Take A Deep Breath

    Okay now, I'm going to ask you to indulge me here.  We are going to do a little experiment. This will be an experiment about visceral response, versus reasoned consideration.  What the hell am I talking about? I am talking about an experiment that exposes just how deeply encoded our first responses are to what we see in regards to Attire.  I am going to give you a series of images, and your mission is to look at each one, note your immediate reaction, and then look again with a more critical eye.  Try see further than your first response allows.  It's not an easy thing to get past.  I know, it stymies me a good deal too.  But as a method of explaining the intense potency of Attire and its effect upon us, it's a fine tool to use.
    The secondary object is of course to broaden our understanding, and our tastes.  If we understand more of the words in the lexicon of Attire, that can only help us to understand each other more fully in the long run.
   Oh, and I will not be making any commentary of my own, this is your chance to step up and do the dissemination of an ensemble's meanings.  Once you've gotten through this, let me know how you felt and what you saw, either by posting here or on facebook.
    So, let's get to it, shall we?

And as a present for being so patient with me, something to give your eyes a rest.

Okay, you can put down your pencils.  How do you think you did?  Talk to me, people.

From This Point, Where?

    It's true we have been at this assemblage of visual cues that is Attire for millennia.  We have donned furs, smeared mud, scarred ourselves, bound our feet, corseted our middles, painted our faces with lead based paint, and endless other variants of what amounts to the boundless human desire to express ourselves.  We have experimented with every sort of variation of proportion, color, and texture. We have garnered ideas from every culture on earth, (whether we understood their full meaning or not).  And technology has been there to hand to forward our deepest desires, and make them realities.

    We have gone from mostly having to craft our clothing ourselves, to there being myriad cottage businesses whose life work it was to see people clad.  Then we began to mechanize and more was available to a much broader audience than before. Now we have reached the point where an idea configured by a designer can be in the hands of the manufacturer in another country this morning, and a sample can be in the designers hands, via Fed Ex, by the next day or so, allowing us to push production even further,  and even faster.   The vast bulk of material goods available at every price point level is staggering to behold. 
    But that said, where do we go now?  What is in store for us?  Now I am not going to be foolish enough to give you a straight simple answer. Everyone who has attempted to predict what we would be wearing in the future has not only been wrong, but catastrophically so.  To be honest, the closest anyone has gotten to seeing what the future holds is the film Blade Runner, which posits a massively polyglot culture with a somewhat Asian spin.  Sound familiar?  It should.  We are in it now, though not as dramatically.

    In Blade Runner, endless combinations of seemingly disparate influences combine to create an individual's personal look.  That is even manifested in the clothing of the myriad extras.  I bring it up because it is one fairly realistic idea about where we will go sartorially over the next decades.  If we take the increase of global communications, and the increased access to differing cultures that creates, then it seems obvious that all that input and sensory information would result in a melange of final communicative responses.  and living where I do, in San Francisco, that is most certainly true.  It is commonplace for me to observe people who are wearing items of clothing with cultural source points that are from all over the world.

    When you add to it the emergence of technologies that could in a decade or so make it possible for average folk to have custom cut and fitted clothing that is unique to them, the potential for individual expression based on our personal interests and knowledge is endless.
    After seeing personally what computer technology is currently capable of with regard to patterning and fit, combined with what is already possible with 3D printing, it is easy to extrapolate that we could find ourselves in very new territories in not too many years to come.

    One possibility would be that you could go into a shop, and instead of pulling clothes from a rack, you would select concepts from a program after having your body scanned to the micrometer,  customize the design, and then select materials, and finishes like buttons or zippers, and have the robotically assembled item delivered the next day.
    Another idea would be similarly devoid of human constructive intervention.  Send to your wall mounted printer the commands for what you'd like to wear and while you are taking your morning shower and drinking your coffee, it is busily printing out clothing for you in the precise size, style, textures and colors your require.  Sounds awfully Star Trek, no?  Truth is that the groundwork has already been laid for just this sort of thing to be realized.

    Or perhaps we might see this occur.  There has already been a huge uptick in the number of designers out there. And a goodly number of them, the majority really, are working and living doing their craft.  Sure, they aren't world wide brands, and they work very hard for little return, but they are paying their rent and producing their product.  What if what we are seeing is a beginning of the return to a cottage industry model for apparel design and construction?  The very technologies that affect so dramatically the ability of major houses to do what they do is increasingly available to people with less financial backing.  What that could result in is a small concern of only a few people, or even just one person being able to realistically work and create custom clothing for a clientele that would still afford themselves enough leisure and funds to enjoy their lives a bit, rather than be chained nearly literally to their sewing machines.

    The realities will be different from any of these things no doubt. One thing I feel certain about. The current model of manufacture is ultimately unsustainable.  We cannot continue endlessly at this pace of production or consumption, so something else, or somethings else need to be positioning to take up the work when it falters, as falter it will.

Costume Party, You Say?

    On the evening of July 2nd, 1897, beginning at 10:30, over 700 wealthy, influential, and titled guests arrived in Piccadilly at Devonshire House to attend Louisa, Duchess of Devonshire's Diamond Jubilee Costume Ball in honor of Queen Victoria's Jubilee.  It was to become one of the most celebrated costume parties ever given.

 

Devonshire House, Piccadilly, London

   

                               Her Grace, Louisa, Duchess of Devonshire costumed as Zenobia

                                                       the Duchess' Zenobia costume
    What makes it of special interest to me is that it was exhaustively chronicled in photographs.  The famous photographer, Lafayette, and a team of assistants, set up a temporary studio in a large tent where they used multiple backdrops to carefully record each of the myriad attendants. Fortunately for us most of those photographs survive to show us what the wealthy got up to when they partied, and what they were willing to encompass with regard to costumery.

                   King Haakon VII and Queen Maud of Norway, with Princess Victoria of Wales

    The guests had been told to arrive in "allegorical or historical costume dating earlier than 1820".  Part of what makes this so intriguing to me is the look it gives us at how much we morph our ideas of history to suit our contemporary tastes.  The women's costumes that claimed to be recreations of past people and eras uniformly failed in one important respect, the shape and positioning of the corsetry, though with regard to decorative details they were usually spot on.  What is also interesting is that the gentlemen actually got a good deal closer to correct period wear than the women did.

                          Her Grace the Duchess of Connaught costumed as Anne of Austria

                                 The Countess of Kilmorey costumed as Madame Du Barry

         Prince Alfred of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha costumed as Duke Robert of Normandy AD 1060

                                   Honorable R. Fitzwilliam costumed as Admiral Nelson
                                                  Lord Staverdale costumed as Petrarch

    Then there is the sheer wealth being thrown around, not only by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, but by all the guests.  Invitations had gone out a month prior to the event, so not much time was available to conceive and build the often complex costumes that you see here.  Ladies and gentlemen rushed to museums to find subjects to use for their costumes and then besieged every major fashion house, high end dressmaker, costumier, wigmaker, leather crafter and even metal worker to supply their needs in the short time before the ball.  All these craftspeople must have been exhausted, but very happy indeed of all the custom they received.  Lets us just hope they all got paid, eventually.

                                         Mrs Reginald Talbot costumed as a Valkyrie
 

                          Her Grace the Duchess of Newcastle costumed as Princess Dashkofs

                               HRH Edward, Prince of Wales costumed as a Knight of Malta
    You can clearly see that, even in the simpler efforts, no thought of cost was a consideration. Luxury, display and the finest of materials and workmanship was expected, and delivered. Though there have certainly been lavish costume balls since, few outside of the Russian Imperial costume ball held in 1903 at the Winter Palace can begin to compare with this extraordinary event.

                                                Lady Paget costumed as Cleopatra
             Her costume is well documented as having cost 6000 dollars from the House of Worth.
                                     (translation to 2016 currency value: $171,420)
    But what, you may ask does this mean for Attire, and for us who didn't get to go?  For us it is a near perfect expression of the human desire for fantasy, and for the ability to trade places, even for a short time, with someone or something else.  Our desire to be fantastical knows only the limitations imposed on us by our fragile bodies and the technology we have to hand at the time.  For Attire it is a monument of creativity, and a textbook example of how no matter how much we might attempt to truly recreate a prior time and place, our contemporary existence always invests a tiny part of the outcome so that we can never get all the way there.
    So, feast your eyes on these amazing people in their amazing togs,  and dream of dancing along with them at what must have been one hell of a party.

                                  The Ladies Churchill costumed as Watteau shepardesses

                     Lady Alexandra Acheson costumed for hunting from the period of Louis XV

                          Count Omar Hadik costumed as his grandfather, Field Marshal Hadik

               The Countess of Gosford costumed as Minerva from an 18th century court masque

                              The Duchess of Portland costumed as the Duchess of Savoy

                            Sir Edgar Vincent costumed as a Dutch Stadholder after Franz Hals

              The Honorable Mrs Algernon Bourke costumes as Salammbo, Princess of Carthage

                    Mr Henry Holden costumed as Will Somers, court jester to Queen Elizabeth I

Scatter #110

    Well, it's been a very interesting week for me.  The facebook version of Attire's mind has seen a massive surge in readership that has had a 2/3 increase over the prior week. I could not be more thrilled.  But nothing, not even that will deter me from delivering your weekly romp of randomness known as Scattertime.   So here we go!

    Let's begin with a lampoon, shall we? This cartoon from the very later 1700s is meant to satirize the extremity of the fashions the young fops were getting up in, even after the rise of Republicanism in Europe.  Though it was no longer safe, or fashionable to wear lavishly embroidered clothes made of fabulously precious silk brocades, extremes still occurred, as they always do. What makes this even more interesting is that the gentleman on the right is dressed in the reality of what fashionable attire was to look like, so we get a greater view of the over the top nature of the sitter on the left. What is a universal is this, that no matter the time or the place, extremes of Attire expression always emerge. Whether those extremes are meant for ritual usage, or are merely an outward manifestation of a desire for notice is not my point, that it is a global human phenomenon is.

    Editing. We hear a lot about editing from fashion journalists and other media. What does it mean in broader terms for the Attire language? It means, frankly, knowing when to stop talking.  A statement made is best when it uses only the elements essential to it's full completion as a coherent thought.  Whenever additional concepts are inserted it becomes more difficult for the observer to comprehend what is being relayed.  Here we have a good example.  This is a superlatively constructed garment, its fit and cut are ideal.  There are however one or two aspects that dilute rather than enhance the message.  All of the visual balance is pulled to one side.  The draped collar, sleeve, angled draping of the bodice, and the skirt slit are all on one half of the design.  The skewing impact of that is diminished here by the angle we are seeing it from, but faced square on this would seem to be sinking off the model.  What, if anything, disturbs your perception of this gown?

    Freddie, Freddie, Freddie.  My, the things you get yourself up in. Of course this outfit is meant for large scale stage performance, and as such in a special category of the Attire language, essentially a dialect that has many different rules, and some different aims from the mainline of the parlance.  The requirements of theater mean that small visual gestures and details will be lost. it must be broad strokes and bold colors to be able to be read from the back of an amphitheater while lighting effects are blazing away.  It gives designers an opportunity to express wild fantasies that would be otherwise impossible. And it gives the wearer equal license to be more outrageous, more free, more creative in movement and expression.  We could most of us do with a dose of this kind of visual outrage.

   

    Lace.  From it's first emergence in the 1500s as a supreme luxury, to the computer controlled production of lace yardage today that rivals handwork in it's complexity and finish,  lace has always had a very special position in our culture.  Its fragility instantly places it into rarefied territory since it cannot survive vigorous use.  With that in mind it has become culturally associated with our wrongheaded notions of the fragility of women.  It's one of the reasons that getting men into lace in our current society is so tough, it has that subtext that connects to the feminine.  For your information, the jabot is a home made article from 1900, with hand crocheted lace.  The spats are from the 1910s.

    This rather astounding looking fellow is Sylvester Schaffer who was a life long circus performer and vaudevillian. Coming from a family of celebrated circus performers, he was highly skilled at multiple different forms within the circus panoply.  So wide were his varied abilities that when he debuted his new vaudeville act in New York in August of 1914 he performed ten completely different acts, by himself, setting a record on the Vaudeville circuit and worldwide.  But we're here to look at his cunning little ensemble.  As I said with the Freddie Mercury entry costume for stage has different needs and rules.  In the case of this costume it needed to create the impression of being Roman styled armor without any loss of flexibility or movement.  So, it is clearly made up in some kind of knitted material with the needed decorative elements done in cording and embroidery.  While it does ape the idea of Roman armor, some of the decorations, in particular the discs on the chest, are unfortunate in their design and placement.  The concentric circles there look more amazonian than is quite right, but doubtless when seen in constant motion as it would have been, and that from a distance it might very well have worked. Any way you slice it though, he was a dish.

   

    These days a couture runway is as much a theatrical performance as it is a display of apparel selections for potential order and purchase.  This detail image is from a recent Eymeric Francois collection.  The choice here has been to reference older regional styles of European hair dress and blow them up to great scale. The danger with any of these sorts of notions is that they have the potential to overwhelm the clothes worn, detracting from the final point which is sales.  Here, the balance between dramatic effect and clothing worn has been kept in place.  It is a notion which actually translates well into our everyday usage of Attire.  Keeping that one dramatic element in proper proportion to everything else going on is essential to our ability to convey what we wish to with clarity. Allow one thing to become too much of a focus and it ceases to be about us, or anything we wish to say, and becomes all about that one thing, pulling the focus from us.

    This is Alexandre Farnese who was Duke of Parma as painted by Sofonsiba Anguissola in 1561.  What is of interest here is how very rigid clothing was at the time, in fact it was not only that the textiles were less fluid in general but that that sense of formality and firm structure was an essential player in conveying to others one's status.  Clothing, especially that of the wealthy and titled was not meant to be comfortable, it was meant to loudly proclaim that person's significance and sway.  This ensemble, which may not even actually have existed as you see here, (additions and subtractions were commonly made by artists based on the sitter's wishes), is all about being impressively formal and luxurious.  All the important markers are there; silk textiles costly embroideries, jewels, precious metals, and furs, and all in service of making sure the viewer is certain that this clearly quite young man is a man of great importance.  Also, I want that coat.

    This remarkably serene and simple looking evening dress of 1908 was owned and worn by Queen consort Alexandra who was wife to Edward VII of England.  I say simple and serene because during this period it was not that common for an evening dress to have a skirt that seemed so unornamented. Of course, it is coated with metal sequins, but the overall effect is of simplicity.  All the decorative mass is on the bodice, and most especially at the shoulders. The psychology of this is astute.  The eye would be drawn instantly to the face of the wearer. It is a gloriously well designed and crafted gown, with perfect proportions, and ideally selected details.

    Two years later, in 1910, Paul Poiret would design this afternoon dress which is a startling departure from the trained and often fussy day clothing that was the norm.  His revolutionary ideas of form and function, freeing women from needless restriction is evident here.  Nothing about this garment is design ed hinder movement.  The bodice is fully cut, the sleeves are neither too tight or too loose, and the breadth of the skirt is great enough to allow for free strides when walking.  Though when he first appeared in the design world only the most advanced of dressers chose his work, but his ideas were significant, and soon his notions permeated the fashionable world. Women and their needs were changing. He saw it and stepped up to help them out.

    The Zoot Suit is one of the most extreme menswear concepts of the 20th century. coming into popularity during the second world war, and continuing shortly after it was meant at first as a deliberate slap in the face against wartime privation. It was an act of visual defiance that meant that the young man wearing it was more interested in music and fun than in the progress of the war effort. So, though we associate this manner of dress with big band loving, swing dancing lads, it had its darker aspect.  This example is one of the only known complete zoot suits in existence, and it's part of the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

    One of the things that marked out an Elsa Schiaparelli creation was here use of unique, often custom created buttons.  They could be in the form of anything from seashells, to comets, beetles. Anything was possible within the mostly surrealist world that she worked in as a designer.  These are tiny Chinese men carrying parasols. Each one is hand carved and painted, as you can make out when you look at them closely, since they each have subtle differences.  The majority of her suits and coats bore such individualistic buttons. Often they were for appearance sake alone, since the garment might actually close with concealed snaps.  This is one of those times.  Such irregular buttons would be difficult to use, and could damage the fabric as well.

    Oh my goodness me, the 70s and our mercifully short lived obsession with making everything under the sun out of acrylic yarns.  As a final entry this week, something to make you smile, and itch.  Who wouldn't want a hand knitted beach cover up made from heavy acrylic yarn?  Come on now. You know you would.  I'm sure there are only a few possible thoughts going through the minds of these models. "I'm getting paid for this." "Geez, I hope no one sees this catalog." "Sheesh this thing is hot and scratchy."  We endure a great deal for fashion's sake, don't we?

Well that's all folks for this week. I hope you enjoyed yourselves!  Have a grand weekend.
   

Yearning And Display

    We have a debt to each other. Truly we do.  When we walk a street,  or sit in our cubicle, or stand before a class of students, we owe a debt to them that see us. We might like to, in our self absorption, think that it is the reverse, that they owe a debt to us.  The reality is that we all walk our life paths learning of ourselves, and giving of ourselves to others without fully knowing the payment that is due.  The Attire language that we have built painstakingly over millennia of time is not simply, baldy, a methodology whereby we communicate our own reality, or fantasy to others.  It is far more. We gain a huge amount of our self knowledge from how we choose to present ourselves visually, and how people respond to the sent message that they see. We see ourselves as worthy or not worthy, largely by the usage of, and the perception of the Attire language.

 

     How do I perceive myself?  In full honesty I cannot say that I entirely describe myself by myself. I am not fully my own person. None of us are. A part of us, a significant part of us is defined and described by the interactions we have, and the culture in which we live. In other words, I am not only myself, I am also my interactions and the effects those interactions have had.  Part of those interactions have been based for good or ill on how I have chosen to accoutre myself for the world's viewing. My manner of dress, how I choose to groom myself and so forth, all have a part in how the world perceives me, and in reverse, how I end up perceiving myself.

                                                            (yeah, this really is me)
I will be bald faced here with facts.  I am 5'4" tall, 59 years old and 155 pounds. I am short-waisted, unexercsised, balding in the back, and a bit stoop shouldered. I have serious bunions and a myriad of other small details that would put me outside of the ideal.  I also acknowledge that my facial physiognomy is one that meets a good many of the parameters currently in vogue.   Frankly, all those admissions are based upon cultural normatives that define those things as more or less than desirable.  And in other cultures and times nearly all those things would have been, have been seen as positive or negative markers repeatedly.  So, I am not moving entirely free of social influence.  None of us are.
     Yet, even with this understanding I still yearn for something more.  Perhaps this is a manifestation of my/our baseline desire to grow and change, to evolve, to metamorphose into something greater, larger than I/we have been.

  

    What it may be for me, for any of us really, is a desire to be accepted and honored fully for ourselves.  And yet, within the Attire language we can only ever get part of the way there.  For as manifestly communicative as apparel is and can be, it can never fully express us. It can only help us along the way to understanding.  And so, we display, like peacocks in rut, we display. We make ourselves visible, desirable, and potent.  If we are people who define as female we often display as procreative source points, harbingers of succession.  If we define as male we regularly present as supreme examples of how to engender progeny.

   

   My final and most salient point is this. We cannot ever conceive of ourselves as being entirely separate from the world in which we live.  We are children of our cultures whether we like it or not.  Our apparel choices, our methods of using this huge, complex language of Attire, all depend, more than we might like to consider, on the thoughts, opinions and feelings of others.  And what does that mean? We need each other. We need each other for validation, support and continuance.  We need each other. Oh yes, we do.