GYPSET STYLE
Antakly Projects · Notebook
Gypset
On the word Julia Chaplin coined.
Some people make things. A rarer few make a word, and a good word does something close to magic. It gives shape to something that was already in the air, already happening, and lets the rest of us finally see it. Julia Chaplin made one of those words. Gypset, gypsy and jet set folded into a single breath, and a scattered, unnamed tribe suddenly had a name.
What I admire is not that the people existed. They always had. The Romantic poets, the Victorian wanderers, the beats, the trust-fund hippies, the artists who quietly chose the next cove over from the one everyone else was crowding. What I admire is that Chaplin saw the pattern and named it, the way the best journalists do.
The idea gets a surprising amount right. Gypset is not about money, it is about creativity in the place where money usually goes, the idiosyncratic chosen over the expensive. It distrusts ostentation. The fashion is meant to look borrowed and lived in, the houses self-built in some far enclave like a donkey sanctuary in Ibiza rather than bought in the correct arrondissement. And it belongs to no single country, which may be the whole point. Chaplin's own line "Geography is the last line of defence against a world that is increasingly accessible." That is the romance and the melancholy of it.
She has given the subject five books, from Gypset Style through Tulum Gypset and the Boho Manifesto, all published by Assouline, and lately turned the same eye toward transcendence in Psychedelic Now.
From the books · Assouline
