Shadowing Practice: Alexa Chung: How PR Works & Normcore | S2, E2 | Future of Fashion | British Vogue - Learn English Speaking with Video

In this series we're exploring how business models are evolving in the ever-changing fashion ecosystem.

This week spurred on by you, the ever vocal Foffers, we're up far too early to meet with one of New York's most in-demand fashion PRs, Brian Phillips.

But fear not if PR sounds like too much of a conventional career path for you.

Later we'll be hanging out with K.Hole, the branding renegades responsible for one of the decades most googled fashion phenomenons, Norm Paul.

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PR, or public relations in layman's terms, is a highly competitive industry, where only those with the improbable combination of quick wit,

organisational skills and charm will survive.

One of New York's most progressive PR agencies, Black Frame, is spread over several floors in the Chelsea Arts District,

where a squadron of staff look after clients that range from Kenzo to Nike to the Frieze Art Fair.

We have Dion Lee.

And there's a pretty wonderful showroom on the second floor too.

Nicholas Kirkwood.

Shuland.

Can Taylor Swift wear this?

Does it smell of Swifty? Does it?

It stinks of Taylor Swift.

It smells like angels hair.

I don't know that.

Along with curating an extensive catalogue of celebrity pheromones, Chief Executive Brian Phillips combines his expertise in the areas of fashion,

film and art to lead a PR firm that tends to some of fashion's most inventive brands.

Can you just talk us through how you got to this point?

What did you study at university?

I know that you went to college with Umberto, right?

Well I met him when I was in college.

He had already graduated.

I was here at Columbia University studying architecture and urban studies, which I was interested in being an architect,

but famously not good at drawing at all.

But I love magazines, so that was kind of my side gig.

Okay, so from once you graduated, what was your first job?

I worked at Visionaire.

I love this idea of art and fashion existing in a publication together, and how they were pushing the boundaries of making magazines

and also loved the idea of kind of being in that kind of a creative environment, getting to know what it was to make a magazine.

So that's where I started.

And do you think that editorial eye kind of bleeds into what you do today?

Yeah, the idea of putting together a kind of perspective on some aspect of the cultural industry

or of fashion is something that has been for sure put into play here because we have a brand too.

You know, clients want to be a part of this context

because it says something about who they are and what their values are.

And so can you explain to me what your business is now and how you got started?

Well, our main business is public relations and image consulting.

So we represent clients from fashion like Rodarte and Kenzo

and opening ceremony to art and design related projects like Fries Art Fair, Standard Hotels standard hotels,

so it kind of cuts across all these different sectors of what like-minded people might be interested in.

When we represent a brand, it's a kind of 360 look at everything that they're doing.

So it's the way that they're advertising themselves, the way that they're dressing cool girls and guys,

relationships with editors and magazines and writers.

We're their ambassador to the world in a way.

And find a way of doing that in interesting and unconventional ways sometimes.

Can you give us an example of how you've managed to put those things together?

Well, with Opening Ceremony, a big project that they did last year was this development of the Mika bracelet with Intel.

So that was a really interesting foray into wearable tech.

When we were challenged here at Black Frame,

how to sort of visualize that and make it compelling as a desirable object that would blend fashion and wearable tech.

Kenzo is a great brand that can really have an authentic voice and independent film storytelling.

So that's something that we've kind of been spearheading for the brand.

And that's a relatively new situation, isn't it?

So it's no longer a kind of reality show version of a photo shoot.

It can have its own identity entirely.

Absolutely.

You know, people love music, they love film.

And cats, people love cats.

Of course, that's the other thing.

Fashion cats are huge.

The last opening ceremony show that I went to, when it was models walking along, and then some of them would fall, like one would fall down.

The first girl that fell down, I was like, oh my god.

And I was with everyone, and we were all sitting there going, oh, poor girl, that is really embarrassing.

We kept talking about it.

We're like, that is so embarrassing.

And then suddenly another one.

And I was like, oh, it's a thing.

And then they got up and did a dance.

And I was like, this is amazing.

Yeah.

That was like, let's turn the sort of conventions of a show, one of which is, sadly,

there's sometimes falls, into something that surprises people and makes it memorable.

Opening ceremony is like the best laboratory because they always say yes to the really big and crazy ideas.

Yeah, that was brilliant though.

Where do you see the future of image making going?

What's going to happen?

Soothsayer?

Yeah.

I mean photography and fashion are so inextricable and have been since like Abaddon and Irving Penn.

I think fashion is also looking at other types of image creators, and that could be young illustrators or architects.

Anybody who can create something that's compelling from a fashion point of view, as an image maker, is going to be doing well in the future.

Our mission to uncover the real future of fashion has taken us down some pretty oblique pathways.

But Art Collective turned brand consultants Cahol take the abstraction cake with their highly conceptual approach to trend definition and cultural observation.

But how does this relate to fashion, I hear you cry.

Don't worry, I'm confused too.

In a further twist of elusive genius, they don't even have an IRL base.

So I had the FOV art director fabricate a typical NYC creative space

so that we could meet to discuss their delvings into the netherworld of speculative sartorialism.

Hello!

Hi.

Only balls up was I forgot to pack my dictionary.

Okay, here we are for our set-up meeting.

I hate anything that's not authentic and therefore I can't act. But I can be.

Honestly, can't.

Five years ago, we started an artist project slash art collective called K-Hole,

with interest in opening up and activating a space between the art world and the world of branding and marketing.

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We had all graduated from school and we were living this space between being artists

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and writers and poets and also doing all these commercial jobs for money.

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So a friend of ours worked at an agency where they subscribed to these really expensive trend forecasting reports.

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Yeah.

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Where you pay as a company let's say 20k a year

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and you got these PDFs with emoticons in them

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that have all sorts of pop cultural theory about young people

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and we became obsessed with these reports and basically in the spirit of fan fiction started K-Hole.

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Part of the reason we decided to make a PDF

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and not a print product is because it was low overhead

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so we were paying for it out of our own pockets

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but it really wasn't very expensive it was just our time

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and of course as things go on your time gets more and more expensive and you have to adjust in different ways.

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And then for us to get an understanding of how your business runs like how many do you have an office?

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Now we're basically in a Google Doc and on the cloud.

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Okay, and how many people make up your collective?

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There are five of us.

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Okay.

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So it's like a band.

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And we were kind of intentionally mysterious about who we were, because we were nobody.

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And the world of the internet started to take us seriously as not just an art project, but also as a marketing and trend consultancy.

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But you never set out to be taken seriously.

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It was more kind of a critique on that, and then you ended up actually being a profitable business.

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It wasn't a satire.

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Like, on purpose, it wasn't like ad busters or something that had come before in the 90s.

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We were trying to demonstrate a much more ambivalent relationship with commerce and culture, and we were also trying to push our friends who were artists,

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who were pretending like their lives as consumers were somehow completely separate from their art practice.

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Right.

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And that's kind of where we started from.

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But also sort of looking at the actual language and landscape of trend forecasting, A lot of it seems like super lightweight cultural analysis.

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Like observing something in the most basic way possible and calling it a trend.

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And we thought it would be a really interesting opportunity to actually sort of use the analytics skills

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that we had built as writers and artists to take sort of surface looking things

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and figure out what was really sort of emotionally motivating about them.

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Can you tell us about your involvement with Norm Cole?

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Sure.

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For us, it didn't really have to do with clothes, but more had to do with imagining a new form of coolness

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that was about being as slippery and adaptable as possible

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and allowing you to get down with as many different groups of people and types of people as possible.

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I love being as slippery as possible.

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Your braves sound as literally slippery as possible, but you know, we were asked to create a report for the occasion of the

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Marathon at the Serpentine in London during Fries Art Fair in 2013.

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They asked us to think about the question of generation branding and if you could create a new generation after Millennials,

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Generation X, is it Generation Z?

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Is it the me generation?

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Whatever, there are all these different...

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I've been in meetings about that.

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Oh, people love having meetings about it.

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So we honed in on this cliche that Millennials all think they're so special, which you may have heard, and...

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Wait, are they not?

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And it occurred to us that maybe all of society was worried about how special they were.

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So we started to reflect on what that actually meant

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and how you could get out of this idea

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that you had to enforce your coolness or specialness against other people stealing it, which we looked at as a kind of alternative perspective.

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And we decided that we were in this mass indie scenario where being special and expressing your creativity was the mainstream value.

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So we kind of came up with these two different routes

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for how you might react to being in this mass indie scenario.

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The first one was the idea

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that you just try to opt out of it by being as bland and basic as humanly possible, which we, in our report, call acting basic.

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This idea that you can kind of be as simple as possible

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and that'll somehow get you out of the quandary just doesn't seem to work at all.

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And so that's when we started to dream of normcore.

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We presented this report at The Serpentine, and it kind of bounced around on Twitter and in the art world.

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We kind of didn't take it very seriously.

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We were sort of like, ah, that's not really what we meant, but who cares?

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That's fine.

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Like, the idea of us coming up with new language was for people to use it themselves.

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So our perspective wasn't that we should police people's use of our language.

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And it turned out being a mega meme, and it was really insane.

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Why do you think the fashion industry was

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so quick to drink in your PDFs and why were they so attracted to you?

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I think most of it has to do with the fact that it was sort of revolved around neologism.

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Like just the fact that all of these...

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I don't know what that word means.

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It means a new word.

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I have no idea.

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An invented word.

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An invented word.

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So something like normcore.

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Thanks.

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And I think the reach of

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that word again has a very sort of linguistic backing it's a word

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that doesn't mean anything like core from hardcore being the sort

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of extreme behavior norm meaning normal like it defeats itself in its own sort of linguistic existence.

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People need more vocabulary for fashion.

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That's true.

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There weren't that many new words or ways to describe the way people are dressing.

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Fabulous.

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Besides fabulous.

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Darling.

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So I think that was part of it.

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Hipster, the idea of the hipster had been totally exhausted

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but in my opinion part of the reason that went on

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so long this question of oh hipsters think they're different

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but they're actually the same is

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because there were no new words to talk about kind of what it means to dress in a certain way

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or have personal style or think of yourself as cool so I think we came into a vacuum in a certain way.

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Have you invented any words that have reached the dictionary?

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Well normcore was the Oxford English Dictionary's word of We were runner up.

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Oh, okay.

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We lost to vape.

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Tied with bae.

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Wow.

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It was a big blow.

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I'm asked about trends a lot and I don't think they exist.

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Well, I think that you can connect certain dots

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and make a bet on what you think is going to snowball and become bigger and bigger.

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Okay, so what's the thing?

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What's the next thing?

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I'm sure we can figure it out.

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Oh, man.

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I think it's really big sleeves.

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Sleeves.

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Really big.

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Really big sleeves.

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Really big sleeves.

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I feel like really big sleeves is here.

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No, really big ones.

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Next week we're hanging out with Brooke Wall, a woman who represents all the magical elves that keep the industry sparkling.

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I developed a crush on a famous hairstylist.

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Who is it?

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I'm not telling you.

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Oh, come on.

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Come on.

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Tune in next week to find out what you're doing.

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And we talk hardball with Susan Scafidi about the emerging world of fashion law.

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I never thought that fashion was something I could do professionally.

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I studied medieval ecclesiastical law of all things.

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I can't even say that, let me spell it.

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Subscribe now to British Vogue or you will miss out

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and you will regret it and you will just have a much less enriched life.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: Alexa Chung: How PR Works & Normcore | S2, E2 | Future of Fashion | British Vogue - Learn English Speaking with Video

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