ILLUSIONS ALWAYS CHANGE INTO SOMETHING REAL

Luigi Vitali in conversation with Eugene Rabkin

For nearly two decades, Eugene Rabkin has been one of fashion’s most uncompromising critics. Through his publication StyleZeitgeist, he has documented the industry’s transformation from a culture driven by ideas, experimentation, and subcultural energy into one increasingly shaped by corporations, celebrity, and the logic of consumption. His criticism sits at the intersection of fashion, philosophy, politics, and economics, treating clothes not simply as products but as symptoms of broader cultural shifts.

His new book, Torn: Fashion and Postmodernism, out in August 2026, is both a diagnosis of the contemporary fashion system and an inquiry into the conditions shaping creativity within it. Drawing on thinkers such as Fredric Jameson, Rabkin argues that contemporary fashion has become one of the clearest expressions of the postmodern condition: one marked by the erosion of distinctions between culture and commerce, the dominance of image and spectacle, the recycling of styles from the past, and the replacement of qualitative judgment with metrics of popularity and visibility. If fashion feels more visible and culturally relevant than ever, while simultaneously producing a widespread sense of dissatisfaction, Torn sets out to understand why.

For DUST’s “Overload” issue, we spoke with Rabkin about postmodernism, the triumph of image over substance, the disappearance of subcultures, and how fashion came to reflect the parable of late-capitalist culture.

Luigi Vitali — The book’s aesthetic—black and distressed—is somehow reminiscent of your beloved dark 1990s, and the title, Torn, sounds almost like an anguished Nine Inch Nails B-side. Yet it’s impossible not to think of Natalie Imbruglia’s pop hit. Two very different faces of the same decade, a moment when a split began to emerge and has only intensified since—from subculture to poptimism. That fracture runs through the book. You describe growing separations between image and substance, creativity and business, fashion and culture. Are we imposing too much meaning onto a well-designed book cover?

Eugene Rabkin — The reference is actually much simpler than that. When I was thinking about the title, I kept coming back to the idea that fashion is damaged. We all see it, we all know it. And torn felt like the right word because you can tear a garment, tear a piece of fabric—it implies destruction, damage. So the title was really a direct reference to that condition.

To be honest, I had completely forgotten about the Natalie Imbruglia song until someone mentioned it in the Instagram comments. The idea was to capture the damage done to fashion, which, I argue, stems from the rise of a postmodern mentality.

L.V. — Yet, you trace a shift from subculture to poptimism, and from fashion as a place of friction to fashion as a mass cultural product. (Poptimism is the belief that popular culture deserves the same value as high culture, and that popularity itself can be a measure of quality—the idea that if enough people like something, it must be good.)

E.R. — Absolutely. I think people tend to underestimate the impact that subcultures and youth culture have had on fashion since the early 1950s. For the first time, there was a real challenge to the established fashion system, which at the time was dictated by Paris haute couture and largely served the haute bourgeoisie before trickling down to the rest of the public.

Youth culture offered an alternative model, and it never really stopped doing so. It became a powerful engine of innovation, generating new styles, new looks, new ways of dressing. And those styles were deeply connected to broader cultural movements. I often think of Frank Zappa’s famous observation that there has never been a revolution in music without a corresponding revolution in style. I’m paraphrasing, but the point stands.

The decline of subcultures and the rise of poptimism are not unrelated to the creative impoverishment I describe in the book. The loss of innovation in fashion parallels that shift. Pop culture can be manufactured very effectively, but it remains manufactured. What gets lost is a genuine creative core, which is why I spend so much time talking about authenticity.

Authenticity is another casualty of the postmodern turn. Today, if you talk seriously about authenticity, people often laugh. It sounds naïve to them.

But I didn’t want the book to end with the conclusion that everything is terrible. I wanted to at least suggest the possibility of a way forward. In the final chapter, I argue that perhaps what we have really lost is the ability to be naïve in the productive sense of the word—to simply try something, to believe in something, to make something without immediately filtering it through irony or market logic.

L.V. — You have always been drawn to fashion as a form of counterculture, a space where creativity and meaning emerged through opposition to the mainstream. Today, fashion seems increasingly absorbed into it, becoming less useful for what it says about creativity than for what it reveals about power, markets, and the ways desire is manufactured. Fashion has become a different kind of lens. What keeps you interested in fashion as a way of understanding society and the present?

E.R. — Creativity hasn’t disappeared entirely. To keep myself sane, I tend to focus on designers who still operate in a culturally connected way—people like Rick Owens, Jun Takahashi, or Takahiro Miyashita. 

They emerged from specific subcultures and continue to engage with the broader culture in an authentic way. By contrast, much of what comes out of corporate fashion today feels inauthentic. It feels driven by business decisions, by the need to manufacture desire, as you said, rather than by any genuine engagement with culture. Like many people, I fell in love with fashion because I realised it could be a form of cultural expression, something that went beyond a simple commercial transaction.

L.V. — Yet fashion also seems to have become a powerful lens through which to understand corporations, markets, and the mechanisms of consumer culture. Has your interest shifted in that direction?

E.R. — My ultimate lens is still creativity. That’s always where I begin. I’m interested in what informs fashion design and where creative ideas come from. But it’s true that I’ve also become increasingly interested in consumer culture and in the mechanisms through which desire is produced. I’m fascinated by why people buy the things they buy and by the ways brands shape those desires.

My first education was actually in finance, so numbers don’t intimidate me. I enjoy reading financial statements and looking at how companies present their results. Part of a critic’s job is to separate reality from public relations. A critic should function as a counterweight, a filter for the industry’s spin.

So yes, I pay attention to the business side of fashion, but only because it helps explain the broader culture around it. Take Chanel, for example. Sales tick up slightly in 2025, and the narrative immediately becomes that everyone is responding to Matthieu Blazy, even though none of his work has even reached the market until this March. Blazy is a remarkable designer, but it is still important to question the stories companies tell about themselves.

What really interests me is the intersection of creativity, commerce, and consumer behaviour. Fashion remains one of the clearest places to observe how desire is constructed and how culture is transformed into something people want to buy.

L.V. — And why do you think people buy fashion today?

E.R. — There have always been two major value systems in fashion. One is older, and one is newer.

The older one is status. It’s what Thorstein Veblen described in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, which remains the best book on the subject. Nothing fundamentally new has happened since then. People buy luxury fashion to display status, to signal that they have money. That’s conspicuous consumption and its younger sibling, aspirational consumption. People don’t just buy luxury to communicate where they are financially, but how they would like to be perceived.

The second value system arrived with youth culture after World War II. Suddenly, there is a different set of values, and that value is cool. You buy something because it’s cool. Obviously, cool is a complicated term, but these became the two competing value systems in fashion.

That competition is what gave fashion much of its vibrancy throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The push and pull between status and cool, co-optation and resistance, generational divides and the constant desire to create something new. That’s where a great deal of fashion’s creativity came from.

Today, I think cool doesn’t matter very much anymore. Subcultures don’t matter very much anymore. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we’ve been slowly but inexorably moving back towards a Veblenian model of conspicuous consumption. The status system has consumed the cool system.

You can see it in the rise of streetwear and hip-hop. These began as genuine subcultural movements and became enormous cultural phenomena. But they also became cultural phenomena built around acquiring goods, around aspirational consumption and conspicuous consumption. In that sense, we’ve come full circle.

Youth culture seems somewhat lost inside that dynamic. I don’t know—do kids even want to be cool today? I’ve been wondering about that for the past few months. Is cool even a value for Gen Z anymore? I’m not sure it is. It seems that everything now comes down to money, making money, safety, and wellness. Those appear to be the values driving society. 

I hesitate to say they’re driving culture, because they produce a rather impoverished culture. But I think that’s where we are. And I think postmodernism bears a significant part of the responsibility. That’s one of the reasons I wrote the book.

L.V. — And the book positions fashion as a clear expression of postmodernism.

E.R. — Exactly. My argument is that the postmodern mentality, through phenomena such as poptimism, the decline of criticism, the collapse of standards and hierarchies, and the idea that everything is purely subjective, has profoundly reshaped fashion.

Many of these ideas began with good intentions. They emerged as critiques of exclusion, authority, and rigid cultural structures. But over time, they have been co-opted and absorbed into a system that increasingly serves capitalism and, by extension, corporate fashion.

That’s why the book opens with Fredric Jameson. He was among the first thinkers to seriously examine the cultural consequences of postmodernism. One of his central insights was that, under postmodern conditions, anything goes. And I think that’s very close to where we are today.

Whether it’s poptimism or the idea that an $800 logo T-shirt can be sold as a luxury object, these phenomena are not isolated. They’re connected expressions of the same underlying logic, which is what I try to unpack throughout the book.

L.V. — Jameson also argues that aesthetic production has become fully integrated into commodity production, that aesthetics themselves have become a form of economic production. Our issue is called “Overload”, and we’re discussing the sense that what we’re experiencing is more than simply a consequence of that process. The constant production of images, styles, and novelty has become the main engine driving the system itself.

E.R. — Exactly. Marx already described the basic mechanism in the nineteenth century. Capitalism is structured around continuous expansion and overproduction. It constantly needs to generate more goods, more markets, more demand, until it reaches a breaking point and the cycle begins again.

What Jameson understood is that, in late capitalism, this process increasingly operates through culture and aesthetics. And that’s precisely where we are now. We live in an era of overload.

L.V. — Is there still something that can be produced from within that condition of overload, or does culture require some form of escape from it?

E.R. — I tried to articulate some answers in the book. My hope is that it can at least help people make sense of the moment we’re living through. One of the most gratifying responses I’ve had is when people say, “This is exactly what I’ve been feeling, but I didn’t quite have the language for it.”

Fashion today presents a strange paradox. On one level, it seems more visible and culturally relevant than ever. More people are paying attention to it, talking about it, and consuming it. Yet at the same time, nobody seems to like it.

L.V. — That’s also the paradox of the democratisation of culture and access to it.

E.R. — Yeah, democratisation is a really interesting thing, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for more than ten years because it’s one of those terms you can’t really argue against. The marketing industry has been very good at creating terms like that. Who can argue with democratisation? Giving more people access to great things sounds unquestionably good.

But in reality, under the guise of democratisation, we’ve often ended up with a kind of bastardisation. Everything is devalued to satisfy the masses. And there’s this idea that everyone is entitled to everything. On the surface, it’s hard to argue with that. But if you look more closely, it doesn’t mean that the masses are moving upwards in terms of taste. It means that the culture industry is moving downwards to meet people where they already are.

That’s why I think modernism was so important. People often describe it as elitist, but the ambition was actually the opposite. It assumed that difficult work had value, that audiences could be challenged, and that people might grow into forms rather than requiring forms to constantly adapt to them.

Today it feels like the opposite. The logic is: bring everything down to the lowest common denominator and give people what they already want. But as Gene Pressman famously said about Barneys, don’t give people what they want—you have to give them what they don’t know they want yet. That’s what I would like fashion to return to.