A Feel For Fashion: Luke Leitch
Luke Leitch is a journalist apart, one who has always treated fashion as a way of reading the world rather than simply reporting on clothes. British by birth and Milanese by adoption, he has written for Vogue Runway, Vogue Business, Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue, developing a voice that combines sharp observation with an instinct for the unexpected connection. Whether writing about a collection, a football match or a broader cultural shift, he approaches fashion not as an isolated industry but as part of a much larger conversation, one that stretches far beyond the front row.
Menswear is constantly evolving; do you foresee a moment when the perfect balance between formal and streetwear will be achieved?
No. Firstly because I don’t think “formal” and “streetwear” are the north and south of menswear, and secondly because while you do get rare moments when an expression in fashion almost perfectly crystallises a wider social moment, they are always brief by nature. They bloom for a beautiful minute.
How would you define men’s elegance in the contemporary context?
Elegance, like nonchalance, is very nuanced. People customarily say it is about attitude, then think of themselves when they try to define it, because we all wish to believe we are elegant. I think elegance in menswear is a form of visible consideration: it is a manner. Which, um, comes down to attitude.
Men’s fashion habits tend to evolve more slowly than women’s. In your opinion, why is that?
Maybe men seem generally more drawn to detail and function, while women relish impression and impact. Possibly this is because men have often been trained as boys to feel that to be interested in fashion or self-image is a trivial pursuit, or a form of unmasculine vanity. Focusing on detail and function is one way of negotiating that judgment.
How do you believe fashion creativity can effectively drive business growth?
I think creativity and business have to be seen as equal factors within a commercial art form, while acknowledging that creativity is the raw material of business success: growth is its tangible result. At the moment, I think there are too many businesses trying to cosmically manifest growth without sincerely or correctly cultivating the creativity that could actually drive it. You also have to remember that effective marketing is the fertiliser of growth, but marketing can only make people desire to a certain extent. If the products you are pushing them towards do not have some spark of relevant innovation or unfamiliarity within them, you can only grow so far.
AI will continue to disrupt and impact how we live and work. What excites you and what concerns you?
What’s most existentially concerning about AI is the notion of the tool having sentience. But it really doesn’t. Artificial intelligence is to human intelligence what saccharine is to sugar: it gives you the impression of something without being it. I think the sophistication of AI tools is extremely exciting because of the potential it creates for HI [human intelligence] products, and as with any great technological leap — the best example in fashion is the mechanisation of cotton looms during the Industrial Revolution — the biggest concern is its impact on those whose jobs it renders obsolete.
In these challenging times, how do you think fashion can spark and sustain desire?
Desire comes from people. I do think Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada were right this season when they criticised the very top-down, prescriptive lens of luxury: it is a very Marie Antoinette attitude, and we all know what that gets you. But I don’t think luxury and fashion are the same thing. Fashion is an almost organic by-product of generational flux. The trick for fashion businesses is to read that flux, reflect it, and ideally anticipate it, then cook it into wearable totems of the time.
How does today’s polarised world impact your creative process when thinking about a global market?
I think I am a reporter more than a creative when I’m doing work at the shows, so it is all material.
What are the key cultural or societal influences shaping menswear today?
I think culture is flattening. Someone recently described the 20s to me as a “Flop Era,” which I thought was interesting and semi-recognisable, with caveats. That is actually quite exciting, because it suggests there is a vacuum expression-wise, and nature abhors a vacuum.
Do trends still matter?
It is super-interesting to me how the half-life of nostalgia is getting shorter and shorter. Last season people were looking back at 2016 as if it were the Stone Age. The year before that it was Y2K, and the year before that the 90s. So maybe we are approaching a sort of event horizon where it is less about looking over our shoulders, because we have run out of past, and more about looking ahead. Like that Space Age period in France of Courrèges, Cardin, Saint Laurent when he did it, and Rabanne: maybe AI will be the catalyst for a new giant leap forward. I still think about that awesome collaboration by the artist David Kramer with Hedi Slimane at Celine, with the T-shirts and baskets on which it was written: “I have nostalgia for things I probably have never known.” Why do we spend so much energy processing the past when everything we have to experience is in the future?
This interview has been lightly edited.