I’ve got a lot stirring.
Many of you know I started my career in fashion. My daughter’s dad worked for the owners of a chateau in Pomerol, and before that in the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants. I used to say I worked with all that’s exquisite that goes on the body, and him, going into the body.
Recently, I was invited to join a table at Noma in Kyoto. I’d missed an invitation in Copenhagen many years before. I love food. I love food.
In recent years, there’s something about the wisdom of grandmother foods and bistrot foods that works magic. Not because of their grounding, comforting nature, but their eternal, Aristotelean essential nature. Something so highly researched feels like it operates at someone’s cost. That is transferred instinct from my work in high fashion. That level of research and execution is stress. Someone carries that. There are those who suffer. I know this.
I do appreciate the commitment, the dedication, the rigor, the passion, the eye, the ability to see the mundane in a sublime way, and actually have the technique and skills to transform the natural. That is, in many ways, a sign of the pinnacle of civilization.
Or is it?
Yes, and. There are the people who make it happen.
When we get to the people part. Japanophiles and craft lovers oooh and ahh about Japanese craft. But it does not exist in a vacuum. It lies in the context of thousands of years of social stratification and hereditary craft, codified and enforced across feudal generations, where workers were fated into a single trade. There is a difference in agency when it comes to the dedication of ourselves to a craft. A difference in who has equity, not only in the real, tangible sense of financial ownership, but visibility: the different intersections of identity, culture, what each of our realities, relationships, values, motivators.
Think: what would show up in a psychometric?
Who has the means to work at a low-paying fashion job and doesn’t need the paycheck? Who has the cultural and societal literacy to navigate negotiations and relationships at an afterparty? (You do not have to be from money. A lot of this you can create for yourself.) Same in every high echelon of any industry. There is privilege. That can be inherited. Some of it, earned. Older systems would say: it’s a privilege to join, regardless of what walk of life you’re from.
The world has, in many places, become more human and people-centric. Businesses spanning these decades are torn in their own transformation. Deserving to be proud of not only what comes through the pass and appears on the table, and the state of elevation and elation the customers leave with, but also the changes they’ve made in the dynamics of courtesy and respect toward the people they work with, no matter seniority, skill, in/outgroup, or anything else.
I do not know René. My first husband worked in a three-starred Michelin kitchen and saw grown men cry over thyme. It’s not news. It comes with the territory. The organization and the leadership has most likely changed with the times. This is true of so many of the places we work.
I ugly cried watching The Devil Wears Prada on a plane because I recognized the slights. Add in the microaggressions — not racial or gender-based, but because I don’t fit the body type. I was turned down for the country head position of a French house on that count. Shooting with Irving Penn, sitting at dinner with Sottsass and the widow and baby girl of Kuramata-san, working for Bob Wilson — none of that proximity, the cultural fluency, the commercial ground covered — registered. The dynamics, the play-by-play, the reckoning of accountability, the taking of abuse in a high-performance environment: it is a collision of identity, of how we are perceived, and of differing realities that occupy the same space-time continuum. (There are individual and collective wounds in every collision. That’s a different piece.)
Power dynamics are 切り離しができない. Inseparable from the institution itself.
This is a masterclass in what it asks of the team tasked not only to carry the legacy, but now being tested to see what they are made of.
Are they who they are because they work at Noma? Or is Noma what it is because of the people who work there?
The real answer is most likely the coexistence of both realities. If this is true, then accountability does not live in a reel. It lives in structure: equity, visibility, authorship at work.
It makes me think about the genius of Margiela v1 in the way the house answered interviews exclusively in the second person, which, by the way, was not a marketing tactic, but because Martin sincerely believed he was not the best person to talk about the collection. Nor to sell it. There was Patrick and the team to talk about it, Axel and the team to work with clients. Credit distributed authentically, not gesture. Then became part of the design and operational manual. Recognition that the institution was built on more than one person’s care, attention, hours. More than one person’s dedication, leaving something else and other options behind, their choice to give a decade to one person’s vision. The vision, by nature, grows.
The question is whether the institution grows with it, or whether one person’s exit is mistaken for transformation. René’s stepping down is one logical answer. One informed by North American cultural practice. It may be the right one. It’s the one Noma chose.
Accountability frameworks are not neutral: they carry the cultural logic of the context that produced them. North American accountability is public, individual, ceremonial. It wants a confession, a step-down, a reel. In Japan, it would have been a press conference and the leadership synchronized in their bowing.
Noma began as something else: Danish, specific, rooted. It became a global institution with a global staff, nomadic locations, and global stakes. By the time accountability was called for, the cultural frameworks had shifted, the culture of Noma’s origins, and the one it finds itself in, today. The accountability gesture borrowed from a cultural framework that wasn’t native to any of the parties involved. Which makes the question of what gets built next even harder — and more important.
Other traditions locate accountability in structure, continuity, redistribution. Less visible, longer time horizon. Neither is inherently more rigorous.
That question is not settled by geography. It is settled by what gets built next, and who is at the table when it is.
Though I recognize being given or earning a place at the table in itself are same shape different things, depending on culture. Merit and political positioning are not always distinguishable. The criteria for a seat at the table shifts depending on culture. Time.
That gap is what’s stirring in me.
Utterly FANTASTIC thank you for finding the words and sharing your story to mark the moment of change.