What is Impractical Girls Club? What is Sudden Chic?
I started Sudden Chic because the way fashion was being written about felt borrowed, branded and bland. It was controlled by advertisers, algorithms and the corporate boardroom male gaze that had been proclaiming what style was for decades.
Impractical Girls Club is our exclusive content channel, group chat, Instagram and way of being: we’re whimsical, impractical, dreamy, experimental and most of all, inspirational. We believe the impractical girl’s gaze does not need permission from a quarterly earnings report to cover the most interesting moments in fashion, culture and beauty. Anyone can be an Impractical Girl. We welcome all.
Sudden Chic is true independent media. No conglomerate edits us and no traffic report determines whether we cover Tao Kurihara archives or a Blythe doll. We write about what we actually want to see, whether it be Tom Ford’s maximalist archives, the year of the big bracelet, Vivienne Westwood snail jewelry, a Chanel reissue, or the costumes of The Devil Wears Prada.
We value the impractical girl’s gaze. We linger on the fashion of the 1990s film Hackers, obsess over archival Miu Miu and treat a Comme des Garçons auction as cultural history, not a sales event. We live for a perfume review as an essay, a couture show as a conversation and an oversized silhouette as a political position.
We believe in girlhood as a serious subject. Pink is great, but we manifest the imaginative state where Alice falls down a rabbit hole, Dorothy finds herself through fashion and a Blythe doll teaches you how to dress. The Impractical Girls Club, our community is built on the premise that impracticality (Wonder! Fantasy! Deliberate Frivolousness!) is the place where the most interesting style decisions get made.
We believe archives matter. The internet is in information overload mode, but has a real memory problem. We value history. We write about Prada Spring 2003 the way other magazines write about next week. We encourage learning about new designers, old collections and real life, forgotten moments that no one else is covering.
We believe the small story is the big story. The eccentric style of Emma Peel, Diana Vreeland’s jewelry collection, and a pair of vintage solid gold nails worn in the 1980s matter a lot in our world. We curate explorations via objects, obsessions, and all the things we quietly notice.
This is why an independent media company matters now. The algorithm has flattened the human experience and the content we consume into a generic product. We offer a new independent voice that brings you topics as far ranging as Paris Fashion Week, Sailor Moon’s intrinsic style history, Prince’s intentional costumes and Margiela’s archival glass slippers, to inspire you. Consider it a small act of impracticality and a little bit of resistance.
Impracticality is the space in between all the noise, where we get to be ourselves.
WHO WE ARE
Kristen Bateman is a New York-based writer known for her sense of personal style, with over a decade of experience creating fashion, culture, beauty and design features for top publications including Vogue, Elle, New York Times and more. She has profiled personalities ranging from Vivienne Westwood to Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto, to Pamela Anderson and Martha Stewart, covered fashion weeks across the globe, gone inside Paris’s modern debutante ball scene, tested every new beauty product under the sun and penned original recurring columns for major magazines. She is the author of nine internationally distributed books and the creator of the jewelry brand, Dollchunk.