IN DECEMBER, I ASKED Jean-Raymond to meet me at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
persona
8 Matching Annotations
- Apr 2021
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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I sometimes felt that he knew better than I did how the things he was saying, as he was saying them, would fit into the scope of a magazine profile.
persona
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ON A GRAY afternoon in November, I visited Jean-Raymond at the studio, where he was conducting a meeting with his 15-person staff.
persona
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“they’ll hire a black face for their company now, they’ll put black models on the runway, they might even put a head of diversity in charge who’s black, but are they giving you leverage to make decisions for the company?”
The diction here, focusing on the word "black" repeatedly, aids in the idea of the sentence overall that regardless of the position these people are still being stripped down to the color of their skin as if that's the main deciding factor.
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Not so long ago, few students on the F.I.T. campus recognized him; now, many of them do.
This is an interesting transition in that it intertwines Jean-Raymond's brand growth with his personal growth. He is growing alongside his brand and moving into the realm of recognition from his previous world of fitting in just as his clothes are attempting to do.
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If he said he didn’t like a print or a silhouette, one of the staffers would ask him why, and he would patiently explain himself: He repeated the phrase “This just doesn’t feel new enough” like an incantation.
Here, the writer appears to be appealing to a shared sense of values in a work environment. The writer does so by explaining how the designer's working style is that of patience and understanding, so as to make sure everyone in the room at every skill level understands his complex process.
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It is a lightly modified combination of his mother Vania’s maiden name (Moss) and the name to which she changed it in order to expedite a green card (Pierre, the same as a cousin’s, who was already in America).
Given this connection of the clothing brand name with his mother, there is slight shift in tone to one that is more sympathetic to work he is doing. After this fact his work gains underlying personal value and partly represents the strength and hardships of his mother.
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a simple white T-shirt commanding “Stop calling 911 on the culture,”
I think this is an important reference that helps the audience understand the power that is able to be generated from inanimate objects such as pieces of fabric. Additionally, it's interesting to see the connections we can use our clothing to make and the voice within them.
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