BLOG#15: RESURRECTION EVIL
I am pleased to announce that I was not invited to a lot of shows for NYFW. This is my second season no longer an editor at a fashion magazine that a lot of people respect, therefore less invites. I honestly like this fact. Not only do I not have to run-and-gun edit multiple high concept essays between shows and rather unfortunate BFA photo ops, I also don’t have to pretend to like or even respect shows that I vehemently dislike and don’t respect. Philosophically, I also like the reminder that people do not notice or care about what I have to say, because it means that I get to care about what I have to say with no material consequences for projects or reputations larger than myself. This isn’t news, but the people who email blast you about how valuable your perspective is, or how much they admire your personal style and dedication to the game? They will disappear the second ‘associate editor at insert-magazine-here’ is dropped from your Muck Rack. And this is a level of earnestness that I actually do really respect. Fashion is an industry, first and foremost about people doing their jobs. The recognition and care you may feel attached to this week of glitz and shows is completely manufactured—in its absence, there is a wonderful opportunity to build your relationship to the clothing. Did it move you? Did you see merit in the construction or theme beyond your personal taste? Did you like it, but didn’t think you would? When you look, on your own terms, you get to build this for yourself. I didn’t like to think this of myself, but I needed the reminder. Every time I hate fashion week I realize that I love it because of this. I’m also a Sagittarius with a clinically liberal arts way of thinking, so I get a nice Lacanian mirror for projection.
Speaking of Lacan, last Tuesday I got the truly immense privilege to preview Dr. Valerie Steele’s latest museum curation at FIT, called Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis. For the uninitiated, Dr. Steele is literally a fashion doctor (as in a holder of a doctorate degree in fashion studies), a dress historian, and in general, the fucking goat. She gave we press preview invitees a walk-though of her labyrinthian curation for Triple-D, a point of view that examines all the nuances of Freudian, Lacanian, and even Jungian psychoanalysis through clothing. The central concepts are clothing as pathology, clothing as permeable surface, clothing as identity construction. There were a couple references to JB (Judith Butler) regarding the identification theme. We go through the history of clothing from what Freud himself wore, implying his own shopping neuroses, all the way up to the more contemporary concept of personal style becoming cultural exoskeleton, a form of armor against unfriendly eyes or sordid influence. I nodded aggressively through Steele’s time-traveling exhibition, completely enthralled. For perspective, when I did my undergrad school’s study abroad fashion program, we looked at a couple chapters of Steele’s Fetish, a book about the Freudian concepts of fetish as they played out in women’s fashion and dress. This was the first book I purchased and actually read all the way through beyond the assigned sections, because I felt like she was writing about me (my father is a psychiatrist and he and I are both somewhat neurotic beneath a calm exterior). I told Dr. Steele this when I interviewed her after the walk-through. Withholding the contents of that interview because I am ideally writing about them for a magazine, so stay tuned for that. Walking away from the lovely morning in Herald Square, I came to the realization that I’ve subconsciously coveted Steele’s career, and probably want to get my PhD one day too.
Nicolaia and her new Chanel. Let’s stand up and celebrate her for wearing a good Chanel, honored that she texted me for shopping advice for this particular item.
White bag supremacy. They will not replace us.
So while that was my technical first fashion week event, all my other free time beyond Managing Editor duties for Byline and desperately trying to convince magazines to let me pop a wheelie on the zeitgeist has been dedicated to TV watching. Specifically, old seasons of America’s Next Top Model and, per my parents’ urging, Dexter: Resurrection. While the former program has re-planted the urge to do something ugly and high maintenance to my hair, the latter has kind of activated my urge to culturally diagnose our current moment. Allow me to begin with a brief history of the Dexter franchise.
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Some background: one of the very first times I drank coffee (Thanksgiving, 10 years old, my parents let me have a cappuccino to combat a severe case of the ‘itis), I crept downstairs at 11-ish at night to join my dad in his nighttime TV watching. He was catching up on Dexter, the original one. After what I can only assume was a child psychiatrist’s internal battle of whether or not to let his prepubescent daughter watch a show about the life and times of a vigilante serial killer, we made steak sandwiches and watched until I fell asleep. Later, watching Dexter would become our weekly family ritual until the show ended in 2012. I remember being disappointed at the idea that Dexter Morgan, at the end of the original show, survives a weak suicide attempt on his boat, only to emerge alive and self-exiled from society in a dark cabin. But, it ended, and there we were. Years passed, I went to high school, went to college, and then something disturbing happened.
The Dexter franchise was reignited with Dexter: New Blood in November 2021, continuing right where it left off. Dexter Morgan is dead; our antihero now goes by Jim Lindsay, upstanding citizen in Iron Lake, New York. He’s not killing, instead satiating the bloodthirst his “dark passenger” by hunting deer. Enter Harrison, his son, who finds him. And Harrison, “born in blood” much like Dexter (you’re gonna have to watch the original show to get that one), begins to exhibit the same anti-social behaviors as his papa (he electively breaks a kid’s arm during a wrestling match for Iron Lake’s high school, and seems turned on by it. Gnarly). Dexter resurrects his old ways, teaching Harrison the same code his adoptive father taught him to keep the “dark passenger” at bay: kill the scum of the earth, chop the body into 9 pieces, bag it up, dispose. Only Harrison is apprehensive, hinting at the idea that his murderous urges are nurture as opposed to nature; he’s not a psychopath like Dexter, just conditioned to be death-indifferent. The miniseries ends with Dexter encouraging Harrison to shoot him in the heart, which he does. Dexter is dead, the character’s death indicative of the franchise finally being laid to rest. Thank god, I thought.
Or so we thought. Cut to 2024, and we have a prequel to the original Dexter series, Dexter: Original Sin, a miniseries focusing on teen Dexter and his initial adoption of “the code” via his adoptive father. I did not watch this one so I have no notes other than that it didn’t have to exist. My parents were excited by the idea of knowing more and more about Dexter, though; a phenomenon I found interesting in that moment. My generation is the one that grew up with media, binge-watching and Wattpad and storyline tracking became a thing in my adolescence; theirs is the one raised on blot holes, no cell phones, early MTV in their young adulthood. Why am I the one who doesn’t want any more show, and why are they the ones that want to dig deeper and deeper in to something that, at the time of the release of Original Sin, should have been done with in 2012?
Then, in 2025, we got Dexter: Resurrection. I actually stumbled across the media pit the premiere of the first episode on my way to see a movie at Lincoln Center with Jack Hermann. ANOTHER ONE?! Didn’t that fool die? I thought, snapped a picture, and sent it to my mom. She told me she was excited to watch it, and a few short months later, I’m on the couch with my parents in my childhood home, and they ask me if I want to watch the first episode with them. I said yes, morbidly curious. Only spoiler I’ll give: even though Dexter was literally shot in the heart by his son at the end of New Blood, he lived because the below-freezing temperature in Iron Lake preserved his body from bleeding out. Weaksauce. On the plane home the next day, I watched three more episodes, and had the same feeling at the end of each episode: this is mimicking the tone and feeling of the original 2005 Dexter, but it is not 2005 Dexter, it is 2025 Dexter. So, to give a timeline: we had an impactful show from the aughts that ended in 2012 with a widely-hated ending, we had a continuation in 2021 leaving our anti-hero dead even after turning over a more “woke” leaf, there’s a bit more context added with Original Sin in 2024, and in 2025 we see Dexter Morgan literally resurrected 20 years after the initial release of the show. Come. The fuck. ON.
Let’s look at that timeline culturally. Original Dexter, 2005–2012 saw the transition from Bush to Obama, several wars in the Middle East, the boom of smartphones, the social media transition from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter and kind of early instagram. We audience members had new tools at our disposal and we used them in earnest. Nine years of discourse later and further development of the technologies that emerged during the original Dexter, the bloggers and Wattpad-ears analyzing plot holes from the original Dexter, comparing the show to the original set of books written by Lindsay, and levying critique from every which way; producers get the bright idea to continue Dexter from its ambiguous ending with New Blood, a way to both capitalize on the discourse, and also absolve themselves of fucking up. End of New Blood, a show ostensibly NO ONE WANTED, Dexter is dead, we get his back story 3 years later, and by the 20th anniversary of the original show, Dexter is literally brought back from the dead for…what again?
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Every remake of a show, or an additional prequel, goes beyond money-making. It reflects a widespread cultural anxiety that uses nostalgia to recapitulate good times, before Trump, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, failing economies, kids in cages, January 6, 2021, October 7, 2023. Before divide. Before half of Vice turned into the Proud Boys. You get the picture. The central conflicts of Dexter: Resurrection don’t just resurrect Dexter from the dead, they reincarnate the kind of absurd bloody camp of the original show; serial killer jokes, skeevy interactions blending murder and sex, all the pre-PC-culture dialogue (vaguely homophobic, all in good fun) that made the original GREAT. The style of the original show, that won Emmys, cannot function the same way 20 years later in Resurrection. So while that direction is brought back in this iteration of the show, it operates as reminiscence, not just of the original, but of the time in which it was made. Reactionary Dexter. All this money spent to arrive back at the conclusion that the original show was fine the way it was, and didn’t need to be recapitulated in so many miniseries and sequels. The fact that Dexter keeps on going shows that nostalgia is now being used as a revision technique to keep audiences wanting what once was. To me it parallels the “we used to be a nation of values” argument that a lot of old school conservatives make. Pack it up.
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This same idea of nostalgia-as-tool, investment in making people feel a feeling from that vague non-place of “when things were good” proliferated through online-life makes me think about fashion.
Allina Liu: to reference my girl Alex Hildreth as quoted in this Vogue piece on personal style, you can tell people’s screen times from their outfits. This entire room was full of 5hours plus. Fake goths in fake leather sat in front of me. Wearing the Miista shoes that a whole bunch of people on the scene were gifted. It was giving “thank you to The Can,” but I guess that’s the point. This is not to talk about the collection itself, which was well-constructed, consistent with its motifs (there were some really brilliant moments with these flower petal-shaped collars for floor-length capes that I found pretty compelling). Not my personal taste (I hated the print that was used) AND containing a lot of merit and heart, especially given the fact that this is the designer’s first time on the NYFW runway calendar. She executed a lot to be proud of; of 30-ish looks, there were only two major fit issues (one on a bralette, another on a pair of clingy pants) which is kind of unheard of for clothing with as much detail as hers. Looking around at Allina’s audience though, I couldn’t help but be confused by the fake goths and the overly accessorized big-blue-light-glasses cosplaying Kristen Bateman. These are the terminally-online people who breed skinny eyebrow and tradgoth and Susie-Bubble personal style, and yet they all call back, aesthetically, the same. With the same gifted shoes from The Can, so to speak. What are we doing!!!
Damson Madder: This one didn’t have to do with nostalgia but did do a very effective form of marketing that I think a lot of the disingenuous trauma mining can take notes from. Conceptual presentation, staged in the East Village’s Marble Cemetery. Models were cast on their model-iness but also their ability to play chess; pairs sat before each other playing the game in the brand’s signature girlish frilly collars accentuated with nerdy-chic patters like argyle and thick-checked plaid. This staging does its marketing literally and silently; smart girls who play chess and wear glasses to read big books wear Damson Madder, and if you want to be smart too, you just buy some Damson Madder and you can do it too. I like this a lot! Simple, effective, aesthetically sound, plus the new collection looked comfy-cute (the brand is famous for the pajamas-you-can-wear-in-public aesthetic; they’re one of the early purveyors.
SC103 (this show is my idea of a solution to all of this): I am biased because I actually know Sophie (the S of SC103), but here’s my as-objective-as-I-can-be interpretation of the brand. I initially did not like SC103, in 2020 when the damn Links bag was the Greenpoint white girl version of Telfar. That pre-judgement was projection, and that bag’s critical mass status does not make it less cunt; truly I’ve always loved that bag and just hated the types of people who carried it during covid lol. Ok so then I started looking at the clothes, and saw this really great idea come through, a somewhat organic approach to Edwardian underclothes (bloomers, soft poplins and sweet lace) but retrofitted for the modern. Around 2021 I began focusing on the brand for cut and sew, kitsch-chic embroidery, the kind of stuff that could belong on one of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band members. See, when you look at brands like SC103 and only choose to look at them from the spread of their influence, you’ll miss what makes it GREAT. So many brands today pour all their energy into cultivating that influence, and it’s understandable because, again, this is an industry. But, when you’re able to ride the wave of influence like SC103 has done, and transfer the popularity of an accessory like the Links bag to go biggerbolder with the collection, that’s the perfect intersection of art and commerce that I feel the industry doesn’t platform enough, and doesn’t honor properly when it does happen. That was my takeaway from this season’s SC103 runway show, a collection that, formally, freaked the concept of the cotton poplin Oxford shirt across tie tops, billowy skirts, and fringe dresses. Those dresses were perhaps my favorite, because they very playfully conjured an image of someone putting an Oxford shirt in a giant cartoon shredder and sewing the remaining strings into a gorgeous bodybodybodyyyy gown. Maybe this isn’t what Sophie and Claire (the C of SC103) intended, but regardless, the formal language of the collection was concise and cohesive. That same organic feeling rang true through the gold and silver metallic foil sandals worn by each model. Someone please get SC103 a contract with Havianas or like Camper for a limited edition shoe collection. Anyways, I love this brand so much.
PARSONS MFA: Every single collection was stunning, the crocheted-basket woven techniques in the first (Jontay Kahm) and last (Alejandra Parra Parodi) collections specifically blew me away, as did Effe Waldorf’s specifically because it was so not my taste on its surface (rhinestone sports-inspired) but as the looks flounced by, you could detect a really palpable sense of play and dramatic irony coming from the designer; she wasn’t re-fashioning bloquette, she was actively unraveling it to insert herself opposed to the microtrend, with a few good, good, GOOD fashion jokes. The show notes here explain. Designer Chi An of Shangli Dunde presented four suits made out of fucking paper. PAPER. Which somehow moved down the runway. The kids are alright, and they seem to be unaffected by the nostalgia industry, at least as these collections highlight.
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Okay, so what happens when the show ends? That is the question, isn’t it? To we make more show, do we invent a prequel to the show, do we bring the show back? Do we resurrect Dexter? I want to end on the Parsons MFA show because what these students did with their collections was not concerned with anything but the moment on that runway. There will be no sequel or prequel to get it right. Confidence, in creativity. That is what I feel like fashion is so broadly lacking right now. Like Dexter, we keep bringing things back from the dead as if we can understand a past moment better when contextualizing it in our current one. But that assumes that any given present is not only fixed, but a universal idea of correct. Linear-time-supremist. And I will not have it! Consider the reality that everything that has ever happened is happening and also will happen, all at the same time. There’s no’80s revival, new indie sleaze, re-upping of twee or blogcore or normcore or minimalism. Whatever we can look back at and identify as funny to look at today doesn’t need to be course-corrected, because it just was. Pack it up, revisionists! Display confidence in what you serve. SC103 did it. Every single designer in the Parsons MFA show did it.
The more fashion weeks I go, the more I see how “the look”of today’s fashion elite aspires vary on the same theme, but every time it seems like it ends up a disgusting, overaccessorized and overflowing cauldron of hot steamy suck. Almost no one’s clothes fit. Point of view, completely algorithmic. A really advanced stage of a project runway challenge somehow involving social media. A way out of this is to just fucking let it do what it do.
Sheesh ok I wrote this in between shows and am currently refusing to edit it or think of an ending so here you go kiss kiss.
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