One day he will become president somewhere.
How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
51–60 of 137 posts
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've bought plenty of $300 pairs of shoes that fell apart in a year. Price has little relationship with quality nowadays. You just need to do your research.
I guess my argument wasn’t clear, if that’s your response. Nobody’s saying that “if a shoe costs more, it must be higher quality”. Give me a little credit, I’m not quite that stupid.
Good shoes are expensive, but expensive shoes are not necessarily good.
Thanks to industrial processes, good shoes also have a maximum manufacturing cost. There are only so many features you can pack in to one footwrap designed to be worn on the surface of Earth. Springs, torsion bars, carbon fiber, pneumatic chambers, pockets, separated toes, non-Newtonian fluid insoles, flame resistance, arc reactor exhaust ports, or whatever. All of those things still cost less than the trademark logo.
You can avoid buying some bad shoes by filtering out those with low prices. You can avoid buying shoes with a bad price/quality ratio by filtering out those with high prices. You still need to carefully examine any that are left, because with shoes, quality influences price, but price has many complex factors and you cannot easily determine what fraction is due to the quality.
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#53My wife and I went to Paris for our anniversary and we didn't realize until we were there that it was Fashion Week. I am genuinely not surprised at all that this guy made it to the top. Streetwear has become so ironic because the lines have blurred between haute culture/high fashion and bargain basement designs that you genuinely can't tell what is $800 (Balenciaga Triple S https://www.balenciaga.com/us/triple-s-shoe…
That Balenciaga is an absurd shoe. It's the running shoe equivalent of a Gaudi hotel facade. It looks like it belongs on the cover of Yellow Submarine. The lines are crazy. The curves of the sole section near the front of the shoe are in a complicated dialogue with the curves near the back. Check those tangents, man. If you've ever used something like illustrator, imagine where the spline controls would be. Then try…
I don't think anyone wears those shoes. They're just for sneakerheads to collect. Then it's just a game of telling people what they should desire.
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#54Then again this is the world of fashion where reality doesn't matter, it's all about perception, brand and connections. His restaurant prank is even better. It would be impossible to keep up these feats for a length of time , but nevertheless it is impressive how he pulls them off.
My hypothesis is that everybody fakes their way into Fashion Week. It's all one giant LARP event that somehow spun out of control, and now nobody knows how it manages to keep going all by itself without any GMs, or how to stop it, if there were somehow an emergency that required it to not take place.
Now go re-read the Verge article or watch the video, presuming that everybody is faking, and see if the hypothesis can be falsified at any point.
The part where he gets the badge? That's just some person with a badge printer, playing the part of the registrar.
That part where he's trying to convince Italians that he's Italian? They're not Italian either. "Oh, of course I'll speak English to you, another completely genuine Italian person, for the sake of your photographer, obviously."
It's sort of surreal, actually. Because then you can expand the hypothesis outside of Fashion Week, and it never stops.
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
That Balenciaga is an absurd shoe. It's the running shoe equivalent of a Gaudi hotel facade. It looks like it belongs on the cover of Yellow Submarine. The lines are crazy. The curves of the sole section near the front of the shoe are in a complicated dialogue with the curves near the back. Check those tangents, man. If you've ever used something like illustrator, imagine where the spline controls would be. Then try…
I don't think anyone wears those shoes. They're just for sneakerheads to collect. Then it's just a game of telling people what they should desire.
Sorry... what? In fashionable places these are some of the most common high-end shoes I see people wearing. They're not very hard to buy or artificially scarce, just expensive, so they're not really a target for sneakerheads in the traditional sense of the word. They mostly care about specific colorways or variants that come in small quantities, or shoes that have just been released with constrained supply.
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Trust-by-default is pretty much the definition of social capital, which is thought to be incredibly important for a functioning society. Not all societies are the same. Trust by default is a luxury in many parts of the world. Typically the rule of law is just non-existent in these places.
Which why the parent qualified "for a functioning society".
You can have a low trust society that still functions. They have existed for thousands of years. They exist today.
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#57Ive always truly believed that gullibility was one of humanity’s biggest, most exploitable weaknesses, if not the biggest. You can fake your way into almost anything with confidence and basic acting. I’m reminded of the folk wisdom about simply holding a clipboard and acting like you belong can get you into private areas of 90% of companies. All the fraud people fall for, all the scams, obvious phishing, you’d think…
I don't trust your anecdote; I think you just made it up, since you have not presented any proof. I think you are trying to prove a point by making up stories. Therefore I distrust your conclusions and arguments, not only because I disagree with them, but because I distrust you. (I'm testing out turning off my trust-by-default gene ;)
Good meta point! When you think about it, there is no really good reason to believe anything posted to a forum such as this, from anonymous people you don’t know. Yet we often do. Touché!
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#58Ive always truly believed that gullibility was one of humanity’s biggest, most exploitable weaknesses, if not the biggest. You can fake your way into almost anything with confidence and basic acting. I’m reminded of the folk wisdom about simply holding a clipboard and acting like you belong can get you into private areas of 90% of companies. All the fraud people fall for, all the scams, obvious phishing, you’d think…
Trust-by-default is pretty much the definition of social capital, which is thought to be incredibly important for a functioning society. Basically, it's more efficient to trust people and be exploited once in a while, than to never trust anyone, which would lead to high transaction costs for any social interaction. Short intro by Robert Putnam, the big cheese in the field: http://robertdputnam.com/bowling-alone/socia…
There's a lot more depth to your insight than you may know. My favorite book of all time is "The Evolution of Cooperation." The book basically takes a biology question, and uses basic game theory and simulations to explore the idea of cooperation between species. The remarkable thing is that given certain evolutionary parameters, the "cooperate/trust first, and just retaliate if you've been cheated on" strategy is incredibly robust.
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#59Reminds me of when someone got backstage to the Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather press event and filmed the process.
Re: How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Trust-by-default is pretty much the definition of social capital, which is thought to be incredibly important for a functioning society. Not all societies are the same. Trust by default is a luxury in many parts of the world. Typically the rule of law is just non-existent in these places.
Which places, and is this personal experience? Every place around the world I've been to has been incredibly hospitable -- and the more besieged by war, or poverty, the more hospitable places tend to be. More so than your average street in the USA.
Yes.
For personal reasons, I'm not going to be specific. I'm just going to say many parts of Asia; just not Japan. It's not perfect and there are probably better measures, but this map gives you an idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
As lotsofpulp has already mentioned, your experience will be drastically different if you're just visiting and if you're not a native. I lived in Asia and I'm also native. My family is still there, and I visit from time to time. If you haven't conducted business or dealt with law enforcement, it's hard to have a full picture; especially if you're just passing by.