What I like about Patrick Ervell, as a brand, is the pace in which change takes place within it. The fashion industry status quo of showing collections only two times a year allows for a designer to easily drop the ideas of one collection and subsequently create an entirely new one with no relation whatsoever to the first. While I can understand the need to differentiate between collections, I find it much more charming when this is done through reworking instead of abandoning past ideas.

If you take a look at Patrick Ervell’s collections, you’ll find all the same elements in each: the club-collared shirt, the cropped jacket, the long coat, the basic suit, and one or two unique fabric selections. There are only a small number of looks and the presentation is always stark. These elements are altered ever so slightly and with great effect. The result is a body work with a very clear aesthetic, direction, and a consistency that sets it apart in a crowd of fashion schizophrenics.

Photos: CelebrityCIty (pre-collage)
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Sufjan unexpectedly doused his musical boon upon long-awaiting fans from whatever aural plane he now resides. Drenched with his familiar, idiosyncratic sound, All Delighted People is a sparkling embrace after five years of mixed signals. It is magnificent.

The first track of the same name is essentially a summary of Sufjan’s musical prowess: incomparable song structures, lyrical agility, and unrivaled instrumentation. His vocals do take quite a noticeable reshaping. Where once was a voice that wandered only slightly above a whisper, is now one imbued with a new sense of urgency and a beautiful unrefinement. It warbles and cracks and wanders about.

Sufjan Stevens – All Delighted People (Original)

I’ll finally have the pleasure to see him live, in Boston and in New York, and I really don’t know how I’m going to breathe while doing so.

Post-Learning, a fragile, fucked-up little wonder, Perfume Genius delivers another stark tune to add to his roster. Because sometimes you just need to feed your inner turmoil.

Photo: Mike Hadreas, via Matador

This is Takahiro Miyashita’s final menswear collection for Number (N)ine. This is Number (N)ine at it’s utmost splendor. It is really a legendary ending.

Yesterday I was able to brave the dreary Manhattan weather–fitting in retrospect–to visit the very last sample sale for the brand. Along both walls of the narrow boutique-turned-repository were cramped clothing racks clogged with bits and pieces from Miyashita’s past collections. It was mini purchasable retrospective. Although I only came away with a handful of pieces, it was gratifying just to be able to handle the coats, cloaks, and jackets that I’ve only gawked at through a computer screen during my time in Hawaii. I can’t explain it but there’s really something special about the reimagined Americana that the Japanese–Daiki, Junya, Rei, etc.–come up with; it’s all very magical. Takahiro’s contributions to that with Number (N)ine will be missed though the output of his new line, I’m sure, will garner just as much praise.

Photos: Vogue UK

This sense of a democracy of interlocutors in Obrist’s interviews, the suspicion that between and beneath these conversations others are going on even as he and his current interviewee speak, is partly a matter of the discursive form of the Q&A. In an interview with Paul Rabinow in 1984, Michel Foucault expressed an antipathy toward polemics, preferring instead the interview or dialogue. Questions and answers, he said, “depend on a game — a game that is at once pleasant and difficult — in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.” (The polemicist, on the other hand, “proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance.”) Obrist’s interviews attempt to go further, to establish the rules for an infinite conversation and street plans for unrealizable routes.

Images: M/M via But Does It Float
Text: “The Conversation Series” by Brian Dillon