Rachel Tashjian Cuts Through the Fashion Noise
As runway shows become bigger spectacles, CNN’s senior style reporter explains why clothes deserve serious coverage, what legacy media still gets right, and how fashion became a spectator sport.
After a long career in magazines, including stints at GQ and Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair, you became a fashion critic at The Washington Post in 2023. Last year, you left to join CNN as senior style reporter. Fashion is a world of fantasy, but if you’re going to write about it in any serious, newsy way, you have to find something real about it. What is that for you?
I think about who I’m writing for. Sometimes I have an ideal person in mind. It helps you pull away the detritus of publicist language and, frankly, designer language. Fashion is such a visual medium that sometimes designers aren’t great at explaining what they’re doing. Part of the job is to help work out the ideas in a way that’s accessible to people.
Why do you think it’s important to cover fashion?
Part of it is the simplistic answer: This is an enormous business. It’s a huge part of many people’s lives. With the luxury end becoming so big and fast fashion becoming so dominant, I think it really warrants quite a lot of coverage. Also, when I’m trying to understand previous moments in history, I often do that by looking at fashion journalism.
What attracted you to CNN?
I hate to use an obvious word, but it’s a multiplatform job. No one who’s interviewing a designer backstage is holding a tape recorder anymore; they’re holding a phone to get video. It adds such an interesting layer of transparency. Seeing someone respond to questions is very different from reading the response.
“Opulent Tips,” your invitation-only fashion newsletter, is a word-of-mouth sensation. And yet you still joined a legacy media company, when so many others are going the independent route with Substack.
I love having people around me who help fine-tune my ideas and help them evolve. I get a lot of energy from seeing how other reporters are approaching their work. It’s very powerful to be independent if you have the stamina for it, but we often neglect to consider that traditional media institutions are so large because they’re supporting all different kinds of work. You’re paying to read about sports and the news and fashion and culture. On Substack, you get access to only one writer.
Tashjian wears a Prada skirt and shoes; Tashjian’s own T-shirt. Michael Kors Collection cape (on chair).
At CNN, you’ve launched another newsletter, “Big Style.” Why do you think fashion people are so attracted to newsletters now?
I see it as a more intimate, looser way of talking to people. I started the first version of “Opulent Tips” back in 2015. It was very significant to me that I became a person who is known for what she’s doing and what she likes as much as what she’s writing. But I can’t be one of these figures where people say, “Well, I love her outfits, but I don’t actually read anything she’s writing.” When I think about the journalists I really admire, from George Plimpton to Tom Wolfe to Joan Didion, they were personalities. They were very comfortable with having their homes photographed and with telling people who made their suits.
Online, there are young people obsessed with creative directors and fashion in a way you didn’t see 10 years ago.
A lot of the conversations about fashion are happening among people who are not necessarily buying the clothes. Fashion has really become a form of entertainment. It can be hard for people to look at a runway show, digest it, and understand it. Yet, at the same time, they’re bigger spectacles than ever before. I wonder if, in the absence of the clothes being accessible, what is accessible is to have an opinion about them. That becomes its own sort of currency or status.
I don’t think you’re capable of writing a word you don’t believe, which is rare in fashion media right now.
I worked with Will Welch for a long time at GQ, and I remember once we were in a meeting for the market pages, and we were like, “And here is a piece of some kind of running tool that you clip on and blah, blah, blah.” He was like, “Yeah, but would any of you actually use this?” And I thought, Oh, gosh, we don’t ask that question enough in fashion. Would I actually wear this? Would I actually spend my money on it?
Tashjian wears a Michael Kors Collection cape; Tashjian’s own T-shirt.
Who’s in your personal style hall of fame?
Daisy Fellowes, who’s an old-school Cecil Beaton muse; Tina Chow; and Bryan Ferry.
Is there a collection that changed the way you think about fashion?
Yohji Yamamoto’s spring/summer 1999—the wedding dress collection. I saw a designer presenting something that was, in many ways, so simple but so artful. Very pure but not clean. It wasn’t like a streamlined silhouette. Everything was beautiful but had these rough edges. I hadn’t really realized that clothing could be funny and sophisticated at the same time. It just showed me a different way of being elegant without being self-serious.
Hair and makeup by Shaina Ehrlich for Haus Labs; Photo Assistant: Layton Davis; Fashion Assistant: Isabel Choi; Special Thanks to Gabriel’s Bar & Restaurant.
