About the interview of Olivier Zahm on Style.com

Dear Olivier,

I just finished reading your interview on style.com and I agree fully with your analysis on the future of web versus print media and the fact that magazines will survive as long as there is fashion (and the dreams and desires which it sets off).

Thank you also for resisting the ever-growing pressures of commercialism – of course we live in a mercantile world, and just like the clothes and fashion styles, which have been replicated throughout the centuries and the existence of mankind, so there will always be people whose only goal is to sell products.

To have higher moral concepts, including the protection of our independence and freedom, the acceptance of the power of love and sex, requires sophisticated thoughts and personal culture, which is not something that all of mankind has access to and there are many reasons for that: they are social, psychological, even political. I like your defense of anti-conformism – even if I work on the other side of the fence, still deep in my mind there are a lot of things that I will always refuse. Not only that – I feel it is our duty to speak up and say that when there is a limit and we should stop and not accept the pressure. This applies to all things in life, actually.

Anyway, what I like most when reading your interview is your obvious absence of fear: in this modern culture of ours, with the all-pervasiveness of the media, the anxieties and pressures of existential survival – I like the fact that you somehow destroy what you create in the name of questioning yourself and growing beyond your own limits.

You are so right – it has always been a fight to make money and some people are better at it than most and usually they are not even the happiest people.

Beneath the rock’n roll and libertine veneer of yours, there is a romantic, an iconoclast, the refuser – our moral and sexual freedom is our most precious treasure and you say it straight out. Your nonchalance and yet sharp analysis is nice – because fashion is not only the creation, the spectacle and extravagant dreams. Our business is full of people who follow trends blindly and who interpret information in the wrong way. Generally, those who are the least fashionable and with the smallest capacities of imagination are the ones that are most concerned with being at the forefront of things.

But as you say: without a deep understanding of history no modern creation is at all possible.

Je t’embrasse

Click to read the interview

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