Grasping for sanity in the polycrisis

+ the luxury industry pivots, work work work

A man and a brain, a few centuries before the polycrisis

I’m a little late this week. My girlfriend and I finally found a new apartment — anyone who is familiar with the property market in Berlin will know that this is a very big deal! — and I’ve spent most of the week buying and assembling Ikea furniture.

In this week’s newsletter:

→ Grasping for sanity in the polycrisis

→ Where the luxury industry goes from here

→ The fashion act reaches California

→ Tech’s right-wing shift and the future of work

Trump meets the polycrisis

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Adam Tooze calls the polycrisis: the web of interlocking catastrophes that converge and magnify each other, like the climate emergency, spiraling inequality, misinformation, fascism, etc. etc. You can probably guess why thoughts of catastrophe have been running through my mind for the past week or so — the Trump administration is dismantling entire parts of the American government, with the help of the world’s richest man.

I am not here to write about hard politics, but now that we are staring Trump 2.0 in its terrible, ugly face, it’s important to acknowledge that we’re witnessing events that will have repercussions for everything else we care about. Fashion, work, consumerism, the environment, sustainability, inequality — all of this will be shaped by what’s happening in Washington. No matter how this turns out, history has been made.

The polycrisis is a scary concept — stare into it too long and you’ll lose your mind — but it’s a helpful way of understanding why the world is the way it is. Instead of drowning in countless catastrophes, we’re in the midst of one big one. And because the polycrisis is a web of interconnected bullshit, doing good in one area has knock-on effects somewhere else as well. Saving American democracy would be a very good thing for, well, everything. Vox has a helpful explainer on what Americans can do to fight back. And many of them are, as Sherrilyn Ifill points out in her newsletter.

For the rest of us who aren’t in the US, we have no choice but to watch it all play out through our phone screens. Whenever I feel frazzled by the world and all its bullshit, I like to come back to the serenity prayer, first coined by a Protestant theologian but made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

If theology isn’t your vibe, then Jeff Guenther aka @therapyjeff posted a video on Instagram saying more or less the same thing. Bless his soul.

The luxury pivot

Fashion is going through its own transition moment as well.

Gucci’s creative director, Sabato De Sarno, is gone after a year and a half on the job. His seat is still empty, and while it’s been a long time since I’ve made these kinds of predictions, my money is on Hedi Slimane as his replacement.

Kim Jones is also leaving Dior. Jonathan Anderson is rumored to be his replacement, potentially doing both men’s and women’s collections. Nobody personified the luxury-streetwear mashup like Kim Jones did, and if we’re lucky his aesthetic will leave with him. The whole idea of luxury houses collaborating with streetwear brands was a car crash from day one, back when Jones unveiled Supreme x Louis Vuitton. Things only got worse from there. When the streetwear industry exploded in size, execs saw dollar signs and everyone started making thousand-dollar sneakers. For years afterwards, we were forced to endure horrible collabs like Gucci x Palace and Dior x Stone Island.

Matthieu Blazy’s move to Chanel from Bottega Veneta is a pretty good indicator of where the industry might be headed.