Three

  THE IMAGES EVOKE a mood or a certain sentiment that I seek to incorporate into my collection but they also provide the visual components for further development of previous propositions. There is often a period of gestation after images are found and refined. Expanding on images of the bamboo forests and the Angkor Wat, I have focussed on the almost elegiac costumes and rites of the Shinto priesthood. There is the transience of the material realm but there is also within that a sense of the eternal and timeless.

  Having established the mood, these images now furnish ideas for colour, fabric ornamentation and silhouettes. I find myself particularly attracted to the surfeit of meaning embedded in the plain absence of their costumes and also, interestingly, to the manner in which these priests are surrounded by coincidental flashes of colour.

  The priest and the actor playing a good game of chess appears to be the embodiment of the austere, the esoteric and the humorous - I suspect they shall be the visual key that will enable me to elaborate upon a most exciting process.

Fin.

Two

   

   
     REFLECTING ON what I had written previously in regards to the magazine Industrie, I must make a note here that there was a very beautiful portrait of Virginie Mouzat, Fashion Director at Le Figaro. It is often a comfort to know that working at the heart of the fashion press are still a number of level-headed women who have the weight of experience and stylistic maturity to guide us through these murky times where everyone (the irony is not entirely lost here) seems to have something to say about fashion or style.

     We often talk about fashion in terms of the new and now. Often in more contemplative periods, I wonder if we have forgotten that the now is also that of the present moment, which is by definition, quite timeless. And so, in fashion, we have the classic and the eternally beautiful. It is not a quality we often consider these days. In the process of looking for new sources of inspiration, I often try to steer away from the incessant torrent of news, hype, gloss and glamour that are so readily available with digital technology and the vast fonts of information embedded within the Internet. Instead, I look for images that soothe the harried mind and which allows us to - at least momentarily - displace ourselves from the hectic pace of this thing we call living.

     These images of monks and bamboo forests are exactly what I have in mind. Interestingly, a silent mind is more alert mind and one that is keen to observe that which usually goes unnoticed. The flashes of vermillion, the pale copper tarnish upon the giant statues of Buddha, the undulating formations of bamboo leaves and wooden ridges, these tiny flourishes of beauty bring pleasure once more. In the end, amid the constant pursuit of the next thing, perhaps the best place to look is where (or when) we are standing still.

Fin.

One

Hello,

by Richard Avedon

 This marks the first entry in a project that begins as an academic exercise but which, hopefully, will grow into a personal possession - rather like the dusty Latin primer still retained in the bookcase. In beginning this endeavour, I asked myself what form these electronic pages will take and decided that if this should be a record of my thought process as a design student, then it shall have to take the guise of a letter written to an imaginary friend. Someone interested in my thoughts and observations on fashion, aesthetics, culture and perhaps, a sense of history and my personal search for that which I cannot name but which must be found amid all the qualities and things I had just listed.

 To wit, there are first discoveries. Every individual who toils in the often thankless grind of perfection behind the dress form and the sewing machine has had that singular moment of revelation when an image reveals possibilities for beauty far beyond what he had hitherto witnessed in the quotidian. Chancing upon a book of Richard Avedon's portraits today, I recall spending days at the library poring over photographs quite like these taken of Suzy Parker here when I was younger. There was something tantalising about her mien and her pose, something mischievous yet artlessly graceful - qualities largely unfound these days in the anodyne faces of interchangeable models and photographs sharpened on the cutting edge.

 Perhaps it is nostalgia for a different era - the past is, after all, another country. The mythic Fifties do seem tinged with golden hues and the liquid static of the Victrola when looked through our contemporary, dystopian eyes. And yet, reading the latest issue of Industrie (look no further for signs of narcissism - a magazine for the fashion industry targeted at 'fashion insiders'), I am struck by the arresting - almost jarring - quality of Mert & Marcus' photographs. An entire oeuvre that sums up the aesthetics of a decade, my generation's decade.

 Someone else might disagree with me - there could be something timeless and beautiful in those photographs too (or perhaps not, maybe timelessness is too much to ask for, or completely irrelevant to the question at hand) but I cannot but wonder - the young pre-teen who picks up one of these photographs where a nude Kate Moss stares at the audience with deadbeat eyes, what glimpse of beauty was made available to him?



Fin.