A Feel For Fashion: OLYA KURYSHCHUK
Not every sharp observer of fashion is interested in preserving its myths. Ukrainian-born Olya Kuryshchuk has built her reputation by doing almost the opposite: questioning them. As founder and editor-in-chief of 1 Granary, born as a student publication at Central Saint Martins, now one of the industry's sharpest independent platforms, she has spent over a decade championing emerging designers while being clear-eyed about the system they're entering. Journalist, critic, cultural commentator: she writes about fashion as infrastructure, not fantasy, with her attention fixed on the people trying to change it from within.
Menswear is constantly evolving; do you foresee a moment when the perfect balance between formal and streetwear will be achieved?
I hope we never get there. I don't think fashion is a problem that needs to be solved, where we need to achieve some sort of equilibrium one day. It's the opposite of how it works. Fashion absorbs everything around it. It reflects society, which is constantly changing. This blending of formal and streetwear was a response to changes in culture, especially the rise of technology companies and the influence of music and sports culture. I think for designers, instead of looking for a balance, the most important thing is to understand how men actually live today and create wardrobes that accommodate multiple identities, occasions, and ways of being, and not think in the rigid formal/streetwear binary at all, because it stopped meaning much a while ago.
How would you define men’s elegance in the contemporary context?
For me, elegance means conformity, so it feels like a strange word to be reaching for. It’s some standard you’re measured against. It’s knowing the rules and following them well. But if the contemporary meaning is anything else now, then I hope it’s knowing what not to wear, what not to buy, what not to communicate, what values you stand for. I think contemporary elegance should be about self-awareness. It is about understanding who you are and expressing that.
Men’s fashion habits tend to evolve more slowly than women’s. In your opinion, why is that?
We are still working through the 200 years of the Great Male Renunciation, it takes time to break out of its stronghold. For two centuries men socialised to avoid standing out through clothes and paid the high social price for any form of adventurous dressing. So as a result, change tends to happen more gradually. That said, I think we often underestimate how much menswear has changed over the last decade. Think about the rise of luxury streetwear, the acceptance of jewellery, handbags, gender-fluid dressing, and, in general, more emotional forms of self-expression have all significantly expanded the menswear vocabulary. The cultural shifts are substantial, even if the pace appears to be slow.
AI will continue to disrupt and impact how we live and work. What excites you and what concerns you?
I am not that excited anymore. I was though, genuinely. I thought it would give everyone access, that it would democratise processes that over the last years had outpriced so many, and that it would give independent creatives a more level playing field to compete on. A young designer working alone can now access tools that would previously have required an entire department, as well as knowledge, more efficient research, and strategic advice. How can someone not be excited about all these possibilities? But the speed at which it progressed this year, and the number of people around me it has already affected, is something we should face with a critical mind. The creative community has so far had zero influence on anything related to AI: how it's used, how it's trained, the direction it's moving in. The rules are dictated to all of us. That's a very dangerous situation. There should be a pushback. I am not villainising AI, but I strongly disagree with the constantly repeated premise that it's just a tool. If we look back at the changes tech companies created over the last twenty years with other tools and platforms – social media, streaming, self-publishing, etc. – they created a seismic shift for the creative industry which mainly benefited a few. AI is a disproportionately more powerful and important innovation, and I personally don't plan to sit silently and just accept the rules of the game pushed on us by a few people. We should be dictating some of these rules as an industry. This tool is trained on our work, so why are we just passive passengers on this journey? What also concerns me is that the industry is so focused on efficiency at the moment. If AI simply allows us to produce more images, more products, more content, and more noise, then it just accelerates many of the problems fashion already faces. Oversupply is a huge cultural problem, and this technology is putting it on steroids. We should also look at the fact that in-house designers were historically never credited for their work, yet AI was trained on all their creations and now will clearly push at least some of them out of their jobs. Credit, as well as many other systems in the fashion industry and in creative education, should be completely rethought for this new era.
How does today’s polarised world impact your creative process when thinking about a global market?
I actually reject the premise that my team needs to think globally. It flattens all the work. It takes the nuance out of everything we say and create. Today, audiences interpret the same message, image, or collection through vastly different cultural, political, and social lenses. So when you create work for the global market, you need to sand everything down. You basically need to make work that travels everywhere by meaning almost nothing anywhere. You can feel it in how much fashion now looks like it was designed in an airport, for an airport. So I aim for somewhere real, and often that's speaking from personal experience and letting go of the pressure to please everyone. 1 Granary's challenge is to be more specific and more honest, and to deliver work that emerges from a clear perspective of someone deeply embedded in the industry.
What are the key cultural or societal influences shaping menswear today?
How people dress today is being shaped by a much wider range of voices than ever before. No one is looking to Vogue for direction anymore. Culture has decentralised, and influence now comes from niche communities, creators, musicians, athletes, and online subcultures. On top of that you have the changing definition of masculinity, the impact of technology and the fact that we now live significant portions of our lives online, the resale market, economic uncertainty. But what we talk about less in fashion is growing wealth inequality and the thinning of the middle class. So many brands are now designing for their aristocratic customer, which widens the gap between the dress codes of different groups of people. A lot of clothes are designed for occasions and spaces that the majority of people never participate in. Including wearing anything stylish during a heatwave. Staying put-together when it's 40 degrees is a flex only some people can afford, even if it doesn't look like one.
Do trends still matter?
Enormously, if you're the machine and your work is based on data. Algorithms love trends. But if you're trying to make something that lasts, you should not think in these terms at all. If your work is built around catching trends, you are basically telling everyone you have nothing of your own to say. Point of view is what matters now.