私たちの意識は、受動的な「反応モード」（情報の取り込み→反応）から、能動的な「位相転移モード」（洞察→枠組みの更新→行動）へと進化している。かつて地理や文化に固定されていたアイデンティティは、いまや継続的な自己更新を共有するプロセスを通じて鍛え上げられている。

芸術は、投影される客体から、日常に織り込まれた埋め込み型の認知ツールへと移行した。その結果、洞察から行動へのサイクルは、数年から瞬間へと圧縮される。社会的空間は個人の進化のための装置として再利用され、贅沢の概念は——アクセスの排他性ではなく——発展的なアイデアの深さによって再定義される。

芸術家の死と再生。第一のタイプの芸術家はエリート教育から生まれた——高度な知へアクセスできる特権的少数者であり、芸術を排他的な営みとした。

第二のタイプは標準化された教育が普遍化した時代に現れた。彼らは、集中的な自己教育（多くの人が得られない知へのアクセス）や、没入的な生活経験——学問や討議では学べないことを実践から学ぶ——あるいはその両方によって、その枠組みから逸脱し、例外となった。

それは第一のタイプよりもはるかに大きな勇気を要した。社会から「ずれている」「誤っている」と見なされるアイデアを構想するだけでなく、それを身体化し、既存のシステムへ統合し、作品が社会の内部で生き、公衆に開かれることを保証しなければならなかったからだ。

今日、私たちは第三のタイプの芸術家の誕生を目撃している。この概念は従来の観念からあまりに遠く、私たちが知る意味での「芸術家の死」を告げる。あらゆる変革的転移に典型的なように、この新しい活動と生産の様式は、当初は「芸術」として認識されないかもしれない。

この新しい役割は、強い自己教育への焦点と、そこから生じるアイデンティティ・ネットワークを核の一部として形成されつつある。

In that period, it was relatively easy to afford a private house and arrange your own world around it. People around were gradually getting more and more means.

Companies regularly offered new home products that created activities nobody had previously even thought about. It was not about the fact that now you didn’t have to wash dishes by hand, that it became easy to brew coffee in your own kitchen, or that now you had a glowing screen through which you could learn about any events in the world, real or fictional. The plot of land and the house you owned were becoming a place of constant updates to how you interact with the world.

In automobiles and finance no fewer frequent updates were taking place, allowing people to use the growing interstate road network. National parks, frequent business trips, or a radical change of workplace — all of this was becoming easily accessible. The relationship with the country’s territory became the same as with the city.

Nevertheless, at high speed there was an effect of taste standardization. Looking at another person meant cross-checking their products against the very latest. You had to have everything that was the newest and what television showed. A new car every 2–3 years. Roles were clearly defined, companies in hiring tests preferred conformity rather than creativity. The “organization man” became one of the dominant archetypes.

This is what became the culture of that time, and the conditions Ralph worked with.
He goes to Europe and sees that if a person there doesn’t have the latest car, even an old one — it is valued more than a new one, as a gift from his family. In his free time, a person wears a sweater rather than a jacket from a store, and that too may not be from the current year.

The picture of what it means to create your own world changed. Returning with ideas of a life built around personal values, Ralph focused on updating local values. Not only communication with loved ones, but also the prairies, the ocean, life on a ranch — you can create your life without being limited by the boundaries of your plot of land.

The synthesizing universe of Ralph Lauren became the development of everything best he had found both in the land of new beginnings and in countries with long histories. From separation from them, by the way, the United States appeared.

There was also a second facet of Ralph’s innovation. It concerned the realization of the existence of a huge diverse world which, as it turns out, had been there all this time right under one’s nose. And the vision of oneself as part of this world.

Living through the regular updating of the capabilities of home products, the emergence of previously impossible journeys, the birth of complexly organized groups of people in the form of companies that made it possible to create what one could not even have imagined — there was a feeling that the whole world around was constantly changing and expanding. What could seemingly be grasped as “this is our world” was being replaced faster than people could grow accustomed to it. Many simply did not have the time to orient themselves as to what the world they lived in was in its integrity.

Ralph Lauren began to notice various groups of people who formed and continue to form this constantly changing world from the past. The Ivy League and Preppy, the Wild West, American Sportswear, the Utilitarian Clothing of Workers, Southern Aristocrats, Military Clothing. A coherent picture of culture and its participants appeared.

For the constantly changing world, a point of support began to be visible. It turned out to be part of another, larger, but also clearer world. A cultural universe as a whole with its parts became visible, in which people as a collective had been all this time, and which had been shaping them.

This not only made it easier to orient oneself, having understood the overall picture and one’s own values in relation to others, but as a consequence also to begin to interact with it. New development paths became visible, possible collaborations that had previously not been thought of, as well as ways to improve or change what was not working so well. “I will take the freedom of cowboys and bring it into the corporate world.” The Jeep Wrangler, for example, was created precisely out of such impulses.

Japan in this sense is an interesting example of how the emphasis on creating one’s own world, which Ralph speaks about, is transferred into a collective understanding. Where each participant understands that the created world is a world created by them. And only due to shared agreement can it be maintained and developed.

This worldview is also transferred into Japanese business culture. Working in a company, such as in Yohji Yamamoto’s team, is experienced by a foreigner as becoming part of a family. But such relationships do not extend beyond the bounds of work. And of course this differs from the culture of the USA or Italy, although the situation is changing every day.

Of course, people had thought of themselves as a collective before, and did so at the level of the nation. Reliance on national rights and governing bodies was one of the main reasons. After all, it seems they are the ones that exert the primary influence on how life will develop further.

Continuing the line Ralph expressed, today many people already see that it is the individual choice of each person that contributes to the collective world. And its scale depends on how broadly a person looks and what they decide to create with their vision.

Thus, for example, Virgil Abloh continued to develop this idea by creating Off-White, offering everyone who wishes cognitive tools that trigger the creation of their own social structures. More on that another time.

Notes on the landscape:
50s-60s
Cars — a new design came: easier handling; movement became smoother thanks to a new type of suspension; the space inside truly became yours thanks to sound insulation; air conditioning and precise temperature control became available not only in top-segment cars, and much more.

Finance — the first credit cards appeared in the 1950s, when Bank of America launched BankAmericard.

Culture participants:
Preppy — preparatory private schools for Northeastern universities. The status of these people was associated in particular with academic excellence and social responsibility.

Nobody saw her arrive.

I was coming back from the canal, carrying a sack of charcoal for my father’s stove. I didn’t even notice her at first. She wasn’t loud. She wasn’t draped in velvet or framed by servants like the high ladies from the estates. She was just… there. Standing like she’d always been there, only I hadn’t learned how to see her before.

At first, I thought she was a servant. Her dress was plain — no lace, no bright silks. But then the oosterse hoofddoek caught my eye. Deep blue of colour, something worn in the worlds one visits only with the backing of a super‑conglomerate.

I stopped. The noise of the square went on — men shouting about fish, horses clattering — but to me it all went flat, like watching from under water.

She turned her head slightly. That’s when I saw it: the pearl.

But it wasn’t like the pearls the preacher’s wife wore on feast days — those tight little clusters like seeds, sitting like apologies on her collarbone. This was a single thing, heavy, moon-round, like it had been pulled from the belly of the sea. It looked absurd, almost. I mean — pearls that large didn’t belong in public. If a woman wore one like that, you were supposed to see the guards behind her. The carriage. The bloodline. The purpose.

She had none of it. Just that tulband, and the pearl, and eyes that didn’t blink when they met yours.

I’d grown up thinking you could look at someone and know who they were. People walked like their class. Their fabrics whispered their worth. Even the way a person held their arms told you how close they were to money.

But she didn’t fit. She wasn’t above us, like a countess; she wasn’t below us, like a scullery girl. She was outside. Outside the game entirely.

And something about that made the back of my neck warm.

People around me started whispering. Some said she must be a foreign princess. Someone else muttered “Ottoman,” like it was a ghost story. I heard another man say “Persian,” half in awe, half in fear. We touched the edge.

We’d grown up hearing tales of their cities, their libraries, their astrologers who mapped the skies like God’s handwriting. They built domes bigger than our whole churches, they wore fabrics that smelled of musk and cedar and time. Their engineers moved rivers. Their calligraphers made language look like prayer. You’d never meet one, of course. But just hearing the words — Ottoman, Persian, Mughal — gave you the sense that civilization itself had more than we’d been told.

To see someone here — on our street — with the trace of those worlds on her skin and cloth… it was like watching the future arrive in silence.

Not the rich kind of future with powdered wigs and court ballets. A different one. A human future.

I remember thinking: If I met a baron today, I’d know how to behave. I’d look down, bow, call him “my lord,” and measure myself against his gold buttons.

But with her — I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. She didn’t offer a class to respond to. She wasn’t presenting power. But I felt it. Not like a degen drawn — but like a door open.

She looked at me. Not like someone curious about their own game. She just looked, like she expected you to exist.

Later, when Vermeer painted her, we all saw it again.

Not the pearl. Not the tulband.

The gaze.

The way of meeting the world with the courage of being nothing but human from a possible world.

And that’s what unsettled people, I think. That suggestion that we’ve misunderstood what a person can be.

Some nights I walk past the painting and it still travels, even though the paints usually don’t move.

The familiar feeling of invitation is always new.

Were we to express our own version of ourselves, then that would be followed naturally by our own expression of every aspect of our way of living. The usually accepted standards wouldn’t apply.

Your own idea of beauty expressed not for the sake of performing, but as a consequence of making your own choices. Which byproducts in the creation of your own world and community. A micro-society. One which is outside that the fabrication standards organising our cities offer.

Cultural limiting offer starts not with clothes. Having a certain body type usually is related to a cultural ‘preset’ — a prototype of what kind of person you are. Defaulting your idea of who you can be.

body→cultural role→”your choice”

The idea is about creating your version of you, not your body or your clothes. Your body, then, becomes a natural extension of your vision.

Physical exercises are part of making clothes — not the goal in themselves, but as acknowledgement your ability to create your own cultural prototypes.

At this level you don’t just step outside of existing prototypes.  Your composition becomes a doorway into a world and mode of being not yet imagined.

The scope of the playfield is seen in travertine stone installed everywhere possible in the studio. A place meant to work as in something like a cave.

Being in a cave creates a space wider than the human-made ones. Ideas appearing there wouldn’t be referencing anything in the scope of the systems we have set up.

.Rick Owens

Landscape:

* * * * * * * * * Continuation of the idea of David Bowie — you are not defined by the place or culture you were born in. You create who you are to be.

* * * * * * * * * Continuation of the idea of Joseph Beuys — an artist’s agency for shaping society.