I wonder what came first: the impulse to slip into his usual ill-fitting suit—like a man cosplaying as dictator—or the urge to threaten the existence of an entire civilization? A tough call. Wool or wrath before breakfast?

Last Tuesday, Trump took to Truth Social to casually threaten genocide. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote—directed at Iran, should a deal fail to materialize.

Less than 24 hours later, nothing. A familiar sequence from Trump.

Ironically, the day before at a press briefing, he wore a soft baby-blue tie. Silk, presumably. A whisper of calm before the chaos. One might have mistaken it for a symbol of peace. A rare moment of sartorial clarity. But all roads to taste and respected judgment end there.

Like all of his ties, it was a touch too long and too wide, swinging past the belt line like an exclamation point to power—one that never quite lands. Big tie energy. Big, empty, threats on the horizon.

The suit itself seemed to be attempting a type of governance too, though failing much like the man in it. That long, boxy jacket that hangs off the body. One would assume there’d a flock of cultish obsessives tasked with maintaining his illusion of power. Perhaps they were on vacation. Or perhaps this wasn’t the first time they’d heard him threaten genocide and decided to sit this one out. I guess even the wicked need a break.

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Hitler—now there was a genocidal maniac who understood the assignment. We’re all familiar with the uniform: field-gray wool, severe and disciplined, cut close to the body with a nipped waist. It suggested control, restraint, relentlessness. Tall black leather boots, polished to a mirror shine, theatrically climbing the calf with a sort of menace. Occasionally, he’d add a long leather trench coat, sweeping and cinematic. And then, on rarer occasions, the stark white double-breasted jacket: crisp, almost ceremonial, paired with matching trousers.

There was also Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator. A black, stand-collar jacket, buttoned neatly to the neck. Loose, utilitarian silhouettes. Linen sets that read as modest, almost indifferent. Where Hitler sharpened power into spectacle, Pol Pot softened it.

Kim Jong Un, too, favors volume. Wide trousers, generous cuts. But there’s proportion. Intent. Even excess, when controlled, can read as unsavory authority.

Trump, by contrast, wouldn’t be caught dead in anything so perfectly tailored or deliberate. No tension. No line to draw the eye. Just volume—a suggestion of power without the discipline of it.

I wonder what I would wear if I was threatening total annihilation. Hard to say. Mostly because it’s a question reserved for madmen, and genocide has never been a method I find intriguing. But also because the options feel… loaded. Dior, Chanel, Hugo Boss. Each with their own complicated history of dressing power.

Though, if pressed, perhaps something austere. A sharply tailored grey set, skin tight to the body, exacting. A silhouette that implies control without having to it. I think Demna showed an interesting little number for Balenciaga once. But that feels like giving the premise too much credit.

Because, of course, this is absurd. Only madmen arrive here.

It’s a strange thing, this insistence on power—delivered through a silhouette that refuses to hold it. Not quite a uniform. Not quite a President. Just the suggestion of both.

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Stefano Gabbana—co-founder, and perhaps the label’s most unfiltered voice—is reported to have exited the Dolce & Gabbana brand. I know I, as well as many of you, are thinking it’s about f*cking time.

Details surrounding the departure remain, in true, begrudgingly standard fashion, opaque. There has been no disclosure as to whether Gabbana’s exit is part of a broader restructuring or if he’ll continue to play a role alongside co-founder Domenico Dolce, who remains at the company. Though some suggest the years of mounting reputational pressure and shifting market expectations played no small role.

In writing this, I have to ask… why now? Was it truly that last men’s show that reportedly featured only white models, with the note “dedicated to the singular identity of every man”? For a house so deeply entwined with its founders’ identities (and those identities often criticized as blunt, exclusionary, or offensive) the separation feels long overdue to simply call it a corporate maneuver.

In 2015, the pair drew international backlash after criticizing IVF and same-sex parenting in an interview, which was widely condemned by queer advocates and consumers alike. Elton John famously called for a boycott, a moment that crystallized the growing tension between the brand’s old-world view and a rapidly modernizing audience.

Then came 2018 and the now-infamous China campaign. A series of promotional videos depicting a Chinese model struggling to eat Italian food with chopsticks was widely criticized as culturally insensitive. To make matters worse, it was a campaign aimed at a key consumer market, and the response was a highly scripted, teleprompter-read apology.

Matters then escalated when alleged direct messages from Gabbana’s Instagram account surfaced, containing derogatory remarks, referring to China as an “ignorant dirty smelling mafia” and calling it a “country of shit.”

The fallout was semi-swift: a major Shanghai runway show was canceled, Chinese celebrities severed ties, and the brand’s position in one of the world’s most important luxury markets was significantly damaged. Yet, they kept Gabbana at the company.

One could argue that his greatest sin was not the controversies themselves, but his insistence on meeting them with defiance rather than repeal. Apologies, when issued, often felt forced.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Domenico Dolce remains, and the brand itself retains significant global recognition and financial muscle.

Fashion has a short memory. As the industry continues its slow, uneven march toward accountability, the reported exit of Stefano Gabbana reads less as a surprise and more as an exhale of relief—one final, dramatic end to a career defined as much by controversy as by craft. But, regrettably, they’ll bounce back. The wicked always do.

More Cultured Swine Insights… Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok, and now… YouTube!!!

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NOTES ON TASTE is a series cataloging style shifts in real time. Think of it as a peek inside the Cultured Swine notepad—quick, bitey dispatches sent straight from t…

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NOTES ON TASTE is a series cataloging style shifts in real time. Think of it as a peek inside the Cultured Swine notepad—quick, bitey dispatches sent straight from the front lines, wherever our editors happen to be. This week, NYFW.

Pamella Roland at the New York Public Library: A Front Row Shift in Manhattan

Of the 42nd Street entrance, in the New York Public Library, Pamella Roland displays a collection she describes as “nature’s most iconic black-and-white palette reimagined.”

The vaulted ceilings flicker with winter imagery. A white rug below, covered in protective plastic… telling.

For those unfamiliar, Roland is a DeVos by marriage. Richard DeVos Sr., was the former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. His son Dick DeVos Jr., ran as the Republican nominee for Michigan governor in 2006. Roland is married to the other son, Dan DeVos.

More importantly, she’s the sister-in-law to Betsy DeVos (married to Dick), former U.S. Secretary of Education under President Donald Trump and a major Republican donor.

Roland has made it clear over the years that she wants to keep politics out of her work—a sentiment I can understand, given the family’s close ties to Trump. Separating the two is difficult in this case. Especially when the distinct Republican look sits front row, side by side like carbon-cutouts ready to observe Roland’s WASP-ish collection.

The Emerging “MAGA-Adjacent” Aesthetic at NYFW

New York Fashion Week has historically been defined by eccentrics, editors, downtown stylists. This season was different.

The blonde blowouts. The sculpted neutrals. The rigid posture. Less Bushwick, more Mar-a-Lago (or it’s predecessor Christian Girl Autumn).

Later at Nardos, the same archetype appeared again. Rare for Manhattan. Less rare now.

If Paris has opened the door for Lauren Sanchez at couture, New York may be incubating something new too: the Mar-a-Lago-coded luxury consumer entering the NYFW ecosystem.

It’s about economics. They’re simply following the money.

I’m paywalling my Versace reporting. Sorry not sorry. If you care about the business of fashion, you’ll pay to read it.

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When people talk about the arts, I tend to glaze over acting as an art form. Not out of intentional disrespect—it just feels like, these days, most actors are the product of celebrity inertia rather than grit.

Take Bella Hadid in Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty. She is, first and foremost, a social media personality, her image carefully curated by a mother who understood branding. Second, she’s a model, and one who’s graced more covers than most working actors will audition in rooms. And now, she makes her acting debut. Let’s be clear: she is not an actor, and she’s far from alone.

Kim Kardashian has appeared in several films and series. Lily-Rose Depp, though technically cast as early as 2014’s Tusk (Heard of it? Me neither.), is far better known for her Chanel ambassadorship and proximity to fashion than for any sustained commitment to performance. Even Janelle Monáe, whom I adore, was a musician long before she was ever taken seriously as an actor.

All of this to say, that the true actors, the ones who climbed rung by rung, are in a rough spot. They’re not just competing with talent; they’re competing with recognition, with algorithms, with celebrity already baked into the casting.

So where does that leave the next generation of young actors? A good friend of mine remains optimistic. “There’s so much out there. It’s exciting,” Zachary Nachbar-Seckel tells me. He’s still green (he was hesitant to do this interview at all) but he’s put in the work. He’s a hustler, possessed of the unglamorous grind real actors have always needed to survive. Even in an industry that feels bleak, bloated, and increasingly unserious, he’s primed and ready.

What follows is an interview about the state of the industry—an honest one—for young actors in 2026.

Questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity.

We met because you lived in my building in New York. And we’ve known each other for some time now, but I’ve only heard your journey as a younger actor in pieces. Start from the beginning.

So, I grew up in DC. I was always encouraged by my directors to pursue theater, but the only thing I really wanted to do growing up was leave and explore the world. So that’s what I did when I graduated, for about six months. Then I went to UC Berkeley for two semesters. I only lasted two before I finally woke up like, I love acting too much to just be ignoring it. I was always in a play. So I went to Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.

Why London? Why not stay in the States?

I did apply and get into schools here, but I really loved Guildhall. I loved the people there. I loved the staff. It’s a place that I could really see myself. And I was really curious about going to a different country. I think being half European and half American, London struck that balance really well. I felt like I fit in—I matched it in a way.

Your dad’s Parisian, right?

My dad’s French. I do have some family in Paris, but my dad, he’s from the south of France.

At what point do you start auditioning? And are you auditioning for plays or screen?

There was COVID in the middle of my second year, so I had to fly back to D.C., and that ended up actually being a really fruitful time for me creatively. I was meeting up with my friend James and we started making music. We sort of launched this band that we would later come back to when I moved to New York and gig together.

It’s also the first time I properly picked up a camera and started experimenting—shooting on it, shooting myself as well, just rehearsing scenes and things in front of the camera. It was feeding this sort of whimsy, I suppose. I sort of think that COVID turned me into a screen actor, because come January I signed with my first agent and started self taping.

Did COVID shift the way that people auditioned and got interviewed, or was self-tapping kind of standard already?

I think more and more self tapes will become commonplace. I am not familiar with the industry pre-COVID, but I do think it fundamentally altered the industry. Pretty much everything is self tape now, unless you’re in a really niche theater community where you know the casting directors already.

In school, were you studying to be a screen actor, or was the school predominantly theater?

It was very much theater. And I think that was good for me. My natural proclivity is to internalize a text and sort of whisper the dialog. What we’d call “naturalism” in theater training was very much opposite. It was big, you know. Like Shakespeare—high drama, life or death situations, these huge moral conundrums, where you have to project to a huge room to tell the story in a large way.

You end up booking your first two roles after doing a bunch of interviewing. How does that go?

Well, the first role I booked was a horrible, horrible character. He was a rapist. Oh god. I got cast in this BBC mini series as an evil American private school boy, Oxford boy. At the time I was so surprised. I played these ingénue sort of characters and to be cast as this monster?

Do you feel like that was an archetype your agent was pushing you into? Was there a conversation about what success looked like for you?

I certainly didn’t know my casting. And when you’re starting out with a new rep, they are sort of just testing the waters because they don’t necessarily know where your strengths lie. I think with this particular role, I matched this kind of zany energy they wanted to a certain level, and perhaps the immaturity of the character.

I remember calling my agent at the time, and saying I don’t know if I can do this. This is the most horrible thing I can imagine. You know, I have two younger sisters, and this is my biggest fear for them. He said I would be an idiot not to take this because it’s the BBC, and he was absolutely right. I ended up doing it, and it was fine.

You can’t take it personally. I think it’s actually such a privilege to be able to step into someone’s shoes who’s widely different from you. And I got to do a lot of other cool things on that show, like drive an old 1920s car and play soccer in the garden of this amazing mansion.

Where was this filmed?

In the countryside outside of London. It was a period piece, which was cool, just for the costumes. I got to work with Thomasin McKenzie, who has sort of blown up.

So you had moved back to London to do these roles then, because you were in D.C. prior to this from COVID.

Yeah, that’s right. I was still in my third year at school.

At what point do you move to New York?

I graduate Guildhall and my lease on my flat is up in London, so I think I moved back in August. I was in D.C. but I had an LA manager then too. So I was taping, and getting close for some stuff. But the industry was pretty hard hit at this point with with COVID and the Writer’s Guild strikes. Everything was backed up, and I was kind of feeling bereft. All my friends had moved out of D.C., and most of them went to New York. I’ve always wanted to live in there, so I just moved. I had money from those two acting jobs and had a wild two years, some of which you know about.

I guess I don’t have clarity if the acting world is widely accessible in New York. You went to school in London—you’re used to the theater scene there. Did you see New York as a viability for acting? Was there even a possibility that you were going to move to the city and book an audition right away?

You know, I didn’t really have my business hat on. I moved more for the social scene, if I’m honest. I think all of us were just sort of waiting. It wasn’t just me, you know. It was all my friends… every actor that I knew. We were all just auditioning, but it was seldom. We were all just sort of holding our breaths until everything would come crashing back, which it never really did. It sort of trickled slowly.

When you say crashing back, are you saying post COVID? And because of the strikes?

Yeah. I hit this really sweet spot at the start of 2021, where I had booked my roles, and I feel like that was the last little sweet spot before everything just went to shit.

I still auditioned from time to time, like taping in New York, but it wasn’t very often. Maybe once or twice a month, and the rest of the time I was working odd jobs. Eventually I grew really miserable.

At some point we talked about you moving to London, because it was hard to book any gigs and your agent thought you might do better back in Europe. Had an opportunity came, would you have stayed in New York?

I really trusted my agent. We were close, a little too close. But, you know, I was starry eyed by the whole thing—bedazzled by the world and what it had to offer. In a way, I think I still am. Which I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

No, keep that. Keep that feeling for the rest of your life.

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On the other hand, I’ve become less concerned with stuff. I’d rather have the right thing, not everything. So I’ve been slimming down my wardrobe to the essentials: jeans, tees, a few sweaters, and a couple pairs of shoes. These are items I reach for everyday, and over time, I scaled them into higher-quality, timeless pieces that make me look and feel fucking good.

Coming off a year where “quiet luxury” dominated headlines, coupled with my new sense of minimalism, I’ve distilled this era into more about investments and less about looking expensive. The items choose to keep ooze luxury not because they cost a fortune, but because they’re built to last and feel effortless. Quality and durability, I’ve learned, are the luxury.

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Through a broader lens, this shift forced me to look at trends differently. If you’re like me, there’s always an impulse for fashion—shopping to follow trends is a daily battle. But in 2025, what I managed to do (for the most part) was understand when and why a trend was worth buying into. In some cases, that meant dipping a toe in before committing to a larger splurge.

So, I’ve outlined some of the most meaningful shopping decisions I made in 2025 and how they’re shaping the way I’ll shop in 2026. In some ways, this may read like a loose trend forecast; when you’re this entrenched in fashion, personal behavior often becomes a subtle signal of what’s coming next. But more than anything, this is about intention—knowing when to invest, when to pause, and how to rationalize a purchase that actually earns its place in your life.

The Tom Ford Sunglasses I Can’t Live Without

Starting with these Tom Ford Bronson dupes, which I wrote about earlier in the summer. With Haider Ackermann newly appointed to the brand, my interest spiked. More than the sleek silhouettes of the ready-to-wear, it was the sunglasses that really caught my eye—a nod to old Hollywood, when stars like Marlon Brando ruled entertainment.

Side note: Perhaps this is an insider thing, but when new designers are named to fashion labels, I always get the itch to look at archival pieces from the brands. Do y’all get that too?

The Bronsons are the perfect shape: aviator-adjacent, but much bulkier and more prominent on the face. I have a large head, and over time I’ve learned that leaning into bigger frames actually complements me more. But $235 for the real deal (and I think they’re even more now, closer to $600) felt like a lot to spend on something I wasn’t fully sure about at the time. Instead, I bought the dupes for $15, and honestly, it was one of the best purchases of the year. I wear them constantly.

I’ll splurge on the real ones one day. The dupes are a touch flimsy (What do you expect for $15?) Having handled the real ones in-store, there’s certainly a quality difference. But I’ve always believed it’s better to go cheap first if you’re unsure about a purchase.

The Ballet Flats I’ll Buy Again (and Again)

I truly believe in supporting designers when you can. Fast fashion comes with a whole bucket of issues I don’t support. My exception, unfortunately, is shoes and these faux Alaïa ballet flats (or Mary Janes—either way), will always be my go-to summer shoe.

I wear these flats religiously in the summer. They’re perfect for the beach, the market, brunch, and can even be dressed up with a blazer and slacks. They’re my holy grail. But I wear them so much… I couldn’t imagine buying the $950 Alaïa pair knowing they’d be destroyed by summer’s end. Plus, having tried on the real ones in person, there really isn’t much of a quality difference. I’ll stick to the dupes.

This ties back to my point about when and why it makes sense to splurge. Shoes that actually support your feet and arches? Worth it. For that, I’ll spend. But in this case, neither the expensive pair nor the cheap ones are doing that. So for me—and I know this isn’t universal—if I know a product will be worn down to the bone and isn’t offering anything beyond aesthetics, it makes no sense to spend more. Sorry, not sorry.

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