fashion design is boring - a small dose of pontification

I recently came across a feature on a new fashion label that unintentionally encapsulated precisely what is wrong with fashion design as a profession today. Without naming names, the revelation comes by way of one of the label’s founders: “With women we are exploring many more categories, more of an emphasis on style and being relevant to what’s happening in fashion, whereas with men it’s extremely timeless.” And this, after the article describes the men’s collection as “t-shirts, woven shirts, knits, jackets and chinos in muted, low-key colours” that, according to the same founder, men “won’t get called out on.”

Heavens to Betsy, we wouldn’t want men to get called out for what they’re wearing.

The problem is the concept of timelessness. In some contexts, the concept of timelessness represents a universal quality, a consistent solution to a persistent design problem, an aesthetic that transcends cultural identification, an idea whose relevance endures over long periods of time. Yet timelessness can also be a manifestation of the status quo, a conceptual frost that favours the static over the dynamic. “Timeless” becomes more excuse than rationale, an apology (without acknowledging it as such) for failing, not to innovate, but to even attempt innovation.

This isn’t to say that women’s fashion is the product of innovative design in and of itself while men’s fashion is fundamentally stagnant. Although there’s no question that the most fun in fashion design is to be found in products for women –see Mohop shoes, or early United Nude designs, for example – fashion designers, as the quote above reveals, nevertheless tend to deploy a conservative hybrid of recycled imagination and reactivity. The relevance to what’s happening in fashion, what’s trending for women, is essentially an example of cyclical cannibalism. Designers resurrect and reinvent past trends in women’s fashion over and over again, with variations marketed as more than they are. Once in a while, they fly their freak flag with wild and admittedly imaginative designs, but so what? They’re typically too impractical and artsy for daily wear. Men don’t get trends, but quality craftsmanship for “timeless” styles, aka lazy design.

For fashion design to be innovative, let alone revolutionary, it should purposefully upset the established order of gendered stereotypes, reject the homogenizing effects of mass production in favor of bespoke artisanship, and genuinely challenge the tension between individuality and social identity manifested in how we choose to appear. It’s not enough for fashion design to question design objects. It must also question the process and reasoning of design itself.

Anything else is just the same old pursuit of commoditized novelty, gendered to favour women with imagination and men with timelessness.

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TFPO column: the fur may now be faux, but so is johnny weir’s conscience

This week's column at TFPO is all about figure skater Johnny Weir's outrageous love of real fur and a kerfuffle you may have read about.

Also, more commentary on the topic over at The Fashionoclast.

TFPO column: what happened to the noble enemies?

I admit it: the ridiculously hostile rhetoric surrounding Obama, the Sotomayor confirmation...it's particularly annoying these days. Whatever happened to civil disagreement? Agreeing to disagree? Or - and this is truly radical, I know - compromise? In other words...

What Happened to the Noble Enemies?

announcing the Fashionoclast!

I've launched a new blog. Topic: fashion, from an independent and iconoclastic point of view. Check it out at fashionoclast.com.

rachael ray, the human body, and self-image

The Huffington Post headline reads, “Rachael Ray Defends FHM Shoot,” and the question is: why does Ray need to defend herself? Defend herself from what? From the traditional perspective comes the shock that a woman would pose in saucy pictures for a men’s magazine, even though plenty of women’s magazines feature scantily clad women on their covers too. It would seem that the moral of the story is that women’s bodies appeal to everyone, not just men, but still, the message from tradition is clear: women who expose their bodies are degrading themselves. Even when we praise this sort of photographic endeavour as strength of character, we apparently can’t let our admiration for women who take control of their own bodies go unchallenged by prudish notions that it’s all subject to sex and commerce, to other people’s desires.

But what if asking Ray to defend her decision to pose for FHM is itself misogynistic? Shouldn’t people viewing the images take responsibility for their own interpretation of these images? Perhaps beauty is being sexualized when it doesn’t need to be – a body is a body, like a work of art – or perhaps there really is sexual dimension to everything, which is fine as long as it comes with the recognition that the sexual dimension isn’t always a meaningful, useful, or valuable. Either way, this lionization of sex skewers our body images. Since we all have bodies, and they are natural, the notion that using our bodies is degrading is itself degrading; it takes us into an abstracted interpretation of the world, and away from the world itself.

“This magazine has as young as seventeen, eighteen-year-olds in hottie bikinis, and these are all actresses, models, pin-up girls,” she said in an interview with ABC News. “I don't belong to any, even remote, club of theirs. And I thought if I'm gutsy enough to do this, this is a good thing for everybody. This is the everywoman, here she is.”

It’s as good a refutation as any, and it goes beyond sexism to how we culturally interpret beauty itself. There’s an obsession with perfection, with standards, with ideal body types, enforced through the media and our own interpersonal relationships. But who’s to say that only skinny toothpicks are beautiful? Why are we programmed to be so damn picky, to reject the slightest curve, the slightest hair, the slightest lack of symmetry? It seems to me that the problem isn’t just the sexualization of beauty, but also the fetishization of it. Our standards of beauty, though variable between individuals, are focused like a fetish on a few features instead of being open to a whole spectrum. Hence, the obsessive preference for skinny instead of voluptuous, tall instead of short, muscular instead of lean – pick your preferred trait – fetishized beauty instead of holistic beauty.

The nudists may be on to something when it comes to dissociating sex from beauty with the goal of simply accepting the human beauty in its natural form. There’s something to be said about finding beauty in everyone and not letting clothes become some sort of psychological trap.

There’s an interest web project by German photographer Sebastian Kempa, called Naked People, that touches on the topic of our relationship to nudity. It’s cleverly set up: people standing in front of a white background, fully clothed. Click on the image, however, and the clothes fade away. There is a range of genders, ages, and body types – not professional models, but everyday folk. The blurb on the homepage, translated from the German, essentially asks to what extent clothes reveal the person beneath. We can tell a person’s occupation, yes, but can we really trust what we see? What happens if, beneath the suit, we discover a tattoo? Does it destroy the illusion, does the person remain inscrutable? Kempa asks us to consider these question through images of dressed/undressed individuals.

Which brings me back to Rachael Ray. We all appreciate beauty, however defined. We all make efforts to look good, or look at things that visually please us. Why be ashamed of it? Why be narrow-minded about it? Let’s just appreciate beauty in all its forms. Let’s have fun instead of being uptight. Let’s not ask women, or men, to defend themselves for having a body, which is obviously natural, and using it.

cantilevered footwear

Little known fact: fashion fascinates me. I can even fake my way through a conversation on shoes and get away with it. In fact, I'm thinking of starting a separate blog to ramble, rant, and muse about fashion in general and men's fashion in particular. I still have to refine the idea to make the blog distinctive from all of those other blogs. And I have to figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't conflict with my zillions of other writing projects. It would also be nice to use the blog to make some money somehow. Maybe I'm trying to do too much, though, with a resulting dilution of the "Frédérik" brand (whatever that is.) What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. In the meantime, here are some thoughts on intriguing, but odd, footwear, modified from comments I made at the Facebook group "Wicked Shoes."

**** I thought I’d seen something like shoes in the image above before, and sure enough, I did: Victoria Bechkam and her PVC heelless boots. A bit of digging revealed that Antonio Berardi designed these engineering oddities. A bit more digging loosely confirmed my suspicion: the soles at the ball of the foot are most likely weighted. I suppose this is the footwear equivalent of a cantilever, although I can’t imagine that it would be possible for a woman to fully relax her weight onto the heel without tipping over – that is, weight has to really be focused on the ball instead of distributed, however unevenly, throughout the foot. And it undoubtedly requires more muscle power for the foot to pull the weight upwards using the upper than it does with heeled shoes.

Biomechanics aside, though, I think Berardi has essentially taken the stiletto’s fetishied precariousness one step further by creating the illusion of complete instability. The shoe doesn’t merely look unstable; it looks impossible. Does it work? As an abstract, high-fashion concept it’s bold and innovative, making it an ideal runway object. But it seems too far removed from the practical to be anything other than a curiosity. Unlike Aminaka and Wilmont’s equally bold soleless heel, this doesn’t respect the form of the foot. By working against it, it creates an unsettling aesthetic that intrigues but doesn’t persuade – at least, I’m too busy worrying about the shoe’s engineering to really get into appreciating the shoe as a shoe a woman is wearing.

But here’s a fun variation; pony boots, also available in a thigh-high version.

The whimsy is enough to overcome the initial shock that comes from the absence of a heel - note the horseshoes! But the construction seems far less cantilevered and precarious, even though the foot is elevated at an extreme angle, giving the shoe an engineering elegance Berardi’s shoes lack. It might appropriate to bring in the word “gait,” since these pony boots must result in a rather contrived walk. I’m not entirely sure whose boots these are, but I suspect that these are not from Berardi, but rather from Dressing for Pleasure, a BDSM/fetish/roleplay retailer. That would explain quite a bit, actually.

Edit (01.06.09): the pony boots are called Rancho and are fabricated by punitiveshoes.com, a BDSM/fetish retailer. Palio is the thigh-high variant. Thanks to Anna Valentina for the link.

a shoe without sole - silly or sublime?

Take a look at this shoe, if it can be called that. (Note: the image was taken from a Huffington Post article and is here displayed under Fair Use principles. If this is nonetheless objectionable to whomever holds the copyright, I will remove it.)

It evokes, at first impression, total disbelief. Ridicule, even. There’s nothing practical about the “shoe.” It leaves toes exposed to stubbing and soles exposed to dirt (and other substances). It’s nonsensical. But in an example of the art of criticism, in which a gut reaction isn’t enough to properly appreciate something – whether positively or negatively – a little bit of consideration can bring about a change of perspective.

For one thing, the shoe is clearly not designed for practical wear and day-to-day use. It’s a question of form as it relates to function, and to condemn the shoe for being impractical is asking the form to function in a way that counters its design. What we’re left with, then, is the shoe as an aesthetic and conceptual experience. The sole-less heel is a concept, a gamble, a toy; this is the basis on which the shoe is best judged. And on this level, the shoe’s designers Aminaka and Wilmont should be credited for their imagination.

Take a look again. Notice how the heel block conforms to the heel of the foot. Notice how the straps not only anchor the heel in place, but give the shoes a gladiatorial look softened by the choice of material. The shoe’s engineering is masterful as it serves a concept of risk: exposing the foot, elevating it off the ground. It’s ultimately clever in its audacity – could it even be sexy? It does possess an idealized fetishism that brings, inevitably, sex into the design. When seen in the context of Aminaka and Wilmont’s 2009 spring/summer collection (see here and here), the sole-less heel is, not a folly, but an artistic expression of fashion perfectly suited, not for the real world, but for the universe of the catwalk and, perhaps, the private home where sharp objects and dirty substances aren’t a threat. What seemed silly at first has become, amazingly, sublime.

So when Ebert addresses the role of (film) critics in light of people’s hostility to criticism…

I believe a good critic is a teacher. He doesn't have the answers, but he can be an example of the process of finding your own answers. He can notice things, explain them, place them in any number of contexts, ponder why some "work" and others never could. He can urge you toward older movies to expand your context for newer ones. He can examine how movies touch upon individual lives, and can be healing, or damaging. He can defend them, and regard them as important in the face of those who are "just looking for a good time." He can argue that you will have a better time at a better movie. We are all allotted an unknown but finite number of hours of consciousness. Maybe a critic can help you spend them more meaningfully.

…I offer my own pennies in adding that the art of criticism – regardless of what the object of that criticism is, whether film, shoes, or whatever – is the art of appreciation, of looking more deeply into things. In other words, it is a reflection of the view that the examined life - both the good and the bad - is a life worth living.