Hedi Slimane

If you live long enough, you can't help noticing a few things, like the resurgence every twenty years of skinny ties and poured on pants. Unlike madras and car coats, however, this look will always be cool, but never as cool as its most recent iteration via Hedi Slimane. He washed the vintage off of it. He redefined it. He brought it to Paris. As the designer for Dior Homme, he rocked the fashion world with this revival, putting every editor, celebrity stylist, and art-school kid on notice. But that was yesterday. If Slimane's name sounds familiar this decade, it might be because of the LA MOCA show of his photography, California Song. As the land of reinvention, Los Angeles is the perfect place to celebrate Slimane's second life as an artist. Besides, his BFFs include gen-ought celebs like Frances Bean Cobain, Girls front man Christopher Owens, Gaga, and that old lady Kate Moss. Purists love to grouse about fashion in art museums, and maybe it's too soon to tout Slimane's art bona fides. But who's to say whether this particular cultural visionary is an artist who designs stuff or a designer turned artist? Sometimes it's better to let the kids decide. If it were up to the adults, the Cubists would've been driven out of Paris. Still, fashion is nothing if not self-aggrandizing, and history does swallow trends whole.