So You Think You’re Better Than Me?

+ fashion’s superiority complex, career pivots and exits, the girlies are winning and more

Hey, hi, hello! Welcome back to Fashion Tingz.

This week I bought the Charlotte Simone jacket of my dreams and I am gagged. You know that feeling when you’ve had your eye on something for ages, and the time finally comes to purchase it, and when it gets delivered to your front door, it’s exactly as you’d imagined, if not better? Yeah, that.

For reference, I’ve had this piece bookmarked in my wish list since November 2025. This year, I’m trying to steer away from impulse purchasing (send help) and buy with intention, or at least purchase more considerately to ensure I don’t have a wardrobe full of clothes I can’t or don’t know how to wear.

Anyways, her drop model is what intrigued me. It builds hype sustainably, ensures things are made with care, and creates a community of people who (like me) are hitting that website refresh button as soon as the latest release goes live. Well played, Ms Simone. Well played.

— J’Nae xoxo

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IN THIS EDITION: Side eyeing style and personal taste. Saks Global is clawing its way out the trenches. Fashion comings and goings continue at full speed. Years-long court battle between Chanel and The Real Real continues. Fashion girlies are doing their thing, icon behaviour. Zines are in their comeback era.

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“At least I never bought from that brand” is the kind of sentence that reads like a throwaway, but lands like a side-eye you can feel through the screen. I saw a post on Notes recently, scrolled past it, scrolled back up, and felt personally attacked. Not because I’m loyal to any one label, but because the brand in question? I own it. I wear it. I like it. I’ve bookmarked its lookbooks, and I’ve subscribed to its newsletter and notification drops. If I’m honest, I’d like to work with said brand one day. So seeing this post made me do a double-take, and with one casually superior sentence, I’d been filed into a category I didn’t consent to joining.

The thing is, I’ve said versions of this same sentence before. We all have, if we’re being honest. Fashion, for all its creativity and self-expression, is deeply, almost comically judgmental. It thrives on setting yourself apart from the crowd. Taste isn’t just about what you like, it’s about what you don’t, and more importantly, what you would never. I’ve rolled my eyes at people queuing for Dubai chocolate cookies like they’re stocking up on eggs and milk in peak COVID times. I’ve mentally distanced myself from the cult of Labubus like I’ve passed some kind of final boss in late-stage capitalism. In these moments, I’ll admit, I felt a flicker of moral superiority. I’m better than everyone who bought into that crap.

But that’s the sleight of hand fashion pulls on us. It convinces us that consumption is identity, and then convinces us that identity is hierarchical. You don’t just wear something, you signal something. Buy into a certain brand, and you’re subscribing to a worldview, a tempo of life, a set of references. Brands don’t hide this; they build entire universes for us to step into. And if we walk out dressed head-to-toe in one particular brand, then yes, arguably, they’ve won. But also… so what? Since when did participation become a moral failure?

There’s a quiet but persistent superiority complex baked into fashion culture, especially in the age of hyper-visibility. The “if you know, you know” crowd versus the mainstream. The archival obsessives versus the trend adopters. The people who thrift versus the people who click add to cart. Sometimes I’m part of one crowd, sometimes I’m part of another. It’s cliquey in the way high school cafeterias are cliquey, except now the lunch tables are defined by aesthetics. Clean girls, indie sleaze revivalists, quiet luxury minimalists who whisper their wealth through beige cashmere... Each group comes with its own unspoken rules and its own sense of being more correct than the others.

And we participate in this ongoing dialogue constantly, often without realising it. We see someone in full designer and assume they’re status-obsessed, out of touch, or trying too hard. We see someone in fast fashion and assume they don’t care about sustainability, craftsmanship, or originality. We reduce entire people — complex, contradictory, interesting, human people — into flat archetypes based on what’s hanging off their bodies. It’s lazy, but it’s also culturally reinforced. Fashion has always been a language, but somewhere along the way, we started treating it like a diagnostic tool.

What’s interesting is how moral language sneaks into these judgments. But often, that language gets co-opted to dress up what is essentially just taste. Disliking something becomes a virtue; liking the wrong thing becomes a flaw.

So when I read that Note, what bothered me wasn’t just the dig at a brand I enjoy. It was the implication that taste and personal style can be cleanly divided into right and wrong, superior and inferior. That there’s a correct way to engage with fashion, and that deviation from the current says something definitive about who you are. Like, can we, as people, not be full of multitudes? It flattened the whole experience into something oddly moralistic, when fashion at its best is anything but.

Here’s the truth: sometimes I want to be discerning, intentional, and a little bit insufferable about what I wear. And sometimes I want to be a basic ass bitch. I want the easy, obvious, widely-loved thing. I want to participate in the trend, not critique it from a distance. I want UGGs and Burberry checks and a grey tracksuit and rhinestones covering my ass! I want to wear something purely for the fact that I think it looks good on me, not because it aligns with some carefully curated identity on which others pass judgment.

This doesn’t make me less interesting, or less thoughtful, or less anything for that matter. It just makes me me. Someone moving through a culture that’s constantly offering new things to desire, reject, and reinterpret.

Maybe the more interesting question isn’t “who has better taste?” but “why do we need taste to be a competition at all?” What are we actually protecting when we draw those lines: our individuality, or our insecurity? Because the moment we feel the need to announce what we would never wear, it starts to sound less like confidence and more like fear. Fear of being misread, misplaced, misunderstood. We’ll always be the outsiders looking in, sitting on the periphery of an industry built on keeping us in our place.

Fashion is a game of signals, of references, of coded meanings. But we don’t have to turn it into a hierarchy to play it. We can love obscure designers and still buy something mainstream, we can critique consumerism and still fall for a beautifully made thing. We can exist in contradiction.

This is something I’ve battled with over the years, and will continue to do so. I’m going to call out my own bullshit here and say I’ll probably be guilty of doing the very thing I’ve waxed lyrical about in this newsletter in the future. I will throw shade, not hands, and I will subconsciously file someone into a certain category based on how they’re dressed. And I expect the same to be done to me. So take all of this with a pinch of salt. But it’s worth remembering that we can wear the wrong thing on purpose, just to remind ourselves that none of this is as deep as we pretend it is.

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@myahhasbany | @buffalozine | @sandyliang

• Looks like Saks Global is finally finding its way out of the financial wilderness, and not a moment too soon. From where I’m standing, the picture is getting a lot clearer: the people holding its senior secured bonds have decided to back the comeback with a hefty $500 million lifeline once the Chapter 11 dust settles. Not exactly pocket change. If all goes to plan, this means Saks will shimmy its way out of bankruptcy this summer with a fresh bankroll and a second shot at relevance.

• Fashion loves a dramatic entrance, but it really loves a quick exit. Mark Thomas barely had time to settle into the creative director chair at Carven before deciding it wasn’t quite his scene. Appointed in March 2025 as a last-minute stand-in after Louise Trotter decamped to Bottega, his tenure feels less like a chapter and more like a well-dressed footnote. What makes it more curious is that Thomas wasn’t exactly an outsider. He’d been there since 2023, shaping Carven’s revival alongside Trotter. And yet, just a year after stepping into the spotlight himself, he’s bowing out to “devote himself to other projects,” which, in fashion-speak, can mean anything from a brilliant new venture to disappearing entirely.

• If there’s a masterclass in the art of the pivot, Rickie De Sole is currently teaching it. With only a couple of weeks left at Nordstrom, she’s not so much leaving as multiplying — stepping into two new roles that feel perfectly calibrated to her orbit. On one hand, she’s heading into a gig as the style and fashion editor at Air Mail. On the other hand, she’s sliding into the investment world as a senior adviser at Sandbridge Capital. This feels like a strategic expansion with one foot in storytelling, the other in deal-making. Which, in today’s fashion ecosystem, might actually be the most stylish position of all.

• Just when you think the legal saga between Chanel and The RealReal might be winding down, it sharpens its edges. This latest ruling feels like a clear, if partial, victory lap for Chanel. A New York federal court has tossed out The RealReal’s antitrust counterclaims, trimming back what had become an increasingly ambitious defence strategy. At its core, the dispute is exactly the kind of existential tug-of-war you’d expect in modern luxury. Chanel claims The RealReal sold counterfeit goods and oversold the reliability of its authentication process. The RealReal, for its part, has pushed back by accusing Chanel of trying to choke off the secondary market altogether through anticompetitive tactics. Now, after a long pause and failed settlement talks, the case is back in motion. Chanel’s central claims are still very much alive, while The RealReal heads into the next phase with a slimmer, more focused defence.

• I’ve always been struck by how Drew Henry managed to shape so much of modern womenswear without ever needing his name on the door. His career reads like a greatest-hits syllabus — Céline, JW Anderson, Phoebe Philo, Burberry — all the places that quietly define how women dress day to day. Now he finally gets the title, stepping in at Courrèges just as it’s trying to steady itself. His brand of sharp, graphic minimalism and real-world wearability is exactly what the house seems to be recalibrating toward. What’s more interesting, though, is the pattern. The Phoebe Philo school of thought is quietly taking over, designers trained in her orbit stepping into top jobs not with theatrics, just a very precise understanding of what clothes are actually for. Henry now has Courrèges’ space-age legacy to play with. The real question isn’t whether he’s ready; it’s what he chooses to say now that he finally has the microphone.

• It looks like Sandy Liang is tightening the circle around her brand in a very deliberate way. Her eponymous label has just signed with Lighthouse Management + Media, handing over the keys to everything from brand strategy to partnerships, media, and long-term growth. It’s a clever move that looks to scale with intent by bringing in a team that can translate her distinctly downtown, slightly nostalgic girl-pop world into something bigger without sanding off the edges. Can this evolve the brand without diluting it? Let’s hope so.

• The girls are winning and we love to see it. Jonathan Anderson has hired CSM grad @myahhasbany to work over at the Dior haute couture design team, while Munich biotech dropout turned Paris fashion student @cestchavie has been casually documenting her life as an intern at Louis Vuitton, and the internet is hooked. Naturally, TikTok’s armchair HR department predicted she’d be fired within days. And yet, she’s still there.

• I love to see physical print media doing its thing. BUFFALO ZINE took over a window at Selfridges to edit their next issue, and while the idea of doing this terrifies me, this behaviour is pretty iconic. Very chic, very IRL.

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