Inspired by William S. Burroughs   

Feb 21, 2025

 The air in Los Angeles

 In the summer of ‘73, hung thick and heavy, a miasma of smog and simmering resentment. The sun, a malevolent eye in the hazy sky, did little to burn away the city’s perpetual twilight edge. I was drifting then, fresh off the Greyhound, lured by the whispers of a different kind of life, the kind found lurking in the shadowed alleys and dimly lit bars that lined the fringes of Hollywood. It was in one such establishment, ‘The Void,’ a dive that smelled perpetually of stale beer and forgotten dreams, that I first saw him.

He sat alone in a corner booth, a figure seemingly carved from shadow itself. Lean, with eyes that held the hard glint of chipped flint, exuded an aura that was both magnetic and deeply unsettling. This was not the manufactured unease of the movie sets; this was something primal that seeped from the very fabric of his being. Later, I learned that his name was Silas. He spoke in clipped, precise sentences, each word a carefully placed shard of glass. He talked of frequencies, of unseen currents that flowed beneath the surface of reality, shaping and controlling the lives of the oblivious masses. He spoke of words as viruses, of language as a weapon. It was pure Burroughs, unfiltered, raw, and utterly captivating in its strangeness.

Silas became my guide, of sorts, leading me through the labyrinthine underbelly of Los Angeles, a world populated by artists pushing boundaries, musicians chasing echoes of sound, and writers who bled ink onto the page in a desperate attempt to capture the unravelling edges of consciousness. We would meet in dimly lit apartments, the air thick with the scent of incense and something else, something sharper, more chemically acrid that clung to the back of the throat. The conversations were always fragmented and hallucinatory, bouncing between esoteric theories and stark pronouncements of societal decay.

One evening, in a cramped room overlooking a neon-drenched street, Silas introduced me to ‘the technique.’ He explained it was a way to unlock the mind, to bypass the conscious filters and tap into the raw, unfiltered stream of the subconscious. “Relax,” he’d said, echoing the man’s words, “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax… into the silence.”

The technique involved prolonged sensory deprivation, a ritual of darkness and stillness designed to strip away the layers of everyday perception. The room’s windows were blacked out, and the air was heavy with a cloying sweetness I couldn’t quite place. Silas lit a single, thin candle, the flickering flame casting elongated, dancing shadows on the walls. He instructed me to lie on the floor and focus on the silence, the absence of light, and the stillness of my own body.

At first, it was just darkness, profound and absolute. Then, slowly, the silence began to hum, a low, resonant thrumming that vibrated through my bones. Shapes began to form in the darkness behind my eyelids, shifting, amorphous figures that coalesced and dissolved with unsettling fluidity. The hum grew louder, morphing into a chorus of whispers, sibilant and unintelligible yet undeniably insistent. It felt like the room was breathing, expanding and contracting around me.

Cold and sharp fear began to prickle at the edges of my awareness. The relaxation Silas had promised was nowhere to be found. Instead, a growing unease coiled in my stomach, a visceral sense that something was fundamentally wrong, that I had ventured into a territory not meant for human exploration. The air seemed to thicken, pressing in on me from all sides as if the room was alive and breathing, a malevolent entity that had been disturbed from its slumber.

The whispers intensified, becoming distinct voices, though still garbled and indistinct. They were coming from everywhere and nowhere, from the walls, shadows, and within my head. The shapes behind my eyelids became more apparent and sharper, taking on disturbing forms—geometric angles that shifted into monstrous visages, faces that seemed to writhe and decompose before reforming into something even more grotesque.

I tried to stop, to pull myself back from the edge of this sensory abyss, but I found I couldn’t move. My limbs felt heavy and unresponsive as if weighted down by an invisible force. Panic began to bubble up, hot and frantic, threatening to overwhelm me. The voices were no longer whispers; they were shouting, screaming, a cacophony of rage and pain and something else, something ancient and malevolent.

Suddenly, the candle flickered violently, spitting and sputtering before plunging the room into absolute darkness. The voices ceased abruptly, leaving an even more oppressive and terrifying silence than the noise. In the void, I felt a presence, something unseen, something close, breathing down my neck. The air grew colder, and a metallic tang filled my nostrils, like the smell of old blood.

Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The oppressive presence receded, the cold lifted, and the silence became silent again, still pregnant with dread. I scrambled to my feet, fumbling blindly in the darkness until I found the door, wrenching it open and stumbling out into the relative sanity of the neon-lit street. But the dread lingered as a heavy weight on my shoulders, a constant reminder of the horrors that lurked just beyond the edge of perception.

Silas was gone. The room was empty save for the lingering scent of incense and the faint, almost imperceptible metallic tang. I never saw him again nor attempted ‘the technique’ again.

But sometimes, late at night, in the quiet hours when the veil between worlds seems too thin, I still hear the whispers. Faint and distant, they drift in on the edges of the silence, a chilling reminder of that night and the unsettling truth I glimpsed within the darkness – that some questions are best left unasked, some doors are best left unopened, and some silences are best left undisturbed. Because in the vast, untapped resource of the mind, as Burroughs suggested, there are answers, yes, but there are also things best left undiscovered, horrors that slumber just beneath the surface, waiting for the careless hand to wake them. And once woken, they might never let you sleep again.

FW25: The Portal                                              

Gabriel Jeroschewitz

Feb 13, 2025

Of all the places I’d expected to find myself on a Saturday evening, standing in the middle of a former industrial warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, while humanoid AI attendants dressed like extras from Blade Runner circled a disconcertingly glamorous woman, was not one of them. But there I was, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Manhattan’s finest—critics, influencers, museum curators, that guy who invented some app everyone deleted after two weeks—all with wine glasses in hand, staring at the curious spectacle unfolding before us.

This was FW25: The Portal, Alexis Bittar’s bold debut into the theatre of New York Fashion Week. It had been hyped mercilessly on Instagram for months: “A performance to bend time, blur perception, and shatter convention.” The enigmatic nature of this description left us all in a state of bewilderment, and from the murmured conversations around me, most of the crowd was as baffled as I was, yet undeniably intrigued by the mystery unfolding before us.

“Is it…art?” someone whispered behind me.

“No, it’s a jewelry line,” their equally mystified companion replied. “I think.” The uncertainty in their voices mirrored the confusion that seemed to be a shared experience among the audience.

The lights dimmed, and a hush settled over the room. A spotlight blinked on, illuminating the central setup—a vintage vanity table, ornate and gold like it had been plucked from the set of Dynasty. But where the mirror should have been, there was an oval-shaped screen, rippling like disturbed water. The woman seated at the vanity was a vision. She had the kind of presence that made you feel inadequate just by existing in the same room. Her hair was a sleek, silver waterfall, and she wore shimmering gold ornaments—bracelets, earrings, necklaces—all from Alexis’s new collection. Draped over her was an iridescent cape with a strange, otherworldly texture that I could only describe as “space couture.”

But it was her expression that hooked me. She wasn’t smiling. She didn’t even look particularly interested. Instead, she exuded a kind of serene detachment, a mysterious aura that made her seem both above and entirely removed from the chaos of the crowd gawking at her.

That’s when the robots arrived.

—

Calling them robots feels reductive. These were humanoid AI attendants, and they moved with an unsettling grace that was neither entirely human nor fully robotic. Their silicone-coated faces were eerily flawless—no pores, no expression, just a bland neutrality that made my skin crawl. Each was clad in a tailored suit with subtle iridescent accents as if they were part of Bittar’s futuristic vision.

The attendants began performing tasks around the woman: one gently brushed her hair, another polished her jewelry with exaggerated reverence, while a third refilled her invisible teacup because, of course, this strange future dystopia involved tea. It was done with the precision of choreographed theatre, their movements so fluid they seemed to glide rather than step.

Above the vanity, the screen portal shimmered to life, displaying fragmented radio signals—numbers, voices, snippets of songs. The sound wasn’t clear; it was more of an atmospheric hum, like a distant station you couldn’t entirely tune into. The woman glanced toward the portal and tilted her head slightly as if contemplating it. Then she reached out a hand, her fingers brushing the glassy surface of the screen.

Was she looking into the past? The future? Was this supposed to mean something?

I turned to the fashion editor standing next to me. “Do you know what’s going on?”

She shrugged. “It’s about ageism,” she said knowingly, sipping her wine. “Or possibly technology? Whatever, it’s chic.”

—

The atmosphere in the room shifted as the performance continued. The air felt heavy with meaning, but it was meaning none of us could decipher. My attention was drawn back to the woman. She remained impossibly composed as the humanoid attendants swirled around her like moths to a flame. She exuded a quiet confidence that made it clear that she didn’t need anyone—not the crowd gasping at her jewelry or the soulless attendants doting on her.

It was both inspiring and, frankly, a little intimidating.

“What do you think she’s thinking about?” someone whispered to their date.

“Probably whether or not her Uber’s arrived yet,” the date replied.

And yet, there was something undeniably poignant about the tableau. The woman was caught between two eras, surrounded by trappings of old-world wealth and futuristic technology. The jewelry she wore—pieces inspired equally by the chunky gold of the ’80s and the sleek industrial minimalism of imagined futures—seemed to represent that, too. It was as if the entire performance was a meditation on identity: what it means to belong to a time and what happens when you don’t.

My phone vibrated with a text from my friend Tamara, who had skipped the event in favour of Netflix and pyjamas: “How’s it going? Are you still staring at shiny things?”

Tamara had once joked that fashion was just “expensive existentialism,” and for the first time, I thought she might be right.

—

As the performance peaked, the woman stood from her vanity. The humanoid attendants paused, their heads tilting in eerie unison as if awaiting her command. She clicked her golden stiletto heels—another exquisite Bittar design—against the floor and turned her back to the vanity, facing the crowd for the first time.

She looked at us—not with warmth, but with a steady, appraising gaze that made us all feel highly seen, and not necessarily in a good way.

“I,” she declared in a voice smooth as velvet and deceptively commanding, “am not your reflection.”

The room was dead silent. Somewhere in the back, someone audibly dropped their wine glass.

She turned back to the portal, her figure silhouetted against the shifting waves of light and sound on the screen. Extending a single hand, she pressed her palm flat against it. There was a flash—a brief, blinding burst of light—and then she disappeared, leaving us all in shock.

I blinked. The humanoid attendants bowed in unison, their movements perfectly synchronized, before gliding sensibly offstage. The crowd erupted into applause.

“What…” I started, but the words failed me. Everyone else seemed equally confounded, though that didn’t stop the praise from flowing.

“Brilliant,” declared a man in a velvet blazer.

“A masterpiece,” agreed his equally bejewelled companion.

“This is going to look amazing on TikTok,” someone near the front added as they uploaded their video.

—

The evening concluded with a press conference-slash cocktail party, at which Alexis Bittar addressed the crowd in a metallic blazer reminiscent of David Bowie in his heyday.

“Fashion,” he said with a mischievous smile, “is about raising questions, not answering them.”

We all nodded in solemn agreement as if that explained anything.

Later, as I walked out into the crisp Brooklyn night, I thought about the woman at the vanity. Was her solitude by design, or had technology stripped her of something essential? Was technology her jailer or her liberator?

But mostly, I wondered if Alexis would ever create a handbag that could hold more than lipstick and a single Tic Tac.

For now, though, that was a question for 2050.