Statements On Fashion

An Interview with ‘The hottest and skinniest girls in fashion’ who Make Statements on Statements

The setting is Katie Wilkes’ living room floor in Paris, France, and the year is 2018. There Katie, along with her co-conspirator Philippa Nesbitt, noticed a new opportunity in fashion media and plotted to fill it. After being awarded a grant from The New School Parsons Paris, the two launched their podcast, now rebranded as ‘Statements,’ to sit down with fashion academics and professionals alike and unpack the pressing problems of the industry with a critical eye. And while this project began during grad school, Philippa and Katie are only just beginning to expand their platform as a tool for learning and thinking about fashion post their degree completion. The hottest and skinniest girls in fashion podcasting share with MERDE their approach to their own work, how they view issues within the fashion industry with a side of humor, and their guilty pleasures.

MERDE: What was goal creating Statements? 

KW: We saw there was a niche that the field of fashion studies hadn’t touched, and it’s so hard to actually do something new in fashion. I think the goal we had when we started has evolved compared to now, but back then we definitely felt like there were so many barriers around fashion studies content, like having to pay for it, the content being convoluted, or people not knowing it exists. We’ve learned that people were missing that, and now even people who aren’t in fashion listen to Statements and learn things. They’re not just listening to the easy episodes with influencers or bloggers, they really want to learn about the scholarly side too.

PN: Something I think all of us have grappled with in our interest in fashion while being very academically inclined people is the duality of a really visual fashion industry, yet really inaccessible in its own way. It’s also seen, for some reason, as vapid, and quite shallow. Then there’s the side of fashion studies which is so much the opposite. It’s so dense and inaccessible for completely different reasons and I think a lot of people are afraid of that too. With Statements we really wanted to bridge that gap.

MERDE: Which demographics do you hope to branch into? 

KW: I’d like to get a bit of a younger audience. I know our first season a lot of our content seemed heavy if you looked at the title. We want to find a way to subvert that fear of young kids being like ‘this will be boring’ because there is a lot that we speak about that I feel if I had knowledge about when I started in fashion, my path may have been different. I think that when we started at Parsons we could look back on different experiences and realize that what we’re talking about in class is actually something we’ve witnessed. I would love to see younger people, or people who don’t necessarily feel academic, listening.

PN: I definitely agree, we’ve been so lucky that the podcast has been used for courses at different universities which is so crazy to us. We would like more of a pop culture audience as well—I think our new episodes coming out are going to be a little bit more accessible than our previous ones.

MERDE: Do you think that the general public is starting to approach fashion with a more critical eye? 

KW: There’s a surface criticality going on, and a lot of it is very performative. A lot of people are quick to post an infographic about how fashion is the second worst polluting industry in the world, or whatever that incorrect statistic is, and then go spend $300 at Zara. Not everyone is perfect, and sustainable fashion is expensive and there’s barriers to it, so I’m not so much concerned about it on a personal level. What concerns me is the faux-criticism and activism that brands have. I think there’s a lot of talk and not a lot of action. 

PN: There are a lot of calls to follow more BIPOC makers and to think differently about our consumption habits. A few of the makers we’ve talked to have mentioned an increase in their followers, but right now it’s hard to understand whether business will increase due to the dire state of the global economy. It’s forced us to think about the way we’re doing the podcast. We’ve always had an eye on diversity, my research has been on gender and disability, and Katie has talked a lot about race, but thinking about how to do that authentically and disseminate these changes that we see in the industry in a meaningful way is a major challenge we’ve had. With our new platform, we’ll be able to share more of what is affecting our guests and what is foundational to their personal experiences in a way that feels accessible, manageable and authentic. 

KW: Also, what we’re seeing in fashion isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. Right now we hear a lot about race, before that it was sustainability, before that it was feminism, and I think the curtain always gets pulled back. So many brands have been exposed as making sustainable claims and they don’t live up to it, and with feminism that’s happened too. I’m working on a piece right now about the faux feminism of female founders. This is huge right now - there are women I’ve worked for who pride themselves on being a “girl boss”, but then the way in which they treat their employees doesn’t line up. Everything comes out eventually, but sadly it doesn’t necessarily catalyze systemic change. 

MERDE: What is the most important thing you’ve learned from a guest from season 1?

KW: We do so much research before we interview someone that I haven’t really had an experience yet where I’ve had someone say something surprising. I have had many moments where guests have said really valuable things where I’ve felt lucky to be in the room with them. Sometimes I feel the moment is very surreal because we’ve read so much of someone’s work and then cited them in our own, and then we get to sit with them, just the three of us, and speak to them. Like when we traveled to London and spoke to Agnès Rocomora, that was an amazing experience that I don’t know that we would have had without the podcast. 

PN: That one was particularly wild, because in our previous season we were pairing episodes. We would do one academic and then have a person who worked in the industry speak to that topic without having them in conversation to unwrap how those two sides interacted. Talking to Agnès Rocomora was so amazing because she was so foundational to our research when we were doing our masters. Then talking to Camille Cherrière was wild because she’s got such a huge following. To sit and speak so candidly with someone who was a blogger and Instagram influencer, who was solidifying what this incredible academic was saying, was such a validating experience. It showed exactly what we wanted to happen.

MERDE: If you had a dream podcast guest who would they be?

KW: I would love to talk to Katharine Hamnett because she was so central to my research for my Masters thesis at Parsons Paris.I centered it on slogan t-shirts, which she’s kind of the mother of - and she’s been a part of so many socio-political movments via her slogan t-shirts so I was be so curious to ask her on her opinions of how it’s evolved and it’s uses and identity politics.

PN: Something that I find really interesting is the publishing industry, so talking to people who have created iconic publications in the 80s and 90s like Olivier Zahm from Purple, or Jefferson Hack and Rankin from Dazed would be so incredible. They were in the industry when print was still so huge. Olivier Zahm was doing such boundary-pushing things and including a lot of philosophy and big ideas in his work, so that would be cool.

MERDE: How do you visualize Statements beyond the audio based podcast platform?

KW: We both feel really passionate about what we’ve created and we’re in it for the long haul. I personally would love to see some sort of publication at some point, whether it’s a bound version of our interviews for people where audio isn’t as accessible, or something that is some of our interviews with other content put together. The sky’s the limit for how you can expand your platform now, we don’t think anything is off the table for where we’ll go next.

PN: Our movement towards our approach to Instagram has really been to not so much to remind listeners that we have a new episode anymore, it’s going to be more of a movement towards sharing information that we’re getting beyond our episodes. We’re definitely thinking big into the future.

MERDE: How do you strike a balance between having a critical eye towards fashion and still appealing to the surge of humor in fashion media today?

PN: Katie and I, in spite of our work, don’t really take anything seriously in any other aspect of our lives, so at the beginning we kind of talked about that in terms of accessibility. Like humour is far more accessible than just sitting there and talking critically about every heavy topic. We’re really open to our interviews going that way, and cracking jokes with guests on our episodes, because it’s so much more interesting and reflective of who Katie and I are as people. The whole idea behind this new season is taking a lighter approach that reflects who we are and our understanding of fashion. 

MERDE: What’s your guilty pleasure?

PN: Ugh every pleasure I have I’m guilty about, like pleasure in our culture is ridden with guilt.

KW: I think my guilty pleasure, which I guess I kind of do shamelessly is having an agoraphobic episode where I don’t leave the house for 4 days at a time. I love it. I’m so high anxiety, I love to just be inside, and usually when I’m doing that, I’m taking multiple naps a day, or I call it a nap, but I sleep for 5 hours…

PN: Or 24…

KW: Well I like to be locked in my house with no contact to the outside world for 24 hours napping and doing whatever the fuck I want. 

MERDE: Anything else you guys would like to add?

KW: If you could open the article by saying that we’re really hot, I would appreciate that. Or “Katie Wilkes and Philippa Nesbitt are a brunette and a blonde with an unbreakable bond.” 

PN: Katie: I love that!