Why is Tom Holland here less well dressed than the King of Spain?
This is a very good question.
I will give you my perspective.
The King is wearing a bespoke suit made for him by a bespoke tailor. Bespoke means the garment was made from scratch. In this case, a tailor measured the King's body and then used those measurements to produce a custom pattern (the term pattern refers to the garment's architectural blueprint). The garment was then made through an series of three iterative fittings — basted, forward, and final — each stage bringing the garment closer to its final form.
Tom Holland here is wearing a suit from Boss, the premium label of Hugo Boss. The garment here is made using a pattern that the designer and their team developed using a mix of things: an idea of their target market, their idea of style (often influenced by trends), and a fit model (someone who professionally tries clothes on so the designer can see whether something fits). Tom Holland was not involved in any of these stages.
Celebrities often wear things at big events due to a series of backdoor business deals. Sometimes it's as simple as a brand giving them something free to wear. Sometimes they are paid. Sometimes they are working with a stylist who has an agreement with a brand. The key thing is that these are business relationships motivated by profit (the brand is trying to make money through publicity).
This is where Holland comes in. Once the suit arrives to him, it's adjusted much like something you'd have adjusted at a local tailor. But since the garment is already made, you can only do so much.
In this case, the trousers are too slim for his legs, so they crumple below the knee. The jacket is also a bit too short, but dedicated followers of fashion often tell me, "this is the style." (Or, as the French say, à la mode).
More importantly, as the suit travels down this production path — from the designer's head into Holland's hands — it becomes increasingly removed from people with technical skills. True, the alterations tailor is skilled, but they are limited in terms of what they can do. The stylist is not skilled in a technical sense; they are hired to buy clothes and put them on a body.
This isn't to say stylists don't have skills or that they're necessarily bad. Indeed, I think Colman Domingo is among the best-dressed men alive today. Much of his style — although not all — can be chalked up to the fact that he works with some very talented stylists.
But on average, stylists' work is often less convincing than costume designers'. Why so? In my opinion, it's because costume designers are often more technically skilled.
The same is true for the King of Spain. There's no distance between him and the technically skilled person who made this garment — the bespoke tailor is literally laying their hands on his body. No profit motive exists beyond paying the tailor to produce a garment. The tailor's only motivation in this sense is to produce the best garment they can.
In the other instance, the development of ready-to-wear systems has produced a network of intricate profit motives. Here, the brand tries to create desire in consumers by putting its clothes on a famous person. But the garment isn't created specifically for that person — and it follows "la mode." It also travels a path that puts Holland further and further away from the technical people involved in production.
Of course, this is not to say that you will get an equally good outcome by going to a bespoke tailor, as not all bespoke tailors are so skilled. It's also worth noting that many people who are not technically skilled masquerade as tailors. For instance, it's common for business people and salespeople to run made-to-measure shops, where they drape a tailor's measuring tape around their neck. They may even describe their business as "bespoke." But they are not actual tailors, as they don't have any technical skills (they neither cut nor sew). Instead, they send your measurements to a distant factory, where someone who never sees you makes the garment. Thus, the same problem arises.
I'm answering this question partly because I've been thinking about this issue in relation to AI. I suspect AI will do things comparable to the Industrial Revolution: lower production costs and, thus, increase how much you can consume.
But I also suspect that it will lead to some deskilling. If you can generate an illustration with a prompt, there's no reason to spend decades learning how to draw by hand. Perhaps sometime in the future, someone will ask why one drawing looks so much worse than another, and someone will give an explanation similar to what you've read here about tailoring. There are fewer technically skilled people involved in the image you see on the right.
This is a really good analysis of the rare earths issue, and does a nice job of framing and basically shooting down some of the preferred talking points about 2010 and what triggered the April 2025 Chinese controls on rare earths and magnets. Let's take a closer look. A short thread. 🧵
https://t.co/ihwTWuUyj7
타임라인에 요즘 종종 보이는 사주와 운명 - 리바이벌
運命。영어로는 fate, destiny 정도인데 내 느낌으로는 별 맛이 없다.
命과 運은 각각 무엇일까?
당연히 여러 해석이 있지만 대만의 저명한 문학가 장훈(蔣勳)이 홍루몽 강연 중 소개한 내용에 따르면 命은 태어나면서부터 타고나는 바꿀 수 없는 것이고 運은 길이라고 해석한다.
命(사주)이 좋은 사람은 태어나면서 벤츠를 탈 수 있다. 命이 안 좋은 사람은 경차 정도.
運은 길 또는 좋은 길을 찾아내는 "내비게이팅"이라고 할 수있다.
행복이라는 것이 인생의 목적지라면 아무리 좋은 차가 있더라도 길 잘못들면 엉뚱한 곳으로 가게 된다.
늦게 가던 빨리 가던 목적지에 가야 한다면 運도 命만큼 중요하다.
命은 주어진 것이지만 運은 여러 갈래 길 중에서 주체적으로 얼마든지 선택할 수 있다.
한 여름밤의 개똥(개똥아 미안해) 철학이었습니다.
#SolarPro4 가 옵니다! Open2 대비 문서 작업, 터미널 수행, 그리고 멀티턴 도구 사용에서 20~30% 성능 향상이 있었습니다. 그래서 작은 사이즈지만 정말 쓸 만한 좋은 모델입니다. 기존 “solar-open2” 베타 사용자들은 모델명을 “solar-pro4”로 바꿔주시면 됩니다.
#SolarPro4 API 는 8월 6일 전체에게 오픈됩니다. https://t.co/YdGZaEt2tm 에서 뵙겠습니다.
Just like I predicted: Kimi K3's license requires inference providers to enter a separate commercial agreement (ARR > $20M).
Kimi might be the first company doing a "fabless" business model.
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验证了我几周前的预言: Kimi 的开放权重模型 K3 ,有单独的商业授权协议,在这样的协议下,模型训练和推理可以在商业上分开,就和半导体设计与制造一样。
围绕着开放权重模型会有一整套的生态和公司,比如专门从事为企业应用微调的,专门做 prefill-only 适配的等等。这种生态系统层面的力量,是封闭厂商完全没法匹配的。
흑백도 선악도 가리기 힘든 혼잡한 상황에 정치와 이념이 개입해서 사람들의 눈을 흐리게 만듬. 다들 고정관념에 휩싸여 마치 미국이 선이고 중국이 악으로 착각하기 쉽지만, Ai와 인류 문명의 발전에 있어 지금은 중국의 오픈모델 오픈웨이트 진영이 오히려 선한 영향력을 주는 다윗에 가까움.