For nearly a decade, Arabelle Sicardi’s been assembling a truly unique body of work. Interdisciplinary yet cohesive, heavy on critical theory but accessible, she’s gained a dedicated following through her fashion and beauty writing for Teen Vogue, Rookie Magazine, her personal blogs, and, most recently, BuzzFeed. Perceptive, thoughtful, and unflinchingly honest, Sicardi’s exactly the type of voice that fashion and beauty writing’s been missing. Now a BuzzFeed Beauty editor, she’s is pushing the field of beauty writing into exciting, progressive new territory. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Your career, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say, would look super different without the internet. I wanted to start by asking you about Tumblr, because it seems to me that’s where things all started for you.

My career on the internet basically started actually on the Teen Vogue forums, when they still had them, and then I was a fashion blogger on Blogspot for forever – by forever I mean 2008 until this year. I started blogging on Tumblr as just another platform for my fashion blog, when Tumblr was super new. It was just a place for me to goof off, and it was my inspiration board for my fashion blog when I was a personal style blogger. Then I just kind of stopped caring about personal style blogging and Tumblr took up a lot more of my time. I wasn’t anyone in the industry, so I was just another Tumblr user for awhile. Then I had my makeup blog on Tumblr, which is Powderdoom, and I became a Tumblr beauty editor for the makeup tag. I don’t really know why so many people follow my blogs. I mean, I guess I do, but it’s also just weird now that virtually everyone I know mentions my Tumblr at one point or another in a conversation we have, which is bizarre to me.

Do you think there’s something unique about Tumblr, as a platform, that’s kind of allowed you to grow an audience there, or do you think you would have ended up un the same place with any other platform?

No. I think it was definitely Tumblr that did the trick because my brain operates, sadly, a little bit too much like Tumblr. The way that I write my essays or think about any idea. I collect ideas in short bursts, randomly, all the time. I’m sure everyone kind of does, but I think like this specifically. I can’t write an essay unless I go through my Tumblr next to an open document. I use my Tumblr tags as my research. That’s how I think about things. I have Evernote and other ways of collecting research where I don’t make everything I do public when I’m creating something. But I think the way that I blog, it’s very clear when I have a finished piece. The steps that I needed for that piece to happen, it’s right there. When I talk about robots or I talk about make-up, when I have to talk about themes like “Beauty Is Terror” or anything, I have a clear public space where I built that, and people like that for that reason. Tumblr is the perfect place for a particular generation of writer who have very short attention spans but are also very obsessive at the same time, so we can return back to ideas, and re-blog our own ideas, and build on them. The same way that we would do if we had a notebook and Tumblr didn’t exist, but now it’s viral, which is cool.

What made you want to work for BuzzFeed?

I did not sign up for the media culture of BuzzFeed. I signed up for it because it was a huge platform that would let me do whatever I wanted, and they completely trusted me with it, because they’re young enough, and brave enough, and fun enough, and arrogant enough to let us make mistakes in ways that print absolutely would not, and other media platforms couldn’t really afford to. Here, they basically told me that they wanted my brain, and they were willing to let me stumble, which was what I needed. I think a lot of people expected me to go into print, something more academic-y. A lot of my friends expressed a lot of surprise when I said I was going to BuzzFeed. I can totally see why, because on the one hand, I could totally become a critic, and just be a slow-burn type of writer, but the number one thing for me is I want my writing to be accessible, because that was my huge rage and frustration when I was a baby fashion blogger writing about this on my Blogspot. There is so much inaccessibility in fashion and in beauty, and beauty writing for the most part is just total advertisement, advertorial. Before I started writing about beauty, I pretty much never read anything about beauty because it’s not relatable, not to be trusted. Coming from a background of gender studies, I was incredibly critical of what beauty writing was in the industry, and I still am. It’s gotten better, but maybe that’s also because I’m paying more attention to all venues, and not just considering print beauty writing. Especially now that I know how print works, I can afford to be a lot more cynical about it, and my cynicism towards print is completely justified, at this point. So, I came to BuzzFeed because I had the freedom to not go down the path. It’s anything goes here, which is nice, and the stability is beautiful.

I think actually I had maybe more time to do research when I was a freelancer, but that’s also because I was writing for publications that paid me properly for the spent time in research, and now as an editor I do have a lot more on my plate. I am in a new place of doing more long-form, researched pieces that I would absolutely not have the time to do, or the opportunity, if I was a freelancer, so that’s nice. Each aspect of writing has its own ups and downs.

How do you see the state of fashion criticism today?

I don’t know. I don’t know how mean I can be. I still feel like an outsider in the industry, even if I am in the nucleus of media, so I don’t know how much I could say without messing things up.I think that the turnaround and the deadlines for reviews shoot the publications in the foot. I’d rather have something good and well thought out. I’d rather have something be the best than the first, which might be surprising given where I work. I’m not impressed by most fashion writing. There are obviously the icons like Vanessa Friedman, Cathy [Horyn], obviously, and Teri Agins, Alexander Fury, all these people – these are the people that I read for years, they’re the ones who shaped my thought process. They illuminate the collections in the context of fashion in ways that very few people can.I don’t like, or trust, or read the majority of fashion reviews. I think for the most part they’re a waste of space because the people who are writing them, it’s basically just a thank you card for these people to be able go to the shows. What I find funny is a lot of people writing these reviews don’t go to the shows – they do the reviews using Style.com photos or something, and that, I don’t care. If you didn’t go to the show, if you didn’t see it in person, I don’t want to hear what you have to say, just because the context of being in the space matters so much.

I’ve completely changed my ideas around Céline because I’ve seen the clothes in person. I don’t think most fashion reviewers know what they’re talking about.

It’s clear a lot of reviewers don’t have a historical-

They don’t have any artistic history, background.

That’s what I love about Alex Fury.

Yeah! I like most of the SHOWstudio conversations because they have actual art historians, people who know their stuff. That is what I like. I need to be taught something. I know that clothes can be a joke, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. The other day I read an Undercover review, [for] the [show] that just happened, and the first sentence was something about fashion shows not really ever having social or political meanings, and I just started laughing. I’ve read that reviewer’s work for years, Nicole Phelps, and I have actually learned a lot from her, but I also think that’s just wrong. Like, every show has sociopolitical meaning. Casting has sociopolitical meaning. Hair and beauty in general.

I wrote a piece on white supremacy in the fashion industry, last year, and now this year there’s a lot more diversity, but a lot of the diversity on the runways now is the one-off, good PR stuff where we’re going to have a handicapped model at this one show no one goes to, and we’re going to write about it for PR. You don’t see those clothes stocked at Jeffry, or Barneys, or Saks. What is the context for that show? It’s nothing. It’s a feel-good thing for The Huffington Post. It’s not for the industry to actually listen to.

I don’t know. I don’t like most fashion reviews. That’s why I don’t do them, because if I’m perfectly honest I won’t be invited again, so it’s like, what’s really the point of me doing that now?

Knowing as we do that you’ll get straight-up banned from shows for negative reviews, is fashion criticism still necessary? What, then, can we get from it that we can’t get from looking at the clothes?

I think fashion reviews are still necessary, but the medium in that they’re given has to change a little. I also think the timing of fashion publications has to shift, maybe. I do think the web is the future, there’s no doubt, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be the first to do something. I think it means that you have to be better at it. We don’t need more people that have no knowledge of these designs going to these places and being, like, “she showed this silk dress on that really hot model.” Congratulations. I would rather be like, this is the history and the context of this designer and their casting, and relate it to something bigger.

I think about really good fashion reviews all the time. I have a bookmark on my old laptop of my favorite ones. [Reviews] that illuminated the history of the Surrealist movement, and linked it back to particular patterns on an Erdem dress, or something. These things, they’re beautiful, and I wouldn’t say they legitimize the industry, but they certainly give you another look into it, because there’s so much unexplored territory when it comes to the meaning of clothes, and why we choose to wear this expensive dress, and why these people are going to these shows. They’re going to them to partake in the admiration of a culture, and admiration of a story for women, and so to just be like, “Okay, here’s what we saw, it was really beautiful, great job, everyone,” I feel like that’s a disservice.

The one good fashion review in a sea of 200 makes the mediocre crap worth it to crawl through, because that’s the stuff that excites me.

In your writing on both beauty and fashion, you center on themes of creation, re-creation, self care, and using beauty and fashion as coping mechanisms. In the interview you did Sarah Black McCullough for The Hairpin, you were talking about Sephora being like a sea of people creating, whereas if you’re doing your makeup on the subway, you get cut eye. Why is it that we see working out, exercise, SoulCycle, or whatever as some sort of morally pure act, but dressing up, make-up, and fashion is often framed as a vanity?

Because people hate women. Society hates women, and they don’t want to be in spaces where women are prioritized. When it comes to SoulCycle, it’s interesting, there’s a culture behind it. Exercise and beauty politics are very interesting places that we have a lot of writing and thinking left to do in it, but the gym is inherently a classist space. SoulCycle is, like, the ultimate bourgeois playground in New York City. It’s a total cult.

It’s just classism and misogyny. That’s the difference between gym masculinity and Sephora. Even that stuff is binary.

When I was thinking about that question, I was reminded of that probably over-shared Rick Owens quote where he’s like, “working out is modern couture.” Do you think that’s-

Rick Owens is so gay. It’s really cute.

I love him so much.

He’s so queer, and the fact that all of his huge stalker following don’t get the joke of him being so queer, it just makes me so happy.

That’s actually kind of exactly what I think is so phenomenal about him as a designer. All of his designs are, like, yes, dark and gothy, but they’re also really funny, and he has this whimsical, mischievous sense of humor that I feel half the people who buy his clothes miss.

They totally don’t get it. I feel like the majority of the Rick Owens customer is a severe, humorless person who I don’t want to be friends with. Then there’s a very particular line of customer that totally gets it and gets him, and they are absolute delights to be around because they really pay attention, they’re so loyal, they care so deeply about quality and the culture of clothes, and they’re the people who I could spend hours talking about the evolution of a garment with. It is really funny that his clothes are perceived as this hyper-masculine, dark, brooding thing, when it’s really not like that at all.

One of your other interviews I was reading while I was researching for this contained a great quote by the playwright Svetlana Boym. The quote was something to the extent of “nostalgia breeds monsters.” [ed.: “The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unelected nostalgia breeds monsters.”] We were tweeting at each other the other day about Moschino and Saint Laurent, and this quote about how nostalgia breeds monsters made me think about both of these labels.

Definitely. It’s really interesting. One of the reasons why I avoid doing fashion criticism now and I stick to beauty is because I am so often proven wrong about what people like and will buy, because Moschino and Saint Laurent are doing so well for themselves.

I don’t like nostalgia. I’m not a nostalgic person. I’m a future romantic. Nostalgia isn’t productive to me, and I think that so many of the designers, especially in these huge houses, are being really, incredibly lazy, because it’s just a reference on top of a reference on top of a reference, and it doesn’t feel productive. I do think productivity in fashion is a very tenuous concept, but at the topmost levels for these designers, they can afford to take risks. Maybe they can’t, but I wish that they could. I want these people to be able to introduce new versions of these women, and not rely on the history of these houses so much, because it’s just boring, and I would rather have these people take risks and fail in notable ways than just make another fucking Marni shirt-dress or something.

Nostalgia isn’t productive. It’s not why I got into fashion. I got into fashion because it helped me perceive my own identity in ways that I had not even conceptualized before. I was thinking about it the other day because someone asked me if I was ever going to update my fashion blog again, and I’m like, “No, I don’t need it anymore.” I was just having this rumination on what fashion did for me, and if I didn’t have Comme des Garçons, and if I didn’t have the designers that really changed my life, I don’t know who I would be at this point. I feel like I say it in every interview when anyone asks me about fashion, but Spring/Summer 1997 and 1996 for Comme, those collections changed my life. I did not think that anything could be that bizarre and still be cool. I had no thoughts.

From Comme des Garçons’ Spring/Summer 1997 collection.

I was trying so hard to be liked, so hard, but seeing that collection, it was one of those moments when I knew my life was going to change, one of those watershed moments where even when you’re in it, you’re like, “Nothing is going to be the same.” That was the most clear moment of any I’ve ever had, looking on the page and just seeing those huge, mutated lumps, and it was so powerful. Those moments were completely different. Maybe not beautiful, but completely different and unabashed about it. Those moments are why I like fashion, and it’s what I look for in beauty. The stories that you couldn’t even conceptualize. And I so rarely get that anymore in fashion.

Can you expand a bit about how you see that ground as being more fertile in beauty as opposed to fashion?

There’s still so much opportunity for those stories to be told. Fashion, I’ve become more and more cynical. Nostalgia isn’t productive. I want to see new futures.

I feel like people, even if they’re vocally forgetful and ignorant about the way that capitalism has completely… destroyed-slash-whatevered the fashion industry, you cannot ever forget that when it comes to beauty, because beauty itself such an exclusionary practice and idea, and so all the prominent narratives about beauty have been positive, and in a terrifying way. It completely upholds white supremacy, and so people don’t really get the platforms to speak about it because the people who get the huge platforms are the people who uphold white supremacy. In fashion you still get people critiquing cultural appropriation, but it’s not like that at all when it comes to beauty because the only people who get those platforms are people who are getting paid by Proctor & Gamble or whatever.

That’s not so much the case now because of newer media platforms. Black Girl Dangerous is doing amazing work when it comes to beauty writing and upholding rare narratives – they’re not rare, but they haven’t been told before on an online platform. They’re doing great work there.

I think people are just ready for more conversation about beauty because of the popularity of identity essays now, the ones that are just like, “this is my story.” I think it’s easier for people to talk about their bodies than it is to talk about clothes, so it’s probably easier to get into talking about beauty politics now.

I’m excited for beauty writing to blow up more, because there’s so much to talk about it’s scary. My favorite phrase in the world is “beauty is terror.” I love thinking about beautiful things, but I’m infinitely more interested in the ideas of the monsters that we create in the search for beauty and the reaction to being denied it. So, wherever you stand on that idea of what beautiful is, there’s always something to say, and you don’t really need the expertise of an art degree or whatever to be able to say something important and eloquent, and I would prefer if people had that knowledge if they were writing about fashion.

That feels like a great note to end on.

Yes.

Although, speaking of capitalism, I wanted to finish what we started talking about the other day regarding Kanye and adidas. What’s your take?

I don’t know, it’s a very tricky subject because all of these essays from all of these people are questioning if he deserves to be in fashion, and I don’t think that’s necessarily the right question. I think everyone deserves space in fashion, even if it means that they’re gonna be mediocre at it. He should have the space to fail.

Is he failing right now? I don’t know. I think his work so far has been derivative. And he has totally copped to that. He has this Tumblr which he supposedly re-posts The Fashion Spot’s Helmut Lang scans. He’s totally just another fashion kid, except now he has tens of millions of dollars to burn away trying to be Helmut Lang or Rick Owens, which is dangerous, but I still support it because he should have that room as a human being who wants to do multiple things in his life. He still wants to be loved, he wants the admiration, and his ideas of classism are basic at best, but I still support him, and I ride for him, but I’m always a little bit disappointed in him, too.

I do wish he would have the conversation with Nicki Minaj, because she approaches accessibility for her fans and products and her brands completely differently, and I think it’s because she’s a woman, particularly a black woman, and she understands accessibility. She doesn’t want the approval of other people, and it shows, because she will pay her fans to participate in creating her own image. Like, she has her fans do her makeup. They’re her makeup artists. She gets them off of YouTube, and she changed that person’s life, so she uplifts women all the time, and she only really does accessible branding. Kanye has done the exact opposite. He’s only shown in Paris, I guess in New York, and his front row is always Anna [Wintour], blah blah blah.

And he completely overhauled Kim’s image. It’s not just him, like, she has agency, obviously, over the program, but he totally wants the approval of these people that a couple years ago would not have given a fuck about him. He knows that he’ll never quite get there, and it’s because he’s a black dude, and that’s totally messed up and racist and he knows it, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want it anyway. Kanye’s a fascinating dude.

Endlessly so. I find that when I listen to him talk about his vision and his goals for what he’s doing with adidas, I’m like, “Yes, that’s so beautiful.” And I think that as brutal and disgusting as fast fashion is, I do think there’s something to the idea of being able to make whatever the runway has decided is the latest shit accessible to everyone – there is something valuable about that.

The thing is, his concept of making everything accessible or whatever is completely flawed because while fashion can be revolutionary, it’s not revolution. The revolution will not be purchased on Net-a-Porter, number one, so, he needs to calm down.

There’s my headline.

I get questions all the time from people doing their thesis about fashion, democracy, and journalism or whatever. Because I’ve written about Marxism in fashion in an accessible way, people assume that I think that fashion can be revolutionary, but no. I mean, yes, but mostly no.

Fashion can never be revolutionary if it cannot be accessed by everybody. Like, I love Comme, and I love my particular designers because they revolutionized my life, but that doesn’t mean they can revolutionize everyone’s, because fashion is a classist economy. It’s based completely within the realm of capitalism. You can’t remove fashion from capitalism. You can’t really remove any of us from capitalism, because you’re not going to fucking live on an island and just self-actualize all your necessities. So, like, I love his ideas, I love his dreams and his hopes, and I believe in them, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll ever succeed in a way that will… His clothing costs more than J. Crew!

Which is already inaccessible for most!

Yeah. Just, actually, the concept of accessibility when it comes to clothing prices is just really funny to me because-

That’s a conversation being had by people who are really already in the upper tier of what you would consider-

Yes. Actually, one of the most common questions when I have my Tumblr ask box open is “How do you afford nice shit?” I’ve never spent thousands of dollars on any item, ever. I could never do that, and it’s really easy to find really cheap designer stuff on the internet.

I think people spend more money when they go to Zara and H&M than I ever do on my own clothes, and I wear pretty much only Comme and, like, vintage. To be honest, I’ve totally become a parody of myself. I’m wearing current fall Junya [Watanabe] and, like, a band t-shirt and Dr. Martens. That is a perfect example of me, but I didn’t spend any money on any of it because I got these [Junya Watanabe pants] off of a consignment store using store credit that I got from the internet because my followers bought stuff, too. It’s basically not hard to find cheap designer. You just need to have an internet connection and willpower.

When we see clothes as kind of a class signifier or a financial signifier, I think it does a disservice to the person who is wearing it, and also yourself. I used to get free shit all the time when I was a fashion blogger, from brands, and that doesn’t mean I could pay my rent. You can’t pay your rent in free shit.