Capsule #17 ft. Verity Babbs

Hello hello!

Hope you’re feeling okay wherever you are 💗. It’s been a pretty horrific week, news wise - sending hugs to women in the UK and everywhere else.

In Capsule world — fashion month is nearly over, it’s October on Sunday, I’m wondering whether to get some Halloween decorations for my flat. 🎃

In this week’s issue, we’re looking at the notion of “playing it safe” (for better or for worse), how being in a relationship affects your style, and the mammoth impact of the Renaissance World Tour. We’ve had help with curation from Rhea, my wonderful intern who is bringing an additional eye and ear to Capsule for the next three months 🎀.

And Verity Babbs is here to share her Hot and Not list with you. 🖼️

Thank you for being here, and hang tight for next week which is a special guest edit!

All love,

Holly

As fashion month draws to a close…

Let’s talk about the notion of “playing it safe”. It’s a statement that’s been used in reviews of some of the biggest shows this month: Saint Laurent, Dior, and Gucci. Does it feel positive or negative for you?  

In the context of these shows, “playing it safe” means showing us silhouettes we’ve broadly seen before, but with slight tweaks to colour, fabric, or styling. The New York Times asks “where are the ideas?”, and fashion writer Rachel Tashjian declares “luxury is no longer about showing us what we haven’t seen before, but comforting us with the familiar.”

For what it’s worth, I liked a lot of the Gucci show (minus the over representation of knee-length pencil skirts). But maybe that’s because some of the looks felt genuinely wearable, even if I’ll never get them from Gucci: monochrome fits (it could be cherry red, but green or navy would be lit too), skirts and blazers with sheer tights, oversized jackets and sparkly bags.

Looking to current modes of dressing, both IRL and online, “classy” styles are popular: think black dresses, neutrals, demure looks paired with sunglasses and maybe a cap for that off-duty celeb look.

The trend is often categorised as “quiet luxury”, which is seen as both Hot and Not depending on who you ask. Something missing from that kind of chat, I think, is that centring an outfit around classic pieces is more accessible; most people own an LBD, so starting with staples and accessorising around them has mass appeal.

I’m interested in why “playing it safe” (i.e. wearing the outfit that some people think is boring, but others say is your signature) can be seen as both a positive and a negative thing. I think these kind of tensions sometimes put people off fashion - as if there’s a constantly shifting goalpost of the “right” way of doing things.

So where do we go from here? Play it safe, or leave your comfort zone? The answer is the same as so many of life’s dilemmas: confidence. We often notice it in the way people wear something - it’s not what they wear, it’s how they wear it. This confidence helps us have less anxiety about trends and see them for what they really are: sometimes a marketing ploy, sometimes a beacon of creativity, sometimes fun to invest in, often fine to watch float by. Could this whole paragraph be summarised with a you do you, girl…. I think so!

A final note on fashion week…

There was some interesting chat about fashion week invitations - both on the actual invites and the cheeky cost of unofficial entry. In his new Substack, writer Alec Leach laments the extremely lavish (and throwaway) show invitations, which are not just cards, but gold Gucci bracelets, Balenciaga mock hotel keys or Louis Vuitton clocks, currently on sale for $5,500 on Sotheby’s. He thinks it’s absurd at a time when minimal sustainability efforts have been adopted across the industry. OG blogger and socialite Bryan Yambao (@bryanboy) also shared an old secret sheet of the price of black market access to the biggest shows. The top end of the industry is spending so much to create coolness and exclusivity, but we see great stuff just by stepping out onto the street or opening TikTok: upcycled bits of denim, DIY bows added to dresses, wearing clothes from years ago in new and exciting ways. Constraint is good for creativity!

Continuing on the theme of “playing it safe”…

Very much enjoying the ‘girlfriend air/boyfriend air’ trend, which looks at how people’s style changes when they’re in a relationship. The theory is that men become better dressed when they start dating a woman (girlfriend air), and women make less effort when they are with a man (boyfriend air). The trend is spreading, and we’re seeing new iterations like “coming out air” in the LGBTQ community, where queer people feel like their outward aesthetic lines up more closely with how they feel inside (I think this one is just so good).

@j4sminele

i saw the potential when no one else did 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻#girlfriendair

And finally…

The best write up of the Renaissance World Tour has arrived. Jenna Wortham writes with the same energy you feel when you leave the venue of a live show that’s moved you, and I implore you to read the piece, but I’ll leave you with this: “And what does Beyoncé think is worthy of resurrection? Love, freedom, safety. It’s another type of insurrection. And what she is inciting is the will to fully inhabit your body.”

This week, Verity Babbs popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Verity Babbs (@veritybabbsart) is an art critic, presenter, and comedian from Northampton. She founded Art Laughs, which brings art-themed comedy events to galleries and museums, has worked on projects for Tate, the National Gallery, and Soho House, and hosts Voice FM's weekly 'Arts & Culture Show'.

📺 Watching: Dumb Money and Past Lives in the cinema, the new Peggy Gou music video at home (so joyful, so far from wet autumn leaves).

📖 Reading: This article from Pandora Sykes’s newsletter about ghostwriters, after Milly Bobby Brown announced her new (ghostwritten) novel, Nineteen Steps.

🎧 Listening to: ENNY’s We Go Again, a six-track EP lovingly gifted to her fans as a care package. And ‘Sambassim’ by DJ Patife - a great dance tune to get you ready for the weekend.

Zephyr is also basking in that post-Renaissance glow and wants you to know that metallics are here to stay. What’s that? A metallic top with jeans and a cute heel for a night out? Perfect perfect.

If you’d like to adopt Zephyr or one of his friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, please forward on 🥺

See you next week 💋