Brynn Valentine

Today’s designers are hardly the first to navigate fashion’s complex relationship with the past: Houses are simultaneously obsessed with defining and defending their aesthetic territory, celebrating moments of past glory while asserting their relevance to what’s new, now, next.

At a time when history itself feels endangered — erased or rewritten by politics and AI, which obscures sources and floods the record with deepfakes — the question grows only more complex. Is an artistic director there to design clothes, or to curate a house’s legacy? Is their role to rewrite history — artificially reviving memories and parodying... See more

Two years into an industry-wide slowdown from which the path forward for fashion remains unclear, “the past becomes a refuge, full of mirages we can turn to paper over the present,” observes Didier Barroso, Parisian gallery owner and director of the vintage boutique Plaisir Palace.

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In 2010’s “Retromania”, the music critic Simon Reynolds sketched out how pop music descended into pastiche through endless regurgitation of past styles. Whereas virtually every decade of the 20th Century gave birth to unique musical movements, Reynolds... See more

The Booker Prizes website discusses Katie Kitamura's Audition, longlisted for the prize, as a puzzle exploring life as performance; Chanel's literary podcast "Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon" featured Kitamura discussing this novel and themes of identity, social roles, and reading, noting the novel's ambiguous narrative about an actress and... See more

The "Real Self" The novel asks the fundamental question of what constitutes the "real self" when so much of our behavior is dictated by the roles we slide in and out of. The unnamed narrator's constant self-awareness and internal monologues underscore the idea that all of us are, to some extent, performing for others and even ourselves.

The protagonist, an accomplished stage actress, constantly blurs the lines between her professional life on the stage and her personal life.

The book uses an unnamed actress protagonist and a unique two-part structure to examine the performance of everyday life and the fragile nature of personal truth.

n the film Sentimental Value, the central character Nora uses acting as a primary mechanism for processing the deep emotional trauma and intergenerational grief that she otherwise struggles to communicate and confront in her daily life.