29/3/13

As I try to get my head together and put some effort into this blog, I've been starting to think about how we think about fashion as a society. Fashion seems to be treated as the frivolous, superficial artform and hardly has any sort of intellectual critique, at least not in the mainstream media. Maybe becasue of the inherent commerciality of fashion as an industry: magazines dare not critique a designer that has paid huge amounts to advertise with them and it seems there are more and more fashion bloggers that are 'sponsored' to wear 'x' label head to toe and yet don't disclose that they are being paid to do so (smidge unethical?). I wanted to see fashion blogs (and write one) that was connected with the original intention of fashion blogging- to be a real person showing real fashion in a personal way and discussing it as a form of expression just as valid as art. In studying art history, it's becoming more and more evident to me how similar art and fashion are in terms of the the way they are influenced and influence. Fashion is essentially one of the most basic, human forms of expression that becomes a part of our body and how we are perceived: it communicates to others about you more easily than a painting of yours on a wall yet people dismiss it so easily.

This has all been buzzing around in my mind for a while now but came to a head when I met curator Alison Kubler at the Gregory Crewdson exhibition at IMA and I of course gushed about how she inspired me to get into art history. She gave me some advice, told me to try and get into fashion and that there will eventually be a huge demand for curators who can talk about art and fashion on the same level, so here goes nothing.

I'll finish with some quotes and links that put what I'm thinking into words much more eloquently than I could:

"...much of the fashion content published is dominated by celebrity and consumer driven stories that bank off the entertainment value of fashion while doing little to enlighten readers about its intricacies and creative nature."-- Gisela Aguilar for http://www.fashionprojects.org/

Amazing fashion writer for Bullett Magazine, Fiona Duncan

Another Magazine's "An Intellectual Fashion"

And some blogs/bloggers I'm really into at the moment:

THE DOPPLEGANGER 

Leslie Ashton Bloomfield particularly the "Webcam Blogging Manifesto" and she did have a blog that I was going to link but it's disappeared?! it's jellybones.net/blog (maybe hosting issues idk)