HEDI SLIMANE & SARAH RICHARDSON

TIME LOOPS SOFTLY, AND IN THE DRIFT, THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT SLIPS BACK INTO STYLE.

By Megan Hullander

Something is returning. Not like a prodigal, not like a ghost. More like a recurrence—low frequency, half-remembered. Cultural static. The spirit of revolt, long dormant under fluorescent joy, has found again its old disguises.

Call it an echo. Of a girl walking home in 1968 with eyeliner smudged and thoughts unspoken. Of Françoise Hardy’s reticence. Of Julie Christie refusing performance. Of women who broke from the lacquered weight of couture for something feral, felt, uncurated. Earthy and bohemian. A season when detachment was a form of agency and fashion looked like unraveling, like truth told slant. There’s a quiet power in the effortless cool of these women—subtle, instinctive, and always aligned with the undercurrent of an era preparing to rupture.

This is not nostalgia; nostalgia is obedient. This is a reverb, a looping refusal. These girls wear disaffection like a talisman. Code rather than costume. A picking through of what’s left after meaning has exhausted itself.

We have been here before. In the ’60s, liberation hadn’t yet been merchandised. The Beatniks still read books. Kitchen Sink dramas didn’t know they were “aesthetic.” Women were no longer dressed to be admired but to move—toward revolution, toward poetry, toward each other. The grandiosity of post-war couture gave way to something intimate, intellectual, lived-in. The icon became the girl next door with a cigarette and a theory.

The ’90s came, a hangover after the synthetic neon of the ’80s. The yuppie era had polished the surface until it reflected nothing. The reaction was heroin chic, post-grunge minimalism, the quiet bleakness of existential cool. Rawness re-entered the room in a slip dress. Kate in a hallway looking like she had forgotten her own name.

Each time, the surface cracks and ambiguity seeps in like weather. Art reclaims its right to confusion. Nothing clean, nothing finished. Raw glamour, frayed at the seams. Mystery no longer the problem, but the point.

We are here again. The cycle turns, formless into form, form into exhaustion. What began as rebellion becomes a brand, becomes boredom, becomes rebellion again. Art is revolt, fashion is a mood, beauty is refusal.

In this key: Hedi Slimane’s shoot for Beyond Noise. A canal in East London. Water slow as memory. Air that tastes of iron, mildew fiction. You could say it evokes Pinter, or Melville, or the inside of a black-and-white frame where nothing happens and everything does.

Slimane renders conditions. His models hover. The kind of girls that seem to have arrived from another time, or no time. You recognize them without knowing who they are: Karina’s beautiful estrangement, Delon’s cruelty hidden under geometry, Bogarde’s soft contempt. Here, mis en scène is dialect. Light references itself. A kind of cinematic shrug.

The power of fashion is in refusal. Anonymity is luxury, coolness is defiance. And resistance lives in shadow rather than spectacle. This is noir as atmosphere: that post-Gainsbourg drift toward glamorous undone. Like a vinyl crackle left on the track on purpose. Like music you aren’t sure whether you remember or imagine.