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.