W Magazine China’s [IG] June 2024 icon issue shares a fantastic fashion story featuring the ‘Margiela Artisanal’ 2024 couture collection. W also makes high-impact points in their commentary about creativity.

Supermodel He Cong is styled by Austin Feng in big-impression images by Zhong Lin [IG]. / Hair by MingHu Zhang; makeup by Yooyo Keong Ming

Brassaï and Paris Nights

The Maison Margiela Artisanal Paris 2024 show was inspired by the photography of Brassaï, the Hungarian–French photographer, sculptor, medalist, writer, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France after WW1.

His night world was one of brothels and seedy hotels; bars and nightclubs. Brassaï saw the details of less tourist-friendly signifiers of city life such as scrawled graffiti and crumbling masonry, as expressing as much about the totality of Parisian life, as the city’s grand salons and monuments.

Galliano on the High Seas of Creativity

In preparing this W Magazine China fashion story over the course of two months, six sets of haute couture fashion traveled across the seas. The magazine “exclusively” documented this fashion moment, along with its fascinating behind-the-scenes story.

Throughout the shoot, Zhong Ling played Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s music, and during discussions about the collection, she said, “John Galliano once again reminded me of my original aspirations and why I stand here.” In the current fashion atmosphere, such sincerity towards dreams is enough to move all fashion enthusiasts (and indeed it goes far beyond).

Creative Directors Examined

For the second time this week, my own brain has been interrupted externally with the reinforcement of thoughts already playing out here on AOC.

Today‘s world is never short of creative directors. The important thing is, what is the driving force and starting point of creativity?

In my long life, I’ve never seen so many people claiming the title of creative director on Models.com. I read the title at every turn online.

As W Magazine China articulates, many creatives claim their desire to “create something that others haven’t seen before.”

With so many people claiming the title of creative director, a gifted and visionary mind like John Galliano’s is required to actually produce fashion or even magazine content worthy of the job title.

Returning to the High Seas

My mind is always tuned into small phrases that can lock-down my brain. When I read about the process of planning and then executing the shoot with six sets of haute couture fashion traveling across the seas, I thought of my own commentary to Vogue Greece’s June introduction of the concept ‘multicultural aesthetics’.

The term is not new, of course. But as online media has demanded purity in design and not ‘stealing’ the ideas or influences of others in acts of indigenous cultures destruction and defamation, it actually took guts for Vogue Greece to acknowledge the thousand-years old reality of ‘multicultural aesthetics’.

In both articles, the intersections of creativity and life connected to “the high seas” are key concepts. For better or worse, rivers and oceans are the glue of our shared humanity, our collective global magic carpet ride that has brought both gifts to humanity and deep suffering.

For AOC, the challenge in the fashion industry is how we respect and honor both indigenous cultures and first-world cultures — the Harlem Renaissance, for example — and compensate them appropriately as engines of global creativity for time immemorial.

For Anne 1+1=3, but that view would get me run off social media. ~ Anne