I've been enjoying the sketches supplied by designers for Michelle Obama's inauguration outfit. There are 32 images to browse on WWD.com and they're all quite different. I really enjoyed the LaCroix suit and the Marc Jacobs dress, which surprised me a little. I suspect the Oscar de la Renta dress is high in the running as it really connects with her style in a way that some of the other outfits don't seem to.

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 Enjoy Judith Clark's "Historical reference in dress has never been about evolution, continuity," these two quotes well read together because Thimo te Duits' point can be taken as something other if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.