"Weekend Reading" is a weekly rundown of our favorite stories from around the web.
Is there a story worth scoping out that we missed? Discuss this past week's headlines, and share your favorite stories from the week that was in our comments section below.

What Happens to Fashion Week After Virgil Abloh?
"June 21, 2018, was the day streetwear won. For years, the walls separating the runway from the street have been crumbling, and now that Virgil Abloh is at the head of Louis Vuitton, the underdog has become the establishment. What happens next won’t be worrying Abloh—he’s king of the world right now—but it poses serious questions for the old guard. Where does Fashion Week go now that the outsiders are the insiders? What happens to the legacy houses, iconic designers, and Fashion Week as a whole now that streetwear is the norm? Does Abloh’s appointment mean we’re at the dawn of a new era, or is a backlash inevitable?"

via: Highsnobiety

Dior, Louis Vuitton and Alyx Plot the Future of Menswear
"An unofficial fashion triumvirate was formed in Paris over the weekend. Within a span of 72 hours, new collections from Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton, Kim Jones's Dior, and Mathew Williams's Alyx entered the ether, and intentionally or not, the movement that has been sloshing around the men's styleosphere for the past few years was crystallized.
There are some obvious ways the three designers overlap. They all have collaborative collections with Nike, although Williams was the only one of the three to include the Swoosh on the runway this season. (Virgil’s collaboration is under the Off-White brand; Kim’s is in his own name.) And all three share a pedigree in streetwear: Kim’s early namesake line ran an ongoing sportswear and sneaker collab with Umbro. Virgil and Matthew proved themselves as brand builders early on with Been Trill, the multidisciplinary cultural force that made clothes and parties with equal hype."

via: GQ Style

Kim Jones Turns to the Bright Side at Dior Homme
" At 3, rue de Marignan in the Eighth Arrondissement, just steps from the Champs-Élysées, a receptionist waits to admit you into the men’s wear studio and ateliers of Dior. If, for whatever reason, you have forgotten why you’ve come, there on the wall is a video on constant loop, of moony young men in stern dark suits or shorts, cradling armfuls of red roses. This is Dior Homme as the fashion world has known it for a decade, and how it has long seen itself: rigorous, romantic and, in truth, a bit grim. Ribbons are flying around the models, but black ribbons, as if for a funeral."

via: The New York Times

A New Generation of PRs Steps Out
"Last January when Pyer Moss designer Kerby Jean-Raymond started to think about the upcoming autumn campaign, featuring his first collaboration with Reebok, he turned to Nate Hinton, a veteran publicist who left PR Consulting, an influential fashion communications firm, to start his own agency last year. Hinton left behind his old firm’s scale. In its place, he offers to personally oversee tasks that fall outside the normal purview of public relations managers. For Jean-Raymond, Hinton not only helped conceptualise the campaign, he also oversaw the casting and logistics of the shoot. Hinton says he performs similar services for other clients, mainly emerging designer labels such as Public School and LaQuan Smith."

via: Business of Fashion

Why Have There Been No Great Black Art Dealers?
"In 1966, two brothers, Alonzo and Dale Davis, set out from Los Angeles on a road trip across the United States, seeking out other artists of color like them. They meant for the trip 'to broaden our limited art history experience,' Alonzo says, since African-American artists had been conspicuously absent from his curriculum at Pepperdine University, or Dale’s at the University of Southern California. 'We drove from L.A. to Mississippi, up through New York and Chicago, and somewhere between all those cornfields, we thought: it’d be interesting to own a gallery.'"

via: The New York Times

The Community-Backed Streetwear Shop Bringing The Hype to Madison Wisconsin
"Early last month, my brother and I were strolling down State Street in Madison, Wisconsin in search of ice cream. One block from our proposed destination, he gestured at a new-looking retail space with concrete-to-ceiling windows and golden oak paneling. The subtle marbled signage, floating just above the vestibule, spelled out "August." It didn't quite look like a storefront that would exist in Madison, Wisconsin in that, among the block's grungy record stores and Fair Trade coffee houses, August may have blended in better someplace like Elizabeth Street in New York or Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles"

via: Fashionista

Shorts Are (Finally) in Fashion
"While packing for my biannual transatlantic trip to attend the Spring 2019 men’s fashion shows in Europe (see my reports from Florence and Milan), I almost, almost slipped a pair of shorts into my suitcase. But then I thought: No. Shorts, even the neat olive green pair I had picked out, seemed too informal and too revealing to fly in the finicky atmosphere of Men’s Fashion Week. My fears were not unfounded: Jesse Hudnutt, a men’s buying consultant who jets to Europe each season for the shows, was barred from entering a Milan restaurant last year for wearing shorts. Though it’s unclear whether the restaurant in question still enforces that dress code (Mr. Hudnutt didn’t try his luck again this summer), shorts were otherwise so pervasive in European cities that I regretted my own no-shorts policy. In Florence, Milan and especially Paris I was confronted with exposed calves just about everywhere I turned, both on the runway and off. While there can often be a disconnect between the runway and real life, shorts proved an exception."

via: The Wall Street Journal

How Clothing Brands are Fighting Back Against Trump's Border Policies
"Most of the brands jumping into the fray on this particular issue come from the womenswear side—several brands and designers, spurred by Melania Trump’s seemingly callous 'I Don’t Care, Do U?' jacket, created items in response and donated proceeds. For men, there’s 3sixteen, Robert Geller, who brought his 'Immigrant' shirt back; Noah and its 'Free the Children' tee; and most recently Supreme announced it’d be donating a portion of sales from its summer T-shirt series to organizations like the ACLU. The list is far from impressive and in its blog post announcing the tee Noah even seemed to make reference to the small pool by calling on 'all designers, stylists, musicians, artists, writers, magazine editors' to get behind the effort."

via: GQ

Recognizing The Revolution: 4 Tech Trends Driving Digitalization of Fashion
"Although a relatively new buzzword in fashion, digitalization is slowly becoming a widespread industry practice – echoing the dramatic changes that technology has brought to other sectors. From entertainment to eating out, analog channels and manual processes have been steadily overtaken by computerized and automated alternatives, and entire industries have been overturned as a result. From an industry-agnostic point of view, there are four key technological trends are generally recognized as the cornerstones of digitalization. However, deeper shifts in the competitive landscape and in consumer expectations brought about by digitalization will, sooner rather than later, also require fashion retailers, brands, and manufacturers to embrace the idea of fashion as a digital domain and understand how these trends are driving major industry changes."

via: WWD

Lakeith Stanfield Thinks We Should All Probably Take a Break From the Internet
"A few days before I meet him, Lakeith Stanfield, the 26-year-old star of *Sorry to Bother You, does something that I find completely insane, or at the very least, possibly dangerous: He tweets his phone number. (Tweeting will prove problematic for Stanfield—more on that in a minute.) 'I wanna say Hi to some of you guys,' he writes. He had done this before, a few years ago, he tells me later, and he had some nice conversations. He thinks, in fact, that he may have made a few people’s days. For the record, from a different type of celebrity, this behavior would be insufferably phony; from Stanfield, who at this point seems to embody a certain brand of ineffable millennial cool, it is somehow charm incarnate."*

via: Vogue

Tags: weekend-reading