Believe it or not, this Menswear Fashion Week marks not one but two decades of online men’s fashion coverage at what is now Vogue Runway—feel old yet?
It was the spring 2005 season when Men.Style.com launched, expanding the reach of Style.com into menswear territory. “It simply felt that menswear deserved the attention,” said Tim Blanks when I invited him to take a trip down the Style.com memory lane. Blanks joined the site that season, covering the men’s shows in Europe before adding New York to his plate for the fall 2005 collections. The way Blanks—ever the most evocative of fashion writers—describes it, in the mid-2000s menswear was a hotbed for creativity, with New York as its epicenter.
Twenty years later, Menswear Fashion Week in New York is no more, but men’s fashion is once again a space where you can find the most directional and exciting of collections. To honor our 20 years of men’s coverage, I connected with Blanks—one of my personal heroes—to ask about the state of menswear, his POV on negative reviews (and whether he writes more or less of them now), and circa 2024 whether designers are better or worse at talking to the press. We discussed his groundbreaking tv show Fashion File, his writing playlists, how he feels about Dries Van Noten’s final show, and much more.
I’ve been wanting to talk to you for forever, so I’m glad that I found a good reason. We’ve been covering menswear for 20 years here, which started pre-Vogue Runway with Men.Style.com for the spring 2005 season.
Tim Blanks: It’s been 20 years since I started working at Men.Style.com. The only thing is that I didn’t review New York that year. I started coming for fall 2005.
And now there’s no Menswear Fashion Week in New York.
But that was when New York was the epicenter of brilliant men’s design.
Who was your favorite, or what do you think made it the epicenter?
You had Duckie [Brown], and I think Steven [Cox] is the best menswear designer that America has produced, with Daniel [Silver] more of the [Pierre] Bergé of the situation. I loved Adam Kimmel, and he got better and better over the years. I thought people like Patrik Ervell were fascinating, they had something that was a bit protean. Michael Bastian I loved, and there was a label called Gilded Age. Apparently it’s still going, which I can hardly believe. I still have every single cashmere cardigan from Gilded Age. The designer’s name was Stefan [Miljanic], and he was a tiny bit gloom and doom. Like Alexandre Plokhov [of Cloak], who was such a big deal. The shows were probably as close to a McQueen show as you would get at that time in New York, this sort of moody kind of whatever.
What excites you about menswear now?
I came in through the back door with men.style.com, really, and I was the only one reviewing men’s shows. I have this memory of doing 12 shows a day in Paris and then writing for 24 hours. It was crazy. It was so exciting. It was the best time I’d ever had in my life because it just felt like something nobody had done before, and it also felt that menswear deserved the attention. Menswear was such a volatile business at that point and it really felt like it was kicking off. It felt like there was a sort of constituency of people who were ready to experiment and there were designers who were giving them things to experiment with.
That excitement ebbed, as it does in fashion generally. I think menswear took a bigger walloping because there were so many good independent designers who obviously couldn’t manage a business. I don’t cover menswear anymore, Angelo Flaccavento does it for BoF [Business of Fashion, where Blanks is Editor-at-Large]. But when I think about menswear now, it just feels really corporate to me. It just feels like everything is under a monolith umbrella. I did a thing for BoF a while ago where I picked my favorite shows, and one of them was maybe the second show that Kim Jones did in Paris. He’s an amazing menswear designer. I think even under the umbrella of LVMH, he’s been able to be really creative and idiosyncratic and original, but I look back at those things he did back then and he was doing what he does now then, but in a way that felt radical and exciting.
You mentioned the number of reviews you were writing then. I’m curious about how you feel now that you write less.
Jamie Pallot really liked the 200 word review at Style.com. I look back at those reviews, and spring 2005 was the greatest Raf Simons show of all time, and it’s funny that my review is this long [indicates a very short review]. Ten years later I’m writing an essay, a thesis, about a Raf show. We used to do individual reviews, that was Style.com’s thing, that was our USP: We cover everything. We do everything. Nicole [Phelps] and I would be doing everything, but it was fun.
She has these amazing stories of you both writing through the night in a hotel room.
Heaven! Or even when I was doing it with Josh Peskowitz and we’d be literally hanging out. He’d be holding my legs and I’d be hanging out the hotel window trying to catch the WiFi signal from the hotel across the road because ours was so fucked. It all had that energy of newness. We were doing something nobody had done before. You were asking me about the volume, so writing a little about a lot?
Yes, exactly.
We don’t do individual reviews at BoF. Now I review the day. The challenge then is that I quite like to make a theme.
I love the themes. That can’t be easy to do.
It’s funny, that’s where your creativity and perversity comes in. You make a theme of five completely unconnected shows. It might be something really stupid. I think people still read the stories, but I don’t think they’re always necessarily interested, and theming helps things. You have to seduce them into reading about something or someone. If they don’t know who is doing Mugler now, who do you stick Mugler in with to make people interested? Everybody is there for Dior and Chanel. But there’s also people that I really love who I want people to read about. Nicolas Di Felice, I think, is just incredible.
I love him. I think he’s amazing.
Incredible, I really hope he gets a really big job. I mean, he’s got quite a big job now. He’s great and I love him.
He’s excited to tell you about his collection or know about what you’re interested in. He’s a good interview. Do you find that designers have gotten better or worse at talking about their work?
Designers have gotten much better about being interviewed. There were designers I loved who literally couldn’t string three words together about their collection, which was always a shame because you could tell that they were not going to be in the dialogue for much longer. I find that they need to talk to you about the collections. They need to know what you think and they formulate their thoughts about what they’ve done as you are talking to them. It’s a skill to be so adaptable that when they’re listening to you, they’re cooking up: Yeah, that’s what I was doing. Yeah, that was the book. Yeah, that was the movie. Because some assistant was doing it somewhere else, so now you’ve given them this intellectual gloss, without trying to sound arrogant or anything. That’s why your reviews are really valuable to the designer.
How do you feel about designers just not giving interviews. Is it more prevalent now than it was then?
In the early days I was doing it for television, so that was new and people were kind of fascinated. I think designers thought it was something they needed to do because they saw it as a new audience. Even [Claude] Montana and [Yves] Saint Laurent, they’d be propped in front of a camera by a handler, or Pierre Bergé, and they’d be useless, but they’d do it. I think that then PR got in the middle and everything became super controlled. And then Tom Ford came along, and then KCD would be like just four questions. It went from a 45 minute interview backstage that you used 15 seconds of in your final piece to four questions and a 45 minute wait. That whole thing was Tom, he absolutely started it. Then people started doing it for no-names, too. You’d be like I don’t even have four questions for this person. I won’t say names, but you can guess. Do I care? It matches my progress through life. I was chatty-chatty in the olden days and now I’m like, you don’t want to chat? I’m happy to go get a cocktail somewhere.
If you do want to chat, though, what’s the way around it?
What I prefer to do now that does kind of kill the review a little bit is to see if we can meet ahead of time and do something that will come out the morning of the show, then you don’t get a review but you get a little profile thing, which is more interesting as a writer. It doesn’t serve the purpose of reviewing the show, but then maybe I would rather read about the person than about the show.
You did one of Pieter [Mulier] for Alaïa when he started, which I thought was fantastic. He gave you a quote about never doing logo hoodies, which I’m keeping track of. I do think that, from an audience standpoint, there’s a specific reader who loves to read about clothes, but most people are curious about the designer as a person, and their thoughts on the brand. There’s almost voyeurism in that. As a writer it’s always fun to profile, too.
I also think that that’s a sort of gauge of fashion’s evolution from quite a niche activity to another branch of the entertainment industry. I’ve been saying that that’s absolutely what has happened in my time covering fashion from 1985 until now. Fashion is now entertainment. Just as there are people who’d rather read a story about Emma Stone’s love life as opposed to a review of Poor Things, there are people who are going to want to read about a designer and not their clothes. I guess it’s humanizing fashion. It’s also distracting people from the sort of slightly monstrous nature of fashion in a way.
You touched on this a little bit, but it’s also the corporate feel that fashion has now. When you get to speak to the designer and meet the person, it distracts the reader from how insidious that machine can feel. It brings it back to the human.
It’s way around that huge control thing with the PR people, standing between you and the designer in a stupid way, in a stupid obstructive way.
I also want to ask you about writing about clothes. You don’t always talk about the clothes, but more about everything else. I’m curious if it has changed at all since you started doing this.
The reason why I didn’t write about clothes in the way Sarah [Mower], for example, can write about them, or Nicole [Phelps], and Sarah and Nicole can really write about clothes, is that I don’t know clothes [laughs]. I didn’t know the terminology. I knew the history of fashion, but through people, so I never wrote about clothes. I wrote about the mise en scène. My favorite show was that [John] Galliano one for Dior in the Opera Garnier [couture, spring 1998], and it was an extravaganza. Who the fuck is going to write about the kind of stitching or the jacquard or whatever? You just go gaga over the extravaganza and that is what you write about. You write about Nijisnky dancing in the lobby when you walked in. My whole thing was that I wanted that in my writing because I was such a country boy and always felt so privileged to be in this big city world. My challenge was to translate it into words. That’s why I got shit for writing about the music, I really did, but I always said I was writing about what the designer wants you to see and hear. If the designer wants huge red wigs on the model, you mention them. I’m going to talk about the person who made the wigs, and if the designer wants you to be listening to a 30-year-old Cocteau Twins song, I’m going to put that in the review. It seems more important to me than the skirts.
I still love the skirts. But I agree, and I’m the same way, in a sense, which I told you I took from you. Some of these things are too extraordinary to not let the reader in on them. All of it is also part of the fantasy and the designer’s message. But speaking of music, I wanted to ask about your writing playlist. I hear you always write with music on?
Believe it or not, Nicole and I had our playlist and all I’ve done is add to it. It’s about 14 hours? I have another playlist on Spotify, which is equally as long. I will just add. The last track I added is by the Irish band Lankum. They’re like a combination of My Bloody Valentine and Fairport Convention, the English band; I can’t even tell you how stupendous they are. I’ve been listening to St. Vincent’s album a lot too.
Switching gears a little bit, I also wanted to ask you about writing negative reviews. Do you think you write more negative reviews now than you did in the past?
Do you think I do?
Well, I’d rather you tell me what you think first [laughs].
[Laughs] Funny you ask me that, I am more impatient now. I don’t know if they’re more negative, but they’re definitely more impatient. And that’s a lot to do with the repetitiveness of fashion now. People just stick to their groove.
It goes back to the corporate-ness of it all. Brands find something that works and then they make it in every single color every single season and everything looks exactly the same. And then we have to find a way of writing it in a different way.
We used to laugh a lot. There were designers where you could honestly take the review from the season before and just change the season. That’s always been the case. But I felt that [in the past] there was always a balance between people who were purely creative and you had more of a flourishing of independent designers. Now you have someone like Matches that goes under and sucks a hundred independent designers with it. I think I’m a little more critical, I don’t know, it frustrates me.
So what do you think of Dries [Van Noten]?
I was going to ask you about Dries. I’ve been a fan of Dries for a really long time. I’m not sure if you know this, but fashion used to be a very big thing on tumblr when I was a teenager. There are a lot of designers who come from tumblr. Mowalola, I think, and Peter Do and Christopher John Rogers. There was a community of people that grew up learning about fashion on Tumblr, and I was one of them. Dries was one of my favorites. We would post images and reblog them. He’s just been very instrumental to me becoming a lover of clothes more than just fashion.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in La Paz, Bolivia.
Oh my, the highest capital city in the world.
Tim, I’m screaming. That is the fun fact I always give people when they ask about La Paz. I love that you know it. But yes, I love Dries. I was heartbroken but excited to hear he’s moving on. Again, opportunity. He’s always ahead. How do you feel about it?
Been there since… I feel like I saw his first show. I don’t know if I did, but I know I saw his second show. Just incredible. Bringing so much more to fashion design and really some of the greatest fashion shows, just the intelligence and sensuality and the kind of perversity of so much of what he did. I love the fact that on Saturday night the 22nd [of June], we actually get to celebrate somebody who is leaving on their own terms, at the peak of their powers, and we know they’re going. It’s not like when they announce a week later that that was their last show. We actually get to say goodbye and thank you.
The way you put it just gave me chills. I had never gone to the shows in Europe until last year in June for menswear, and that was my first-ever Dries show, which I thought was fantastic. But it was the most insane experience to just be there, all the way from tumblr and La Paz. I just never thought I’d ever see it in person.
If I could take you back to a show, the Bryan Ferry show with the catwalk with all the umbrellas on top of it, or the women’s show where a million fairy lights came down and the soundtrack was Godspeed You! Black Emperor, or the anniversary show where we ate at a table and the models walked on it. I mean, the greatest things you’ve ever seen. You walked away thinking, fuck, this is why I do this. I didn’t care if I didn’t write anything about it. I had been taken somewhere I’ve never been before and I will never go again. There’s very, very few people—Dries, Galliano, McQueen, Raf, Comme [des Garçons], though Comme would do it without the surge of sex and warmth. Even when I first started, the first Saint Laurent show I ever saw, the first Geoffrey Beene show I ever saw, you’re like, wow, this is a fashion show. This isn’t like when Lucy [Ricardo] and Ethel [Mertz] went to Paris [in I Love Lucy]. This is like a proper thing.
I’m curious about who your favorite designers to talk to are.
I’m going to sound completely like a hippie love machine [laughs], but I love talking to everybody. I’m really consumed by curiosity about them. The fabulous thing for me was always the microphone. It took a lot for a shy boy in 1989 to stand up in front of a crowded auditorium and interview people about things, and the microphone was always my mediating device and the camera lens was always the friend I spoke to.
I do like talking to Rick Owens. I’d walk on gilded splinters, any day, any hour of the night to talk to him. There are people like Jun Takahashi where the conversation is mediated by a translator, but he says amazing things from his heart. When Helmut [Lang] finally got talking… and Christian Lacroix was amazing, a wonderful man. You couldn’t shut him up. But I love people who have a reputation for not talking. I did a great interview once with Rei Kawakubo. Raf, when you got him talking, too. Miuccia Prada is also a wonderful interview.
The first time I went to Japan to meet Issey [Miyake], I was told that if he answered your first question in Japanese, it was going to be a very, very short interview. If he answered your first question in English, two days later you’d be in Kyoto with him for the weekend. Just having an amazing time. I went in and he answered the first question in English, and then, well, Kyoto. I forget because it’s been a long time, but people like Yohji [Yamamoto], Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass. I mean incredible people from another time.
What I also find interesting is the fashion school pipeline. Designers being raised to be designers versus people finding their way into designing. It doesn’t mean it’s good or bad, it just created a different industry and a different kind of designer.
I think for such a long time it was a vocation, it was something that is going to be hard, but you do it because that’s all you can do. That still applies in some cases. What I’ll say to students when I do a talk, they always ask what do I need to do? And I just say that you have to believe in what you’re doing and not ever look for financial remuneration. Just do it because it’s your calling. Writing? You’re never going to be a billionaire. I’m proof of that [laughs].
Are you on TikTok at all? How do you feel about that TikTok fashion commentary?
I’m not on it. So I haven’t seen it.
I think it’s interesting that people have been trying to do what you did with Fashion File. That style of interviewing that feels like what you did or House of Style.
Is Fashion File on TikTok?
It’s not, because it’s hard to find. But I do see it as something people are trying to replicate. It doesn’t always hit, but there’s lots of people running around with microphones in their hands.
It was a different time. People were a little older. I mean, I was talking to peers. They were more thoughtful, probably. When we sold Fashion File to E! And it became a top rated show—we outrated Howard Stern for a little while—I always said the show was about the people I was talking to, not about me. But E! said they needed a front person, somebody to lead the audience in. They auditioned Tyra Banks. She apparently wanted more per episode than they were paying me for a year, so they came back to little old me with my little bag of magic beans, and that’s how Fashion File kept going. If they would’ve buried it in some kind of American gloss, it would have never had that real aspect to it. It worked because it seduced people with its authenticity.
So iconic. That and House of Style with Todd [Oldham] raised me.
I have a lot of happy memories about it. I was lucky enough that we kind of kicked the show off in 1989, just as the supermodel thing was beginning. There were only three camera crews backstage, and eight months later there were 300. We got incredible access to these incredible women. I don’t know if I’d call them all friends, but Linda I would call a friend. The others, it’s nice to see them when we see each other. I’m so happy that they remember and have fond memories because I do, as well. It was an amazing time.
Do you find that designers used to react more to reviews before than they do now? There’s one designer who is always replying to comments, good or bad, under his posts. I find that hilarious and kind of great.
You’ll have to show me. I don’t really get any reactions. I don’t get people reacting the way that they did with Style.com. It had a reach and an intimacy that I think people were incredibly engaged with. I don’t think there’s that degree of engagement in that medium anymore. I think obviously there’s engagement on TikTok or somewhere, but Style.com was the forum, now there’s a million forums. But if I ever hear negative things or positive things from a designer, they’ll usually contact you directly.
Right. That’s also the reality of social media in terms of engagement. I can write something on Instagram that will get tons of traction, but perhaps it wouldn’t have the same effect on the site. It’s interesting. It’s that extra click that people have to do. They like to be met where they are, I guess.
BoF will post when I write something. They’ll post a picture and a little bit [of text] underneath. I notice that if something generates a lot of response, it’s always to the images and not the words. People express their opinions about what the story is about, nothing to do with what I wrote. There was something furiously negative. I can’t remember what it was, but it was along the lines that because of my age, I couldn’t possibly understand what I was writing about. But what people forget is that, in the end, everybody gets old [laughs].
That’s true. I love that as an ending quote, actually.
Isn’t it good when somebody gives you a last line?
