A colleague of mine gave me a copy of this past weekend’s Financial Times. This is not a newspaper that I read often. In fact, I read it very seldom. In particular she wanted to share with me an article by Vanessa Friedman that remarked on the ability of a movie like the Hunger Games to satirize the difficult-to-poke-fun-of fashion industry.
The thing that was exceptionally refreshing about the way the piece was written was that Friedman didn’t really remark on the clothes. She didn’t even really talk about the designers involved in the construction of the costumes. She was more interested in the way fashion was used in the movie as a way of creating a parallel to relevant things today: the 99%, the oligarchs, one can survive merely by getting by through image (and an able stylist).
To be honest, I don’t exactly follow fashion discourse. I read the Cathy Horyns of the world and trace the thread of trends, but beyond that, I’m not one to actively engage with fashion in a way that’s overly theoretical. (There are exceptions, as with a lot of the Japanese designers like Junya Watanabe, Rei Kawakubo, and Issey Miyake; Viktor & Rolf; Alexander McQueen; Rodarte; among others.) The way Friedman wrote about the impossibility of satirizing a world that’s at the pinnacle of all satirical potential, then relating it to image and the first lady of the UK—all that was pretty neat.
I moved on to an article about the Maastricht fair. The writer made a reference to Frieze in a way that anticipated and/or assumed the audience’s knowledge of Frieze. You could never do that in the US. An explanation would be required.
* Yes, I’ve had a drink after work every evening since Monday. I don’t do this much. Alcohol does make me way more loquacious (in real life and on the Internets). Please excuse any grammatical fumbles you see.