Before the Algorithm, Taste had to be Developed
Back in 2010, I wrote a piece called 15 Reasons You Know Nothing About Fashion. The title was provocative because that was part of the language of blogging at the time, but the idea behind it was much more personal. I was documenting the films, designers, photographers, models, artists and personalities that were shaping the way I understood fashion. This was before an algorithm could build an aesthetic for you in a weekend. You found an old movie, picked up a magazine, heard a designer mentioned in a song, discovered a photographer through somebody else's work or saw someone on the street put something together in a way you had never considered. One reference led to another. Looking back sixteen years later, I realize I wasn't creating a list of things fashionable people were supposed to know. I was documenting how I was developing an eye.
For Me it's Starts with.. Dapper Dan
There is one person who wasn't represented by a movie on that original list but whose influence helps explain why so many of those references connected with me in the first place: Dapper Dan. What was happening in Harlem wasn't simply an alternative version of European luxury. It was a completely different way of interpreting it. Logos, silhouettes and symbols associated with established luxury houses were being reconstructed through hip hop, Black identity, neighborhood status and personal expression. That changed the meaning of the clothes. Fashion could come from Paris or Milan, but style could come from Harlem, and culture could take something created thousands of miles away and give it an entirely different language. Dapper Dan helped establish something I would understand much more clearly later: knowing fashion and understanding style are two different things.
Mahogany: Fashion as Transformation
Mahogany showed me fashion as something larger than clothing. It was ambition, fantasy, identity, image-making and transformation operating at the same time. Diana Ross wasn't simply wearing clothes in the film; fashion became part of the architecture of the character and the world surrounding her. The photography, styling, movement, glamour and drama demonstrated how an image could communicate before anyone said a word. That relationship between clothing and storytelling became increasingly important to me because it showed that fashion wasn't simply the final product. The image itself was the product.
Andy Warhol: Culture Could Become the Medium
Andy Warhol made the boundaries between art, celebrity, fashion, photography, commerce and popular culture feel almost irrelevant. A person could become an image. An image could become a product. A product could become art. Art could become culture and culture could turn around and sell the entire thing back to you. Long before social media transformed everybody into their own media channel, Warhol understood the power of repetition, celebrity and visual identity. His world helped reinforce something that became fundamental to how I eventually approached creative direction: the most interesting ideas rarely stay inside one category.
Edie Sedgwick: Style as Identity
Edie Sedgwick represented something fashion has always understood but can't manufacture on demand: presence. The clothes mattered, but the attitude made them memorable. Hair, makeup, proportion, movement and personality combined into something recognizable before branding became the word we use for everything. Edie was an example of how individual style could become its own visual language. You didn't need a logo to recognize the image because the person had become the identity.
Karl Lagerfeld: Reinvention Is Part of the Job
Karl Lagerfeld represented the ability to understand the history of a fashion house without becoming trapped by it. Fashion survives through reinvention, and Lagerfeld demonstrated how heritage could be preserved while continuously being reinterpreted for another generation. That balance between respecting what came before and understanding when something needs to evolve became relevant far beyond fashion. Brands, artists and creative people face the same problem: preserve too much and you become a museum; abandon everything and you lose the thing that made people care in the first place.
Prêt-à-Porter: Fashion Is Also Theater
Prêt-à-Porter pulled back the curtain and showed fashion as the strange ecosystem it actually is: designers, models, editors, photographers, celebrities, buyers, egos, business, spectacle and chaos all competing for attention while pretending everything is perfectly controlled. Fashion can be serious business while simultaneously being completely ridiculous, and understanding both sides is important. The runway may last fifteen minutes, but the machine required to create those fifteen minutes is enormous. Once you understand that, you start looking beyond the clothes and paying attention to the industry producing the moment.
The September Issue: Taste Is a Business
The September Issue showed that fashion isn't driven exclusively by designers. Editors, stylists, photographers and creative decision-makers influence how the public ultimately understands what designers create. A collection can exist, but somebody still has to decide which image represents it, which photograph runs, what gets removed, what becomes the cover and what the audience sees first. That is where taste becomes business. Creative direction isn't decoration added at the end of the process. It can determine how the entire world receives the work.
Valentino: Elegance Requires Discipline
Valentino represented another side of fashion entirely: precision, romance, craftsmanship and consistency. Trends can create attention, but a recognizable point of view creates legacy. You can see a certain silhouette, a particular red, a proportion or an attitude and understand the world it belongs to. That level of recognition isn't accidental. It comes from repeating and refining an idea until the aesthetic becomes bigger than an individual garment. Elegance looks effortless from the outside because the work required to create it is usually invisible.
Zoolander: Fashion Can Laugh at Itself
Zoolander worked because fashion already contained everything necessary for satire: extreme personalities, impossible standards, manufactured celebrity, enormous egos and an industry capable of treating the smallest aesthetic decision like an international emergency. But underneath the comedy was something useful. Fashion is powerful precisely because people agree to participate in its mythology. The poses, photographers, runways, exclusivity and personalities create a world that can influence culture while also being completely absurd. Sometimes understanding an industry requires being able to laugh at it, plus Owen Wilson on a scooter when he skateboards is comedy.
Blow-Up: Framing Perspectives
Blow-Up made photography feel less like documentation and more like investigation. The photographer wasn't simply recording fashion; the camera was deciding what deserved attention. That distinction changed how I thought about imagery. Clothes can exist independently, but photography creates the version of them most people will remember. Crop the frame differently, change the lighting, move the subject, introduce an environment and suddenly the exact same garment communicates something completely different. The photographer isn't standing outside the fashion conversation. The photographer is helping construct it.
Gia: Pretty Priviledge Tax
The story of Gia Carangi complicated the mythology surrounding modeling. Fashion imagery can make people appear almost untouchable, but the people creating those images remain human. Behind the photographs are careers, pressure, personalities, vulnerability and an industry constantly searching for the next face. Gia's story made it impossible to look only at the finished image without thinking about what might exist outside the frame. Fashion creates fantasy, but fantasy still has real people inside it.
Project Runway: Freestyle Designer Run off's
Project Runway did something significant by exposing the creative process to a mass audience. Suddenly people weren't only seeing finished clothes; they were seeing sketches, fabric choices, construction problems, deadlines, criticism, mistakes and the decisions required to turn an idea into something tangible. Design became conversation. It helped people understand that creativity isn't simply inspiration appearing out of nowhere. It is problem solving under pressure, editing yourself, responding to criticism and continuing to make decisions when the clock is running out.
Isaac Mizrahi: Fashion Can Have Personality
Isaac Mizrahi demonstrated that fashion intelligence didn't require removing humor, personality or humanity from the conversation. There was color, wit, accessibility and a willingness to talk about clothes without treating fashion like an exclusive language available only to insiders. That mattered because style should ultimately feel alive. The best fashion doesn't simply communicate that somebody knows the rules. It communicates that they know themselves.
Elite Visionary David LaChapelle: Real Shooter
David LaChapelle showed me what happens when photography stops trying to quietly document culture and starts building its own universe. Saturated color, celebrity, religion, sexuality, consumerism, fantasy, humor and spectacle could all occupy the same frame. The images weren't simply photographs of people wearing clothes. They were complete visual environments. That approach reinforced something that continues to influence my work: sometimes the strongest image isn't the one that explains itself immediately. Sometimes you build a world interesting enough that people want to stay inside it long enough to understand what you're saying.
Absolutely Ozwald Boateng: Classically Unapologetic
Ozwald Boateng deserves an honorable mention because he represents something I came to appreciate deeply in menswear: flair. Traditional tailoring can easily become a uniform of restraint, but Boateng understood how to respect the architecture of the suit without disappearing inside its rules. Color, lining, proportion, fabric and silhouette could carry personality while the tailoring remained disciplined. There is a difference between dressing correctly and dressing with presence. Boateng demonstrated that understanding tradition doesn't mean surrendering individuality to it. Dapper Dan showed me how culture could reinterpret luxury. Boateng showed me how personality could reinterpret tradition. Different worlds, same underlying principle: clothing becomes style when the person wearing it brings something of themselves to the conversation.
Ruth E. Carter: When Clothing Becomes Character
If Dapper Dan taught me that culture could reinterpret luxury, Ruth E. Carter showed me how clothing could tell the story of an entire people. Her work made me look beyond fashion as simply what somebody was wearing and understand costume as character, history, geography, politics, aspiration and identity operating in the same frame. From Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X to What’s Love Got to Do with It, Dolemite Is My Name and Black Panther, Carter wasn't just dressing actors. She was building enough visual information into the clothes that you could understand something about the person before they ever spoke.
Fashion Was Never Just About Clothes
Looking at this list sixteen years later, the common thread becomes much clearer. I wasn't really studying clothing. I was studying image-making. Photography, movies, music, advertising, designers, stylists, models, artists, magazines and street culture were all showing me different ways identity could be constructed and communicated. A photographer could change the meaning of a garment. A stylist could change how you understood a person. Music could change the cultural value of a brand. A neighborhood could reinterpret luxury. A designer could take centuries of tailoring tradition and inject personality into it. The clothes were only one part of a much larger creative system.
Before Everything Became Content
There was value in discovering these things before everything became instantly searchable, shareable and optimized into content. You had to follow references. You had to wonder why something looked interesting and then go looking for the reason. Taste developed through curiosity rather than recommendation. Today we have access to more fashion history, photography, collections and cultural references than any generation before us, but access and understanding aren't the same thing. Seeing everything doesn't automatically teach you how to see.
16 Years Later
I wouldn't write 15 Reasons You Know Nothing About Fashion - A Side exactly the same way today, but I understand the person who wrote it. I wasn't really trying to prove that somebody else knew nothing about fashion. I was realizing how much there was for me to learn. Those films, designers, photographers and personalities became entry points into a much larger creative education. Dapper Dan helped me understand why culture could be as influential as the establishment. Ozwald Boateng reinforced why discipline never has to erase personality. Fashion gave me references. Hip hop gave me context. The streets taught me interpretation. Tailoring taught me discipline. Flair taught me not to disappear inside the rules. Experience taught me how to connect all of it. Sixteen years later.