FQ Insider members get exclusive early access to Dan Ahwa's debut column from our Winter issue, two weeks before it appears anywhere.

Welcome to my first column for Fashion Quarterly. Having written and reported on fashion for the past 20 years, I’ve seen just about everything come and go. Trends, scandals, closures, openings, aesthetics, entire careers built on things once declared ‘over’ — an ever-evolving puzzle that now provides me with the thing that helps provide not only context, but perspective. So, when I was tasked with filing my first column, my mind drifted to a line from the recent cinematic masterpiece that is The Devil Wears Prada 2. When Andy Sachs casually declares she used to write about “more important stuff” — referring, of course, to the kind of journalism she practiced before fashion, at a publication modelled after serious newsrooms with serious stories and serious integrity — I was triggered.Sure, there’s room for hard news. There must be. Having spent the last decade sitting in an actual newsroom, I became intimately familiar with the strange ecosystem that exists between lifestyle desks and investigative reporting: a slightly wonky equilibrium where one side is breaking stories on political upheaval while the other is equating economic downturns to hemline lengths. To me those were just as valuable conversations around identity and culture as anything else.

Last night, lying awake in the small hours, my brain cycled through the usual thoughts on repeat lately. Politics, climate disaster, elections, economic instability, the slow collapse of collective optimism. But then another intrusive thought entered my brain: If I were a sweater, what sweater would I be?You can spend…