This piece appears as part of “Not In Paris,” an online exhibition hosted and curated by Highsnobiety. Head here to see the full series.
Fashion shows are nice, but have you ever stood in the queue for a club in Paris while a kid dressed like Uzi Whatsapp voice-notes his friend convincing him to pull up, because, “Bro, I just saw Lord Flvcko walk in with both Hadids, and the line isn’t even that big. Bro?”
Probably not, and thanks to Heron Preston’s specially-made playlist, you don’t have to.
It’s well-documented how, in recent years, the disruptive vanguard of men’s fashion have turned the biannual celebrations of style on their heads, largely by bringing their streetwear roots to the fore. And, from fights in colette to sending Sheck Wes and Octavian down runways, music came with it.
For the longest time, the lore of the Paris Fashion Week after-party was about champagne, celebrity, and french techno. Not that there’s anything wrong with techno, but as the runways reconnected with the youth and with reality, so did the night-time programming. In the age of the multi-hyphenate, designers are DJs, rappers are models, and Dapper Dan is finally getting paid by Gucci.
Fashion week, IRL or online, is music, and Heron Preston, A+ graduate of the Been Trill school of DJ-come-designer, typifies this as well as anyone else. For this playlist, curated especially for “Not In Paris,” Preston pulled together 10 tracks of audio tonic; not for the after-party, but for now, when there are more important things to reflect on.
“The songs that I shared on this playlist are stress-relieving tracks that I like to listen to when I need a calming moment. A lot of these songs I’ve been purchasing recently on vinyl records and I play them when I work or when I wake up on Sunday mornings. They’re the kind of records that I don’t really get to play when I’m DJ’ing in a club. It’s the type of music you can have in the background when you’re working, driving, or just having a glass of wine. It’s the category of music that can bring peace in this time of uncertainty. Enjoy! #H”
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