I've been looking at Fashion Cultures edited by Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson which is a fashion theory reader published in 2000. It contains a few different essays that I fully intend to read. There's a piece on patriarchy by Pamela Church Gibson and Fiona Anderson's Museums as Fashion Media that are definitely on my reading list and in the back of my mind there's a voice telling me to read the whole book. I am desperately trying to listen to that voice but some of the pieces sound like I'm going to encounter some internal anguish. Can I manage a chapter on Fitzwilliam Darcy or Gwyneth Paltrow in a fashion reader that takes a cultural stance? Darcy perhaps but I suspect I'm going to abandon poor Gwyneth Paltrow. The interesting thing about the reader is that it feels dated enough that a lot of the subject matter and discourse has been very present over the last 8 years but not so much that it's interesting from the perspective of history. A case in point is an Angela McRobbie essay that opens with a discussion about the No.10 Cool Britannia party. If I were a little younger then that might be compelling because I would feel that more time had passed but there has been so much analysis of that episode of British history in the last 8 years and specifically what it meant culturally that I'm tempted not to read the work. Perhaps I'll just skip the first page and see where she's gone with it!

Images from a Chinese fashion spread. I think this is really interesting from the point of view of photography but it also has a cultural value because we see so many fashion spreads everyday that only contain caucasian models.

Notes on excerpt from Backstage Antwerp, 2002.

Statement III from Thimo te Duits provides the biggest challenge for me in the sentence "fashion is not art because it has no pretensions to autonomy". Does this equate with the notion that fashion is always within some cultural context as a living craft or at the very least in the context of the human body. Enjoy Judith Clark's "Historical reference in dress has never been about evolution, continuity," these two quotes well read together because Thimo te Duits' point can be taken as something other if Judith's position is not kept in mind.

I haven't really liked Gareth Pugh's collections over the last three seasons. The combination of very dark shades and cut that I've found intrusively aggressive has not made me a fan but I like the work he's just shown a lot more.

There are images like the one below at style.com


I'm reading Lou Taylor's Study of Dress History, I've only read the introduction and the beginning of the first chapter so unsurprisingly it's all been a bit obvious so far but pleasantly, intelligently obvious and that usually means compelling reading.

Naeem Khan is a designer whose work I almost like but seems to fall short in some way that I can't quite grasp. The dress below if from the current season A/W 2008 and it has all the hallmarks of a good piece of clothing. The textures play well against each other, the materials aren't flat and drab and it looks like a dress that would be exciting to wear but it's not quite right. Personally I think that the neckline lets it down, it makes it too vertically symmetrical because the neck and hem are the same shape. If a designer doesn't see that or if he thinks that it's appropriate then he's not the designer for me.



Shall I tell you a little secret? The first collection that Stella McCartney has ever produced that I have liked is this winter 2008 line. I can't help but feel that this is because a lot of the silhouettes remind me of Nicolas Ghesquire's Balenciaga dresses from S/S 2008 which were undoubtedly my favourite pieces from that season. What bothers me about Stella McCartney's clothes is that they seem as if they've been made for the more emaciated among us but they aren't costume, they're definitely outfits to be worn on the street. They're the kind of loose that only the slender can wear because they look like a tent on anyone who carries weight, even if it's around their collarbone and that bothers me. Look at this S/S 2007 outfit, it makes the body straight and imagine if the model was a UK size 14...