Fashion Ate Them

This journal has been looking like a one-man operation lately, which technically it isn’t. There are two other contributors listed—Hannah and Caro, both Munich-based, both working in fashion—and readers have been asking about their absence with the persistence of people who feel mildly owed an explanation.

The theories arrived by email and various social channels: alien abduction, career change, a rival blog where they’d finally be free of my more questionable content. All entertaining, all wrong. The actual arrangement—metaphorically speaking, signed in blood and other bodily fluids—contains several pages establishing that nobody gets out alive. Once you’re part of this particular operation, you’re part of it permanently.

The mundane truth is that the fashion industry has swallowed them whole. Deadlines, shoots, the merciless calendar of an industry that treats sleep as optional and sanity as negotiable—they’re buried in it, apparently too deep to surface for long enough to write anything. When the pressure eventually lets up, Hannah and Caro will be back, and this place will stop reading like one person talking to himself in an empty room. Until then I’m holding the fort and trying not to embarrass anyone too badly.