On this episode we speak with Emily Segal, the founder of the brand strategy agency Nemesis, publishing house Deluge, and the author of the novel Mercury Retrograde. Emily came to fame in the 2010s as the co-founder of the collective K-Hole, which coined the term "normcore." She went on to work with everyone from Prada to Supreme, and learned a few things along the way, some of which we discuss in this episode. We mostly concentrate on two pieces of her writing, the Umami Theory of Value and B for Balenciaga, a brand case study. We discuss why the current culture feels like a postmodernist, meaningless, made-for-Instagram slop, or as Emily writes, "Umami is what you got when you did not get anything," why Balenciaga is a cultural apex predator, a vortex that sucks in cultural artifacts and spits them out as memes, why Demna's irony is hollow, whether he will succeed at Gucci, and much more besides. Support the show
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1:27:17
Paris Fashion Week F/W 2025 Women's with Philippe Pourhashemi
We are back with Philippe Pourhashemi to review the women’s Fall / Winter 2025 season. We discuss the debuts of Veronica Leoni at Calvin Klein, Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford, Sarah Burton at Givenchy, and Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten. We also give our impressions of what is likely to be the last collection of Daniel Lee at Burberry, and dive into the shows of Undercover, Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons and more.Support the show
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1:44:03
Fashion & Art: Redux with Natasha Degen
Natasha Degen, the chair of Art Market Studies at Fashion Institute of Technology and the author of Merchants of Style: Art and Fashion after Andy Warhol, is back on the podcast to discuss the ever more insidious relationship between fashion and art. We discuss her concept of Art Pop, which are commercial ventures that are given an air of an art project, what the second rounds of collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama signify, and why fashion is increasingly getting into film, TV, and books and literature.Support the show
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1:47:06
Paris Fashion Week F/W 2025 Men's with Philippe Pourhashemi
We are back with the journalist and critic Philippe Pourhashemi to review the Fall / Winter 2025 men's season. We discuss the Setchu runway debut at Pitti Uomo in Florence, and touch upon the meaning of and the need to put on a fashion show, Peter Copping's debut at Lanvin, the new direction at Dries Van Noten, and the shows of Auralee, Comme des Garçons, Rick Owens, and more. We talk about the continuous grotesquery at LVMH, as well as our surprise reactions to the latest collections from Kim Jones and Prada.Support the show
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1:15:44
The State of Luxury with Ana Andjelic
On this episode, we speak with Ana Andjelic, the strategic branding mastermind who knows her Bs from "Brand" to "Baudrillard," author of the Sociology of Business Substack and of the new book Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture. We discuss how the luxury industry went off rails through over-expansion, the difference between the luxury and fashion mentality and the luxury and commodity thinking, and what it will take to turn things around. We discuss how fashion trends are really created and why everything looks interchangeable. We finish the episode with a surprising marketing case-study!Support the show
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