I found a page of G.K. Chesterton quotations on the internet while looking for a George Bernard Shaw quotation, and they all seemed quite pithy, but I was struck by one because it seems to describe one way in which I differ from most people in my life.
"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
Sometimes I feel like I'd have a lot more adventures if the people around me didn't insist on considering them inconveniences.
Mittwoch, 17. November 2010
Dienstag, 2. November 2010
Vintage overload
I have decided that the vintage fad has to stop. That may sound odd coming from one who routinely wears clothing hundreds of years out of style, but I stand by my declaration.
Blogs like Permanent Style and A Suitable Wardrobe often post fashion plates from the 30s, 40s and 50s as inspiration for correct modern business dress. This, to me, is ridiculous. In 1910, any man caught wearing even twenty-year-old fashions would have been laughed at, and yet now it is the height of cool to wear a suit that looks like it could have been made half a century ago. The kicker for me is that the 1960s was itself a retro-styled decade. They called it Neo-Edwardian, because the fashionable silhouettes were borrowed from the Edwardian era fifty years or so before. Which means that when I make and wear a jacket based on late Victorian/early Edwardian (i.e. hundred-year-old) style, nobody really gives it a second glance. Fashion in the fourteenth century had more innovation.
Now, I like old stuff. I make some of my own clothes, and I draw inspiration almost exclusively from the distant past or from fantasy films (which are also inspired by the past, but in a way that's different from retro fashion). I like learning about old languages that nobody speaks anymore. I like having the kind of facial hair not seen in public office or the financial sector for over a century. I have been told that I was born anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries too late. BUT. I like these things for their novelty. My homemade clothing is based on costume. I don't really want those times to come back; I just like the look of parts of them. And I certainly never wanted all the cool people to be wearing what I want to wear.
I sound even to myself like a whiny hipster complaining about mainstream society ruining what was once cool (see my previous post for my views on hipsterdom), but the real root of my problem with this whole thing occurred to me on Halloween: if all I wear is costume-type stuff, then whenever I want to wear a costume, it feels no different from wearing my normal clothes. I have always loved Halloween because it allowed me to dress up like and pretend to be someone I'm not. I've always been slightly uncomfortable in my own skin, and so being someone else for a day was incredibly exciting. Now, though, despite having all this crazy stuff to wear, it's not exciting because I wear it all the time. So it turns out that I have ruined Halloween for myself.
When I started sewing, I never intended to wear what I made day-to-day; I intended it to be costume. I'm not saying I won't keep dressing oddly; I'm a hipster and a nerd and that works for me. I just don't believe the cool people should like the same strange and esoteric things I do. Fifty years of retrospective fashion is long enough. It's time for a change.
Blogs like Permanent Style and A Suitable Wardrobe often post fashion plates from the 30s, 40s and 50s as inspiration for correct modern business dress. This, to me, is ridiculous. In 1910, any man caught wearing even twenty-year-old fashions would have been laughed at, and yet now it is the height of cool to wear a suit that looks like it could have been made half a century ago. The kicker for me is that the 1960s was itself a retro-styled decade. They called it Neo-Edwardian, because the fashionable silhouettes were borrowed from the Edwardian era fifty years or so before. Which means that when I make and wear a jacket based on late Victorian/early Edwardian (i.e. hundred-year-old) style, nobody really gives it a second glance. Fashion in the fourteenth century had more innovation.
Now, I like old stuff. I make some of my own clothes, and I draw inspiration almost exclusively from the distant past or from fantasy films (which are also inspired by the past, but in a way that's different from retro fashion). I like learning about old languages that nobody speaks anymore. I like having the kind of facial hair not seen in public office or the financial sector for over a century. I have been told that I was born anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries too late. BUT. I like these things for their novelty. My homemade clothing is based on costume. I don't really want those times to come back; I just like the look of parts of them. And I certainly never wanted all the cool people to be wearing what I want to wear.
I sound even to myself like a whiny hipster complaining about mainstream society ruining what was once cool (see my previous post for my views on hipsterdom), but the real root of my problem with this whole thing occurred to me on Halloween: if all I wear is costume-type stuff, then whenever I want to wear a costume, it feels no different from wearing my normal clothes. I have always loved Halloween because it allowed me to dress up like and pretend to be someone I'm not. I've always been slightly uncomfortable in my own skin, and so being someone else for a day was incredibly exciting. Now, though, despite having all this crazy stuff to wear, it's not exciting because I wear it all the time. So it turns out that I have ruined Halloween for myself.
When I started sewing, I never intended to wear what I made day-to-day; I intended it to be costume. I'm not saying I won't keep dressing oddly; I'm a hipster and a nerd and that works for me. I just don't believe the cool people should like the same strange and esoteric things I do. Fifty years of retrospective fashion is long enough. It's time for a change.
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