🔥 FIRE SALE 🔥 No. 33
👠 Chloe Malle x Anna Wintour Interview, 🏈 Chuck Klosterman's "Football", 🧠 and the difference between an obsessive and a cultivator of interests
I was watching the interview with Chloe Malle and Anna Wintour, and Wintour dropped a pretty backhanded compliment on Malle when she said, “Well, obviously she’s brilliant and interested in so many different things, and of course she appreciates and loves fashion, but she is not a fashion obsessive.”
This quote, on its face, seems like a compliment, but in her muted and pointed way, Wintour is highlighting what the magazine may be losing in the future.
There was a lot of chatter online about Malle’s fitness for the position since she was named (as if we were talking about the presidential election or a patrimonial crown). I, too, thought that being a fashion obsessive might, in fact, be a good thing when you are at the helm of one of the most iconic fashion brands, certainly the most iconic in editorial.
So when Chuck Klosterman, who is really aging into Gen X, retired slackerdom nicely with just the right amount of self-effacement for me, was promoting his latest book, Football, on The Adam Friedland Show, he noted that when he was a young man, there would be one college football game on Saturday, two on Sunday, and then Monday Night Football. In the late 20th century, four football games on a weekend, maybe even fewer, were enough to call yourself a “football fan”. Klosterman lamented that if you consumed that much football in an average weekend in America today, you could barely call yourself a fan, let alone a knowledgeable one.
These two seemingly disparate interviews were hitting on something. Information overload is often mistaken for expertise. This manifests in sports debates over a bucket of beers all the time. You got the friend who is rifling off field goal percentages, usage rate, plus-minus, PER, EFF, EFGP, Team Off/Def Rating (per 100 possessions), assist-to-turnover ratio, true shooting percentage, and has basketball reference bookmarked.
On the other hand, you have your friend who cites the eye-test, aura, killer instinct, and “he’s just got that dawg in him”. You go back and forth until your beers are finished, and there are two minutes left in the 4th quarter, so you should probably start paying attention to the game. Both of your friends have lost the plot and gotten nowhere closer to the truth; they are both just dug in on their positions.
All this authority gets pretty tiresome and frankly, annoying. It’s either the extremely knowledgeable punching down on the less knowledgeable, or the dimwitted calling anyone with any knowledge a gatekeeper.
Back to Malle, who I’m sure will be a completely fine editor for Vogue. No matter how subtly cutting Wintour’s remarks may have seemed, I genuinely believe generalism is an asset, not just to Malle, but to culture writ large. I think we have all gotten a little too obsessive, and in trying to know it all about one specific thing, we forget how to think about anything else.
Watching four football games a week makes you a football fan. Being able to identify a best-selling handbag, but not a runway show from 30 years ago, can still make you a fashion connoisseur. The question is not whether you can recall with pinpoint accuracy every look from a runway show or every MVP since ‘03; that’s just memorization. It’s about whether you can connect the dots. Whether that look offers something bigger than another two-dimensional screenshot of a tired reference. Whether you actually enjoy a game-winning drive, or just care whether you hit your prop bet. You’re never going to learn it all, so you might as well enjoy the moment before it becomes part of the repository of time.