My Two Wardrobes

Tie-dyed shirt, thrifted

Butterfly pendant, estate sale, remixed

I've been thinking a lot about this post recently, and the significance of editing - the self-editing just about every blogger does.

I don't show you all my clothes, Fabulous Readers. You don't see my gardening/scrubbing/home construction grubbies, the baggy board shorts I go kayaking in, my lounge-around-the-house-in-a-funk pajamas, my ad-hoc workout wear. You also don't see outfits on days, like today, where after half an hour with the camera I haven't been able to get a single photo that looks decent, that approximates what I see in the mirror.

Is that vain? Absolutely. But there are a lot of facets of me that I don't discuss on this blog: my politics, my religious views, my other areas of interest, what I had for dinner. That's not why you come here, which is also the reason I don't attempt to encyclopedically document every single thing that I put on my body, in some mad quest to be fashion blogging's answer to Samuel Pepys. You read my blog, I hope, to see and hear about my particular (peculiar?) perspective on fashion, its whys and wherefores - and hows.

Clothing might not shape our self-image in toto, but it does help define it to the world at large. I don't expect my clothes to express the sum of my personality to the world at large: instead, they present a carefully-edited version of myself, the parts of me I choose to show.
That process of editing, of choice, is what really fascinates me about fashion. Why do we make the choices we do? What determines why I find one shirt cute and another so unflattering as to only be suitable for the most menial of tasks? Why do we emphasize some parts of our bodies and desperately try to camouflage others?

It's easy to say "because of the dominant social paradigm" in response to all of these questions, but I think that's too simple an answer, and maybe even a bit of a cop-out. What are the forces that drive that paradigm? Where do they come from and what influences them? And what about the people who stray from that paradigm, by degrees minuscule or dramatic? What inspires them?

What do you think? Should style blogging be encyclopedic, a comprehensive catalog of what one person (or several) wears, or would you rather see a carefully thought-out selection of outfits a blogger thinks are interesting, inspiring, or attractive? What degree of (self-) editing is all right before a blogger loses authenticity and thus authority - some? None? Lots? No upper limit? Are style blogs more like diaries or one-person fashion magazines?

PS. Apologies to all you Fabulous Readers who subscribe via RSS: I don't know why this published while I was halfway through writing it!

Living through clothes

I just came across this article in the New York Times' Arts section. It's about an art installation currently being erected in New York City's Park Avenue Armory. The artist, Christian Boltanksi, has assembled the piece from a giant crane, 30 tons of used clothes, 3,000 cookie tins, and a recording of human heartbeats. The clothes are arranged in a giant pile: at intervals, the crane plucks a clump from the pile and scatters it. The cookie tins form a giant wall, sheltering and concealing the installation. The heartbeats are a constant soundtrack - visitors can even record their own beats to add to the track.

The article examines the work in terms of its context of mortality and loss. Using piles of discarded clothing as a signifier of the dead is not a new concept - perhaps the most striking example is the pile of shoes collected from victims at Auschwitz. As a frequent shopper at thrift stores, garage sales, and even estate sales, I know that clothes can be one of the most visceral, intimate reminders of the departed. Perhaps only scent carries more freight, emotionally.

However, I wonder if there's another interpretation that can be put on this work - one not of mortality and loss but of consumption and consumerism.

Thirty tons of used clothes. Let's say that again. Let's do a little experiment.

I put together a moderately representative outfit: jeans, socks, a blazer, a hoodie, a tee, and a tank. I deliberately chose a mix of heavier and lighter items. I didn't include shoes because the article specifially mentioned clothes only, and didn't bother with underwear in the theory that even the most massive bra weighs only a few ounces.

The pile of six items weighed about seven pounds. I'm willing to round that up to 10 pounds, for argument's sake and to make the math easier. So if we figure every 10 pounds is approximately six items of clothing, one ton (2,000 pounds) is 1,200 items; 30 tons is 36,000 items. Thirty-six thousand pieces of clothing (give or take a few hundred, I'm sure) that people bought, wore, and then eliminated from their closets.

For contrast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has over 35,000 pieces in their costume collection, while the Victoria and Albert Museum has "14,000 outfits plus accessories."

Some of those items may come from the deceased, but I'm willing to bet (although there's no way to confirm this, really) that most came from living people who just decided they didn't want those pieces of clothing any more.

Now, these clothes came from a textile recycling plant, which maybe - hopefully - means that they were in such poor condition that they couldn't be resold. It also means that they were slated for re-use, rather than disposal, before they got pegged to become part of a major art installation.

Looking at it, I must admit I think more about our society's patterns of use and waste, of the cycle of accumulating and then discarding material possessions, than I do about the fragile nature of life. The random scattering of the clothing pile, in particular, makes me think of the often arbitrary nature of fashion trends. It reminds me of the way my own floor looks after the frantic search for an outfit that works on one of those days where nothing seems to fit or work together right - piles of discarded clothes that I disconsolately pick up, fidget with for a while, then discard into a different pile. I'm also reminded that being fashionable and amassing a wardrobe can easily turn from an enjoyable pursuit into an obsession, and, like any obsession, leave you hollow and devoid of meaning, an empty building full of a pile of discarded clothes.

In some ways, that makes it even more melancholy than its original intent.

I also kind of wonder who ate all the cookies that came in those tins.

Regular outfit posts will resume (hopefully) later today.

Label envy?

 

Above, a Cynthia Rowley dress printed on "a heavy cotton knit" (image courtesy nytimes.com): below, a Hanes Beefy-T (image courtesy hanesbullseye.com). 

This article from the New York Times amused the hell out of me, and really got me thinking about the significance of designer labels.

Once, a couture label was a guarantee of quality and originality. It assured value for price: yes, the garments were extremely expensive, but they incorporated the highest-quality materials and superior workmanship (such as hand-finished hems and buttonholes) as well as the designer's unique artistic expression. If you've ever seen a vintage couture piece up close and personal, you know that these differences are more than just fancy touches: even fifty (or more!) years later, the fabrics are supple and luxurious, the construction amazingly detailed and intricate by modern standards. The inside of a Dior New Look gown bears a striking resemblance to a suspension bridge and has about the same structural integrity (note that the bridge in question is not Westchester/Rockland Counties' Tappan Zee, the structural integrity of which is rather suspect at this point).

This isn't to say that couture labels didn't always have the same cachet, the same status-symbol, um, status, that they do today. However, there was no need to splash a designer's logo all over something to convey it: the details of design were sufficiently unique, the quality sufficiently evident, that the over-the-top branding that we've become accustomed to wasn't really necessary. Creating a tailored garment takes skill: a t-shirt, no matter how rarefied the fabrics used to make it, is... not exactly the pinnacle of the art of tailoring, shall we say?

So, OK, here we have the estimable Ms. Rowley, screening photo images of her latest collection onto heavyweight cotton jersey - that's something very much like Hanes Beefy-T material, by the by - making it up into, essentially, t-shirt dresses that look (if you squint lots, and maybe have a stiff drink first) like the actual tailored ones from her Fall 2010 collection. You can also buy the photo-screened dresses as yard goods and assemble them (or not) yourself, or, on the wow-this-label-whore-thing-has-gone-too-far level, get a $150 sewing kit, that "includes one of Ms. Rowley’s labels, which you can sew into the garment of your choice to make your own statement on fashion."

Did I mention that you're paying a low, low $320 for your t-shirt dress, or $280 for the privilege of doing your own assemblage? If you assemble the dress as intended (and more on that later), and assume a decent-but-not-great labor rate of $10/hour, that means the dress takes four hours to cut out and sew up. For those of you Fabulous Readers who don't dabble in home sewing, that's practically instantaneous in terns of garment construction time. I don't have exact statistics on production times for traditional couture garments, but I'm going to guess as dozens, perhaps hundreds of hours.

As for the uber-expensive sewing kit with status label, to, supposedly, up the brag factor of your plebeian wardrobe? On some level, it reminds me of label switching on vintage garments. On the other, it's kind of amusing, in a fashion-as-metatext kind of way: you don't actually need the designer's product, just the symbol of it. It's the status part of couture without any of the innovation or artistry. Oh, brave new world!

Is this also the time and place to bring up that, ideally, nobody but the wearer sees the label on an article of clothing? That's always been my take on the women who buy dresses a size too small because they have to fit into that size 8 (or 6, or...): Honey, nobody but you sees the label. Cut it out if you must. When the label's sticking out on an article of my clothing, I'm gratified when someone tucks it in for me (thanks, Mom!), so I don't walk around looking like a slob - and thanks to my good thrift-store karma, I've got some moderately brag-worthy labels. I still don't want them sticking out!

As a social statement, though, it would be very amusing to sew that high-end label into the aforementioned Hanes Beefy-T. Or take the yard goods with the printed-on dress and do something completely different with it: Throw pillows? Big, boxy t-shirts (the dress printed on jersey knit has obvious antecedents in those horrible t-shirts from the 80s with tuxedos printed on them)? Curtains?

The only reason I'm amused at this, and not fuming over a designer ripoff (which part of me feels it is, big-time) is the obvious subtext of do-it-yourself fashion. Ms. Rowley is assuming that she has enough of a market that has sufficient sewing skill to assemble copies of her dresses, even if they are the screen-printed tee version. I'm sure there's some expectation on her part of customers personalizing and tweaking the sew-it-yourself design - in fact, if she's really smart, there will be a Web site or Facebook page dedicated to customers' interpretations of the designs. According to the Times article, this is in part a reaction to the fast-paced information lifecycle afforded by the Internet. As we all know, one of the great (and hugely beneficial, in my mind) changes that technology has allowed is multidirectional information flow - it's not just that the designers tell us about fashion: we tell them. Or at least we can, if they're listening, and I hope they are.

So what are your thoughts? Does the ripoff factor of a $150 sewing kit outweigh the participatory-fashion coolness? How should designers react to the instant-gratification nature of today's market, especially if they want to continue to offer the high-end, time-intensive tailoring that is a requirement of haute couture? If you had a sew-your-own Cynthia Rowley dress kit, what would you do with it?