conquistadors.

“That’s the opposite of how we value textiles today,” I remark. She sighs in response, and I sense that I’ve perhaps hit a sore spot. “It’s such a struggle,” she says, “it’s still weird for me. I’m trying to figure it out.” This is probably the first time I’ve ever heard a designer lament the valuation of clothing as anything other than a commercial product.

She’s quick to note that, at the end of the day, yes, she’s running a business. But her reasons for founding her brand Mozh Mozh in 2015 are atypical. Matin was born in the Peruvian Andes to Iranian parents and she credits her early interest in fabrics, patterns and prints to growing up immersed in two cultures known for their ancient textile heritages. She laughs as she tells me that as a child she was always touching things to feel their texture. Her curiosity led her to travel throughout Peru, discovering a variety of extraordinary textiles and tracing each one back to the community that created it. From these artists, she learned not only their technique but also what the textiles meant to each of them.

Her collections today are the result of ongoing, in-person creative exchanges between designer and manufacturer. “I never show them something and say, ‘do exactly this.’ I always try to find a balance that I hope both of us will be fine with. It’s more like, ‘oh, I love what you’re doing, what if we do it with these colors?’” She recently collaborated with workers in the Amazon called shiringueros who produce natural rubber from the shiringa tree. The resulting material is a plant-based latex that is applied to natural cotton, creating a locally-sourced and sustainable alternative to animal leather.

Her collections are the result of a joint decision-making process between designer and manufacturer, one in which the latter maintains a large degree of creative license. This in-the-flesh exchange creates a social structure that stands in stark contrast to the majority of designer-manufacturer relationships today, which tend to be characterized by their social, symbolic and physical distance. It’s interesting to consider that a closer physical proximity between a designer and the person who is constructing her product might be an important factor in the reprioritization of social concerns over economic ones.

A concern she cites during our conversation is that many of the textile techniques featured in her garments are at risk of disappearing as younger generations of the rural communities that produce them move to the cities to pursue more modern occupations. Mozh Mozh is a vehicle for preserving these techniques, at least for a while. The brand also serves as a means of providing women, who make up 90% of her workforce, with an income, granting them financial independence within their family structure.

I first came across Matin’s garments at her press showroom in New York City. A rack was packed with chunky knitwear tops and woven dresses in a variety of textures and patterns that I’d never seen before. In contrast to the neutral tones that pervaded the other collections in the showroom, her color palette stood out as bright and inviting. I couldn’t help running my fingers over the garments, scrunching a red and brown knit dress in my hands so that it bunched up into a satisfying thickness. The garments were individual, different: they were relevant to the zeitgeist yet unconcerned with its trends. As I admired the cocktail-length frock, I had a distinct impression that I hadn’t felt in a while: this was a timeless piece.

With Mozh Mozh, there’s an implicit understanding that the garment is more than just a disposable product. This is markedly different from the majority of clothing production today, fast fashion and luxury alike. “I think the biggest problem comes from consumerism, from the fact that people are convinced by big brands that they need to buy more,” Matin explains. The problem is also that, even in the luxury sector where consumers can ostensibly afford to choose ethically designed and produced items, buyers often don’t take into consideration where their clothes come from. For the most part, Matin says, “all that matters is the name of a brand, or if it’s trendy.”

I ask Matin what she thinks about the Carolina Herrera Resort 2020 collection, which drew the ire of the media and even a member of the Mexican government when the brand debuted dresses and separates that featured exact replicas of Indigenous embroideries and textiles. In addition to the timeless ethical problem of a luxury brand (which, by definition, caters to the wealthy) profiting off the creative ideas of a voiceless community, Matin also brings up an interesting technical point: “If you’re a designer or a creator, you’re a curious person. You’re trying to see things and translate them into design. So I feel like when you’re appropriating something from a culture, you’re not doing your work right. You’re just taking the first thing you see—the most obvious—and you’re not going any deeper than that. You need to do more to investigate.” She says that, from a design standpoint, basically, “you’re being lazy.”

That fashion has always involved a degree of directly knocking off other designs is as true now as it ever was; this happens in nearly every creative discipline. It’s also worth noting that the creative process has always walked the fine line between influence and plagiarism. The problem isn’t about where an artist’s inspiration comes from: it’s about how that inspiration is treated along the way. As Matin puts it, “it’s all about respect,” and taking the time to understand. Ethical problems occur when a brand commandeers an aesthetic from a culture and consequently reinforces a stereotype, or (in the case of the Herrera collection) when the designs created by a disenfranchised community are exploited by companies worth billions of dollars.

It’s also important to make a distinction between fashion designers and the directors of the conglomerates who own the majority of household name brands. For one thing, fashion designers have far less power than the public generally realizes. The real culprits are the CEOs of the major fashion conglomerates; designers— even the famous ones—are often treated like pawns in a huge, unintelligible game of chess.

Matin believes that ultimately, respect lies in taking more time to understand the meaning behind an aesthetic. “If you have a fashion brand that makes many, many collections a year, and you’re always trying to make something new, you don’t have time to investigate.” This explanation may sound reductive, but it’s not: most designers are not given enough time to design a collection. Like all corporate industries today, fashion is run by the big-business mentality of growth-at- all-costs, with little if any consideration of the ethical consequences.

Beginning around 2007, the fashion retail cycle increased from two collections a year (Fall and Spring), to about a dozen (Fall, Spring, Resort, Pre-Fall, Fall Couture, Spring Couture, Mens Fall, Mens Spring, Bridal Fall, Bridal Spring, to name just a few). The pressure on designers to produce has become, according to many, unsustainable. Former British Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers wrote in her provocative interview for Vestoj magazine that: “Businessmen are trying to get their creatives to behave in a businesslike way; everyone wants more and more, faster and faster…The designers do it, but they do it badly…”

One of the main reasons for the increase in annual collections is the luxury sector’s response to the rise of fast-fashion retailers, who copy designs from the runway and sell them faster than luxury brands are able to. This vicious cycle has led not only to increased design oversight, but also to massive environmental devastation and innumerable counts of human exploitation that often amount to slave labor.

Smaller brands that have come of age with an awareness of these problems have the unique advantage of adopting more mindful practices with greater ease, since they do not bear the burden of corporate pressure. That said, how does one participate in the fashion system without falling prey to its more nefarious attributes? “I feel like I have one foot in the door, and one foot outside the door. I participate in market week, because in the end this is a business, but I also have this feeling that this is not the only way, and that we need to find other ways. I am looking because I don’t feel good being part of the system.” I ask her if she has any ideas in mind. “I usually do two collections a year, but I’ve actually been thinking about whether I should just do one instead.”

It struck me how Matin’s recounting of the Incan civilization’s estimation of textiles was echoed in her own estimation of clothing. Placing greater creative, emotional and social value on clothing design and manufacturing provides a model that could help designers—and, indeed, creatives of all fields—navigate the creative process in a way that positively engages everyone involved. No doubt her situation is uniquely advantageous: she is based in a country known for its vibrant textile practices; she designs in close proximity to the artisans who produce her collections, thus fostering an economic model that prioritizes the social connection with her manufacturers; and, Mozh Mozh is small enough that she doesn’t have to face the economic concerns that larger independent brands do. Nonetheless, this brand is exemplary, and with hope, will prove to be a sign of things to come.

“Which designers do you most admire?” It’s a trite question, I admit—one that I often try to rephrase or avoid during interviews (responses are often pat or conventional). But right now, I’m genuinely interested. I’m on the phone with Canadian fashion designer Vejas Kruszewski, who founded his namesake label, Vejas, in 2014, at the age of 17. He’s an unusual designer and I feel sure his response will be intriguing. “I think the life story of [1930s couturier] Madame Grès is really interesting. Her dresses were inspired by ancient Greek statues, but they were so futuristic. Those streams of influence are fascinating. Actually, she also convinced [Cristóbal] Balenciaga to start his own line,” he tells me. “And I’m pretty sure the costume designer for the original Star Wars was looking at her work. I love those hypothetical links and the idea of a lineage of great people influencing great people.”

Kruszewski’s ability to identify the subtle, cobweb-like connections that span decades, visual mediums and a diverse cast of designers makes something light up in my mind. In a creative landscape and market that are besotted with pastiche (and horse-whipped by big business), it’s hard to remember what the sensation of seeing something new and unfamiliar feels like. We’re obsessed with novelty, but only if we can recognize it. As I listen to him talk about the way he engages with influences, I realize that his perspective is quite unique. An innate and unbridled sense of design often engenders this kind of vision. It’s also a requisite for making work that truly feels modern.

It might sound as though I’m making him out to be a romanticist, paying too much lip service to creative vision and not enough to the grueling day-to-day responsibilities that actually fuel a brand’s survival. But Kruszewski’s pragmatism is as remarkable as his artistry: while he muses on cross-pollination, he’s also got his eye trained on the fact that, first and foremost, he’s running a business. One could even say there’s something strangely serene about his acceptance of that side of the job; for him, it doesn’t seem as counterproductive to creative license as it does for some designers. When I ask what advice he’d give to fashion students, I’m not totally surprised by his response: “Research accounting!” He laughs and apologizes for the “boring” answer, but it’s quite valid.

Perhaps his matter-of-fact approach to both art and commerce is enabled by the simplicity of his clothing (deceptively simple, I should add). His signature consists of neutral-toned wardrobe staples—a leather jacket, a white t-shirt, the classic jean or little black dress—that have been subtly revised with such details as a reworked shoulder seam on a utilitarian jacket, or decorative paneling that reveals itself to be an unexpected pocket.

At one point in our interview, we’re talking about the famed 1940s costume designer Adrian, whose work greatly influenced Azzedine Alaïa. “Adrian was doing all these strange things with tailoring, like panels and inserts that were decorative but not frilly or feminine, more like masculine design elements. I love that there was a conversation between them, in some sense.” We talk a lot about movies during our call—Kruszewski is eager to design costumes for a film one day—and it’s intriguing to follow the connections he makes from one place to the next. “I swear I can see flecks of Adrian’s work in the Bladerunner costuming, all those sharp shoulders in the blazers that [the character] Rachel wears.” It feels telling that Kruszewski mentions so many films that take place in the future. “Costumes bring a lot to the plot, even in a movie like Alien. You could say that there’s not even much costuming in it, but there is, because it’s so deliberate.”

Understanding subtlety is a key factor in creating well-designed clothing, regardless of the style. But subtlety doesn’t seem to have much room in the current fashion zeitgeist. Jil Sander recently commented that fashion “has turned into a multimedia entertainment business where recognition and buzz decide the day. Accordingly, the silent language of a well-cut piece of clothing is no longer sufficient.” Designers such as Kruszewski are exceptions to this, but there aren’t many, and it’s certainly true that the expectation for brands to engage with the “entertainment” mentality can be stressful, if not crippling. “There’s a pressure to be really public as a way to build not only your visibility but also your business. You have to appear as though you’re always doing well—success after success. Talking about anything that doesn’t work out as planned causes a lot of fear and anxiety in this industry,” Kruszewski explains.

This pressure often lands young brands in deep water before they’ve figured out how to float. In 2017, Kruszewski and his two full-time colleagues (at the time, aged 21, 24 and 23, respectively) found themselves in a difficult position about a year after receiving the coveted LVMH Special Prize, one of the fashion industry’s most respected awards for young designers. The rewards included mentorship with the industry’s top creatives, as well as 150,000 euros (Kruszewski was 19 when he received the prize and the youngest designer ever to win). But such gifts can sometimes prove to be, unintentionally, something of a Trojan horse. The award secured their place in the global arena, but there were certain operational factors that made it difficult for the brand to fully harness the bounty of the prize. For one thing, they were still located in Canada. “LVMH gave a lot of visibility to the brand, and so did presenting the collections in Paris twice a year. We were producing in Italy, but we were still based in Canada, so there was a big issue about overstaying our visa in Europe.” Moving to Paris made a lot of sense, but the costs of such a move, and the logistical nightmare of obtaining visas, were prohibitive. “You can’t just take a month off to move, at least not if you’re following the seasonal schedule.”

Kruszewski decided to pause work on his own brand and accepted an offer to helm the Italian leather brand Pihakapi, for which he designed two exceptional collections. “A lot of people were surprised and disappointed. It looked as though we were going backwards, but it was actually in order to move into the future,” he tells me, pausing before he adds, “and to put ourselves in the right place.”

He seems to have seamlessly located that place earlier this year, when he returned to Vejas and presented the line’s Spring/Summer 2020 collection in Paris (he was finally able to make the move in 2018, while working for Pihakapi). The experience designing for another company served him well. “I learned how it feels to work for someone else, to be on the other end. It opened up my mind about how to delegate and how to communicate clearly and in an effective manner, in order to save everyone time and energy.” That Kruszewski is often described by journalists as pragmatic, mature and rational comes as little surprise. Another remarkable trait is the designer’s judicious ability to trust himself.

The SS 2020 collection presented an interesting shift towards a more sensual version of the Vejas silhouette, and incorporated some fruity shades of pink, green and yellow. Far from sexualized, the allure came rather from the thrill of the unexpected, or the mysterious, revealing itself. “There was this luscious, fertile vibe in terms of the colors. The yellow is very citrusy, and with the pink and green I was thinking of cactus fruit. When you cut it open, you never know what the inside is going to look like; it never matches the outside.”

Kruszewski also spent time at The Guimet Museum in Paris, which houses one of the largest collections of ancient Asian art in the world. He was particularly inspired by statuary from Thailand, India and Laos (spanning 3rd millennium BCE through 10th century CE). “I loved the lines of the fabric, the ropes and trims circling the stomach, legs and chest.” He blended those lines with the pleating techniques of Madame Grès’s dresses, which were, of course, also based on the raiment of ancient statuary. “I wanted to make a dress that had the same technique as hers but followed the more asymmetric lines that I saw on these statues: how they swept across the breast, over the back, onto the thigh.” Kruszewski’s work is a prime example of how technical referencing is very different from thematic referencing; it adheres to a design sensibility grounded in construction as opposed to exoticism. It also shows how a specific kind of copying is not only a positive thing, but a necessity for innovation. “There might be some element I like in a garment, but I can only focus on that one part, zoom in on it and combine it with something else.” That, in a nutshell, is the history of invention.

Many of the 20th century’s most celebrated designers stuck to a specific visual concept throughout most of their career. Today, such stylistic consistency between collections is often viewed as a lack of imagination, but those who think this way are missing the point. Madame Grès put it wisely: “As soon as you find something personal and unique, you must exploit it thoroughly and continue to implement it without stopping and right to the end. Similarly, you have to perfect your own technique and not let any detail escape or be neglected.” Sometimes it’s difficult to determine the pitch of a designer’s voice so early on in his career, but Kruszewski seems to have already discovered something deeply personal and unique in his vision and is well on his way towards cultivating it. He’s a rare breed, and most certainly one to keep your eye on.

I dreamed lately of Isabel, of her jet-black hair and red lips and wide eyes, eyes like a fawn. They were at once cautious but filled with the innocence that only the greatest minds possess: it is the sword they use to pierce the darkness and pull from it the substance of their art. It was a troubling, see-through dream, because I knew that, in actuality, she was dead. But for now, here, she was alive. Even more troubling was the knowledge, unspoken, that it was her husband Ruben who had died, that half of the heart they shared had indeed fallen away, but that it was not Isabel’s half. Did he give his heart so that she might live, in the dream? I imagine they were so imbued with union that either would have sacrificed themselves for the other to live on. Isabel wore a dress of blood red taffeta, the fabric gathered in bunches and cinched with matching ribbon. Her speech was fast and breathless as if she didn’t know where she was. Her house was cut into the side of a yellow hill made of sand. The desert landscape around us was arid and endless, its color contrasting starkly with the red dress, as if the dress was the heart that she and Ruben had shared for so many years.

She seemed unaccustomed to this place, as twitchy as a sparrow. She darted from one spot to another, speaking to a woman dressed in an austere black suit. The woman held a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other that made violent little jerks as it checked off a list.

Eventually she disappeared, and I approached Isabel timidly as though she might spook. The words we exchanged sound to me now like muted strains. The individual notes have lost their clarity. Isabel spoke with that twittery cadence of one whose heart is beating fast. She was uncertain of something, and in her nervousness she spilled her secrets into my hands. She paused for a few seconds from time to time to ask herself whether or not I was trustworthy. I wished I could tell her how trustworthy I was, that I would never repeat what she said, that I would take it first into my heart, and then to my grave. But my voice fails me, and my gestures are nothing but empty flailing arms.

I woke up exhausted. The news of her death the previous week had pulled the breath from my lungs when my mother asked me one morning,

Did you hear,

my dear?

Isabel Toledo has died

That first shock of death knocked my cup of coffee from my hand and it shattered on the floor. I was surprised at how quickly I had lost myself, and my cup, to grief. I did not cry immediately, or even later that day. The news settled on me slowly as though dark figures were pulling a blanket over my body, until it covered my face. The grief came like that.

I spent the day sitting in the sun without seeing its light. A finger-printed wine glass from the previous night sat on the table, its rounded surface hard and cold. I plucked a dead fruit fly from the liquid and gulped down its acidic contents. Something inside me couldn’t understand that she was gone. That drenching wave passed over me at last, but the tears came silently, for my pride rebuffed company.

I had come to Isabel through words, reading about her first in magazines and then collecting books on her work over the years. Now I watched her vanish through words as well. Words are tricky little things, never wholly promising their allegiance to what you assume they impart. A messenger obituary waved at her retreating form, but also caught her up in its branches made of sentences. I saw her fading into silken darkness yet held forever in a tangle of adjectives and taffeta fibers. I had her with me, safely guarded like a worry doll, but she was also gone, and reality finally triumphed over my dream.

I met her once on a brilliant, frozen afternoon. My friend, another devotee, and I clung to each other as we climbed the stairs to Isabel and Ruben’s apartment, afraid to trespass into the private world of our idols. We knew that meeting one’s heroes was often a disappointment, and as much as we swore that it couldn’t be true this time, we feared the possibility.

Our first sensory experience upon arrival was a pungent smell of fish, and the sight of an extraordinary mise-en-scène. The spacious loft we entered was flooded with light and filled with easels, paintings, books, and dozens of striped hula hoops. A massive cactus stood in the corner, its thorns hung with miniature portraits of Isabel, painted by Ruben. Their laughter bounced off the walls as they repeatedly apologized for the curious smell. They had cooked fish last night but dared not open the windows to the icy winds that pelted the top of their industrially zoned building. “No heat past 6 o’clock, you see,” Ruben said. “Sometimes, we sleep in ski suits.” I was enchanted by how human they were. Idols are usually accustomed to pedestals, but they engaged us as equals, even friends.

If Isabel’s mind was that of the sage, then her eyes were those of a child. “If you had never seen an umbrella,” she once remarked in an interview, “and you had no idea what it was for—if it just looked like a dying lily—could you imagine its shape open?” Her curiosity was untouched by the tides that dampen our resolve and corral us into obedience to a bloated master. Fashion is like that, a bulbous entity that often eats its young and mocks its veterans before tossing them to the trash pile. No doubt Isabel knew this, but the reason she remained true to her own vision was not out of self-preservation. It was born of an unrelenting commitment and a blind, sacred devotion to design. Her example was that of the revolutionary: go against the grain. Do not give up. Do not cave in. Have a vision and make no sacrifices in its pursuit.

Over the years she became an invisible personal friend, urging me to avoid the well-worn path, and to keep my blade sharpened to cut through the brush as I made my own way. But above all, her smiling face told me, never forget the delight there is to be found in life, and the sustenance offered by love.

There was a forgotten pack of cigarettes beside me on the table, so flattened in someone’s back pocket that when I put one to my lips it looked ridiculous, like a small white flute. The plumes of smoke drifted up. Even in the sunlight their color was a definitive blue. In search of her I inhaled the new obituaries, but many of them felt weak or prosaic. They sidelined the stories of her formidable talent in favor of a few buzz-worthy points. I snorted in annoyance, accidentally breathing in the smoke and coughing hard, which made me lightheaded.

She was, as they say, a designer’s designer. A painter’s painter, a writer’s writer, a director’s director. Do these visionaries, so doggedly in love with their craft, invariably die in relative obscurity? I suddenly felt a scream rising inside me, a desire to shout into the void of cyberspace, look! look here, this is it, this is why! She’s amazing, can’t you see? For fear of breaking two cups in one day, I pushed the wine glass away from me. My frustration was far from slaked. In the slick and traction-less world of social media, I searched for traces of her presence. Surely there were remembrances by her friends and admirers?

My relief was thick when I found them, and it weighed me down into the chair. The outpouring of emotion was substantial, and for once it felt truly genuine and personal; clearly she had moved others as deeply as she had moved me. They too were casting into the void their sorrow at her premature loss, and their anger that even in death she caused little more than a ripple in the zeitgeist.

Was my frustration merely a reflection of my own desire for recognition? Recognition for all the underdogs, the forgotten visionaries? Many of her contemporaries clamored in her support throughout her thirty-five years as a fashion designer, demanding that she receive more appreciation, more love. But, for the most part they went unheard by a system that rarely listens to smaller voices.

Have I learned nothing? I suddenly asked myself, staring into space so that the trees and clover melted out of focus. The bitter waters of indignation died down, and in the clearing a figure appeared. It was Isabel, wide-eyed and red lipped, her hair cascading over her shoulders. She was hula hooping in a black dress, laughing at the smell of fish in her apartment. “I didn’t care about recognition then,” she responded haltingly between gyrations, “and I don’t care about it now.”