An Editor’s Guide to Curation
My last post was a case study on Baby Phat. It felt like a good time to revisit the brand because of the increased intermingling of luxury and streetwear in our current zeitgeist. Kimora Lee Simmons used high fashion nuance to build Baby Phat into a cultural entity. Read that here.
Looking to the DNA of fashion editors to connect taste-making to the concept of curation.
Curators as repositories of specific knowledge. Slowly building up that knowledge, sharing it, improving upon it. Since curators focus and dig deep, and because they are highly selective in how they socialize, they regularly build influential cultural niches around themselves and often become a source of inspiration for wider trends (Andjelic 2022).
With that in mind, what better case study to understand taste-making as an act of curation than OG fashion editors? Take OG to mean pre-Internet because of bloggers and the democratization of trendsetting (blog post here).
Taste-making is a social activity that drives cultural capital (blog post here).
The Devil Wears Prada 2006
With fashion editors, curation takes on a layered meaning. Attending fashion shows and identifying emerging trends to help define them. There’s the world of the clothes themselves and then there are monthly magazine issues – developed to tell larger stories about fashion, culture and lifestyle.
The larger argument is “editor” can be translated to any taste-maker, particularly those navigating niche communities with shared codes. Taste is developed through cultural knowledge.
With this connection in mind, I wanted to list out some skills that make editors good curators:
In-depth awareness in contemporary art, literature, music and fashion. Through this existing cultural knowledge, they are able to find inspiration to inform current trends
Image composition and critical analysis – understanding the components of a strong image.
Research and archival skills. A form of cultural knowledge in visual form allowing editors to develop strong references for their concepts.
Creative strategy – writing creative briefs, developing mood, story and clothing boards.
Armed with a unique perspective, the curator builds a repository through engaging in their areas of expertise – developing taste through ritual engagement (full report here).
