Friday, July 10, 2015

Boundless

    One of the things that distinguishes us as a species, is our endless and fervent creativity; our desire to manipulate the world around us, and the things in it, to not only serve our purposes, but to create beauty in new forms.  The haute couture is how this expresses itself in the Attire language.  It is the place where all limits are ignored, where the challenge to make something heretofore unseen often takes center stage.  And since the resources available, and the technical skills of those who work at that level are nearly limitless, the results can be mobile artworks of truly breathtaking, and oft times disturbing loveliness.
  
     In a world where so very many suffer privation from the most elemental things, this, for me, is the only true reason why such a lavish thing as the couture world needs to exist.  We must have a place where we know no restrictions.  There must be an environment where our dreams can actually come true.  It is obvious that you and I will likely never know that beauty personally, beyond seeing it from a distance, or observing it in a museum.  That changes nothing.  It still allows us to dream, and gives our dreams a direction, a route to follow.
    The inspiration to be had from these fragile objects can change how we view ourselves, turn us to a different career path, or encourage us to think in a new way.  But it is, in the end, the sheer appalling beauty of these things, especially when we know the cost in skill, and time it took to create them, that is reason enough for them to come into being.  Its been said before of other things, that if it did not already exist, someone would have to invent it.
   
So the haute couture provides an ultimate view, an apex for us to climb, each in our way.  And every culture, everywhere, carries its set of these ultimate ideas that inform and affect the people of that society.  That haute couture has the influence it does is due mostly to the globe spanning media that took the ideas of designers, and spread them far and wide, from the very inception of couture in the 1800s.  But that does not alter one jot the importance and effect of the differing ideals of each society on our small planet.  If anything, haute couture has become the ultimate champion of all those notions, by bringing diverse cultural references to people, and places, where they had never been before.
   
    So what we end up with is a glorious mixture of all ideas from everywhere, that expands what we can, what we might accomplish, to make it almost literally boundless.

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