Keyword

Engine of Commerce

The Deformed Thief, Fashion

The Deformed Thief, Fashion

‘They’ decide everything. ‘They’ know whether it is to be pink or green this fall, whether it’s to be short skirts, whether you can wear mink. For years everyone who thinks has gone around at one time or another trying to find out in a desultory sort of way who ‘they’ are. One of the most fascinating things about the world of fashion is that practically no one knows who inhabits it or why it exists. There are a few people who know how it works, but they won’t tell. So it just goes on, getting in deeper and deeper, until something like a war or depression slows it up from time to time. But once the war or the depression lets up, off again goes fashion on its mad way.

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Dream Spaces

Dream Spaces

An Afternoon on a Buying Trip in Milan

The salesperson re-approaches, grinning widely, dangling a T-shirt with a phallic motif on it. Now we are excited.

‘That’s free money!’ is Aimee’s favourite expression, and she uses it here. It means something we can go deep and wide into. ‘Deep’ means we will buy a lot in quantity, and ‘wide’ means we will buy a lot of colours. For a long time we consider colours for the phallus, and which direction it should point. (Sideways is chic, up or down is crass.)

I have a flash memory of reading somewhere that brands were supposed to be ‘spaces for dreams.’

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Fashion Documents

Fashion Documents

Frederick Wiseman on his Sartorial Films

Since 1967, filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has produced an enormously influential and insightful series of documentaries. Over the course of some forty films, he has taken viewers inside an insane asylum (‘Titicut Follies’), uncovered the workings of the welfare system (‘Welfare’), witnessed terminal patients on a hospital ward (‘Near Death’) and victims of spouse abuse (‘Domestic Violence’).

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