Introducing the Editor
As a young girl who was normally bored in school, I was uninterested in most textbooks and always more attracted to the images they contained. I figured that my best shot to distinguish myself from others was to develop taste. I thought the most brilliant thing a woman could have was a unique taste palette. Now, I fantasize about the role of the Fashion Editor next to the Artist, and how the two exist in contemporary culture.
The group and podcast Nymphet Alumni, hosted by Alexi Alario, Sam Cummins and Biz Sherbert, is a great example of contemporary editors reflecting and projecting culture. Like many of the writers discussed in this text, Nymphet Alumni creates language and meaning for Fashion (with capital F) of the moment. They think about culture verbally and visually, as for every episode released, there is an accompanying Pinterest board.
The podcast is driven by a somewhat internet spiritual sensibility. They utilize language to generate meaning, rather than to simply explain it. For instance, the creation of non-existing terms for different internet-adjacent aesthetics.
Nymphet Alumni are best known for coining the term “blokette”[1]. Terms like this fill up spaces in culture that were previously verbally empty, spaces that only existed through imagery. In our current image-obsessed world, fewer words feel appropriate to describe feelings and phenomena that mostly take place online. So, by expanding the meaning of language with the creation of new words, Nymphet Alumni question whether the unity of a word can capture the presence of a thing.[2]
Through platforms like TikTok and Substack, editorial authority becomes decentralized. Culture circulates before fashion (with lowercase f) has time to formalize and capitalize on it. And when it does, like when Vogue reports on “Literary Chic” as a spring trend for 2026, it is already irrelevant and uninteresting.[3] The cyclical view on fashion is not only boring, but it also accelerates environmental degradation, promotes overconsumption, normalizes unethical labor practices, and reduces clothing to disposable commodities. The pursuit of being fashionable is not driven by any practical need that fashion objects can fulfill. Rather, style is a “desire for its own image” and for the spirit and non-material ethos of Fashion (with uppercase F).[4]
The editor makes choices and selections. They are driven by an unspoken sensibility that seems hard to question. This is what art envies about Fashion (with uppercase F). The pleasure of being guided by subjective values, the guilty pleasures, the mindless immersion and the indulgence in culture.
All visual culture can simultaneously consist of mindless immersion and detached observation, a well-put dichotomy by van Winkel - looking and thinking, retinal and cerebral. Mass culture and art stand in a dialectical relation to each other. In the present day, neither can be conceived without the other.[5] The separation between high culture and low culture, art theory and art practice, and the Editor and the Artist, is no longer relevant, since it has been put to the test throughout the twentieth century.
Mindless immersion can be personified by someone who puts themselves completely at the mercy of the cultural system they find themselves in (like the fashion model or the actor). People who are, in fact, vessels, as well as simultaneous creators. This is rarely the role of the contemporary artist. If anyone occupies this role in the art world, it is the outdated ephemeral muse, someone like Grace Jones or Veruschka. On the other hand, detached observation is embodied by someone who puts themselves outside, or even above, these systems. They comment on culture, remaining observant and critical.
Artists who manage to stay between both positions are the ones who can honestly show their genuine attraction for mass culture, as well as their critical tendencies toward it. Mass culture always seems to seduce and to offend in the same instance. Transmitting the nuances that are inherent to the engagement with fashion is not as easy as unbiased analysis. In some cases, it is more radical. Those who attempt to take a neutral position when it comes to mass culture and art, inevitably isolate themselves from their object of study. It is both obvious and absurd that, at this point in time, art and mass culture cannot be separated.
We can no longer approach art and mass culture with different mindsets. We have one singular view to deal with both. The “mindless immersion” and the “detached observation” are synonymous with the outdated division of culture into “low” and “high”. In other words, what is left of the divide of visual production personifies into the fashion Editor, who creates fast, juicy work for mass culture, and the Artist, who creates intelligent, clean work for the art world.
Frederic Jameson argues in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” that “elite” culture and “mass” culture are mutually intertwined and should be studied as such.[6] He rejects the idea that these two forms should be placed in opposition to one another. The Fashion Editor and the Artist are, in fact, in the same rooms these days, with examples such as Anne Imhof, Cindy Sherman, Vanessa Beecroft, Rei Kawakubo, Wolfgang Tilmas, Sylvie Fleury, JW Anderson, Bernadette Corporation, Anthea Hamilton, Ann-Sofie Back, BLESS, Nadia Lee Cohen, Petra Collins, Martine Syms, K-HOLE, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Ashley Williams, Laurie Simmons, Julie Kegels, etc (just off the top of my head). These artists reflect that the visual sensibility for image and culture can be used for Fashion and for art alike - who even knows which is which in their work?
Artists who deal with these systems of value do not want to be placed at the margins of mass culture anymore. They do not want to function as moral excellence or as the critical card. Artists long for the freedom to operate within whatever system they find themselves in, in a diverse, sometimes inconsistent way. Engaging with art by tiptoeing around culture feels very stale. The once dominant expectation that an artist’s decisions should be coherent with the intellectual values that come with the job now feels dishonest. A lot of contemporary artistic production is not so heavy. It can be moved and pushed around through different parts of culture. If it cannot, if it can only exist within the art world, it might not be so urgent.
To be clear, I am referring to artists whose practice revolves around culture. Those who play with the notion that their work can only exist when inserted into contemporary culture, who operate outside categories and classifications. Artists who can be touched by anything and instigate anything. For instance, Anthea Hamilton’s exhibition Mash Up (image 44) at M HKA, in Antwerp, is a filtration and processing of familiar imagery.[7]Hamilton frames fashion, food, architecture, pop culture, nature and design in inventive ways. The distillation of known tropes and motifs creates an immediate response in the viewer. In the exhibition, there is a room that displays costumes from The Squash (images 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 and 72), a collaboration between Hamilton and Jonathan Anderson from LOEWE. These are seven elaborate costumes created for live performers to wear during Hamilton’s first major exhibition at the TATE modern in 2018. Hamilton came across a photograph in a book she found while researching improvisational theatre and participatory art practices in the 1960s and 1970s.[8] The image depicted a vegetable-like figure, a person transformed into an object, lying dramatically,surrounded by vines (image 93). The performance is the result of an imaginative process. As Hamilton could not find the origin of the photograph, she was left to fill out the visual gaps of that gelatinous image. Using structures, costumes and sculptures, the performers are open to physically interpret the figure depicted, a result of the artist’s interest in the complex ways we respond to imagery.
LOEWE also released a lookbook of the costumes that was published in British Vogue in March 2018.[9]Hamilton uses Fashion, not in a critical way, but in a reflective way, free of the other bulky connotations of designers, brands and signifiers. “The Squash” looks like pure imaginative personas of the Fashion (with capital F) world, gelatinous figures that have no clue what Levi’s engineered jeans are.[10]
[1] Blokette is a microtrend popularized on TikTok. This aesthetic blends elements of Blokecore style (garments such as oversized football jerseys, vintage sports jackets and Adidas Sambas and Coquette style (mini skirts, bloomer shorts, knee-high socks and ribbons). This aesthetic combines traditionally masculine elements with hyper-feminine ones
[2] According to Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology, logocentrism is the tendency in Western thought, to believe that meaning is guaranteed by language, a logos Logocentrism, in this manner, upholds traditional thought. Through Derrida’s way of thinking, text becomes intertextual; Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida, analyzed in Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorist (second edition), Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (Anthology Editors), Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025
[3] Vogue online article The Key Spring/Summer 2026 Trends you can already shop, Andrea Zendejas
[4] Jean Baudrillard Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1976, 115
[5] The Regime of Visibility, Camiel van Winkel, NAi Publishers, 2005, 61
[6] Frederic Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, 133
[7] These are the descriptions provided by M HKA of the iteration of these costumes shown in “Mah Up”: “Giant Pumpkin No.2, 2022, 110 x 223 x 220 cm, Hand-painted leather, foam, timber, metal fixings; Anthea Hamilton, in collaboration with LOEWE, Giant Pumpkin No.1, 2022, 130 x 207 x 170 cm, Hand-painted leather, foam, timber, metal fixings; Anthea Hamilton, in collaboration with LOEWE, The Squash (Look 7), 2018, Costumes: Life size, Helmets: 45 x 50 x 45 cm, Fiber glass head covered in white hand painted napa. White leather bolero. Tracksuit in white knit with hand painted squash texture. Courtesy of Jonathan Anderson; Anthea Hamilton, in collaboration with LOEWE, Giant Pumpkin No.3, 2022, 123 x 175 x 105 cm, Hand-painted leather, foam, timber, metal fixings.”
[8] Anthea Hamilton The Squash, TATE Britain’s website, 2018
[9] These are the descriptions in the lookbook, Jonathan Anderson: When Loewe Does Squashes, provided by Vogue: “Fibreglass head covered in white and black stretch velvet, black leather bolero, tracksuit in white swimwear jersey and black velvet stripes. Worn with printed silk crepon scarf, long gloves in white napa and tabi long socks in white calf with black and white hand painted stripes; Fibreglass head covered in white hand painted napa, white leather bolero, tracksuit in white knit with hand painted squash texture; Fibreglass head covered in green stretch fabric with ruffles and light gold sequins, jersey gauze tracksuit with ruban in light gold sequin, reconstructed leather braided cord cod piece; Fibreglass head covered in calf leather marble print, vest and pant in stretch calf leather marble print, shirt in hammered silk crepon marble print; Fibreglass head covered in green buffalo leather and vintage effect calf leather, multicolored printed silk crepon nightgown, green velvet cuff/collar and purple velvet marble print top panel; Fibreglass head covered in dark grey ostrich leather, orange handpainted leather bolero, knitted tracksuit in vegetal hand painted texture with Swarovski hand stitched stone; Fibreglass head covered in black lamb suede and black strech napa, tracksuit in black lamb suede and black stretch napa.”
[10] Trendy jeans model that gained mainstream popularity in 2025