It still all looks like a joke to me.
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Alexander McQueen F/W 12.13 Paris
- Thread starter christian zh
- Start date
It still all looks like a joke to me.
O
olpi
Guest
What is this?!? 
D
Deleted member 130879
Guest
I love the skull-clasp clutches and the accessories (Except for some purses). But the commercial collection looks like McQ. That t-shirts look UGLY. Thou, I like the commercial dresses and the pink jacket...and I hate pink.
Tentacl Ventricl
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I want to suggest that sometimes when a collection gets panned on this site that in fact the negative reception may indicate that something interesting, something new, perhaps significant, is to be discovered in the designer's offering that season. And that that is what has occured here.
I first need to make several points about the nature, now, of fashion criticism. Or, better, we might say, fashion evaluation.
The internet, of course, democratises everything. In terms of 'open access fashion discourse' all have a stake because everyone wears clothes, everyone has a body. This open access is fascinating, I wouldn't seek to change it for the world. But it does mean a skew toward evaluation based, ultimately, on an overemphasis on criteria of wearability. The imagined shopping trip, game of dress-up, expression of one's particular sartorial tastes at that particular time.
That's fine and dandy for commercial collections but let's judge collections on their own terms? If a collection is editorial, conceptual, directional, in it's intent, saying you don't like it because you couldn't/wouldn't wear it is entirely meaningless. You're not meant to wear it. The runway samples in the McQueen AW12/13 collection is case in point: backstage there is a whole other set of garments converted for retail. What we saw on the runway should not be assessed on grounds of wearability.
When someone says they don't 'like' something- on initial gut reaction first sighting- it means more often than not that it's something unfamiliar to them. I believe that quite a few people are coming round to what we might call 'The Balenciaga effect': that with Ghesquiere's work, it's wise to give it time and repeated viewing and dare I even say, thought, because that initial reaction that the looks were somehow too weird, strange, unpalettable to the eye, will, in time, be replaced by a change, a shift in our eye, our appreciation of what fashion is. Fashion, and our eye, does change. It sort of has to?
So, sometimes, where the consensus in terms of initial critical reception on here is negative, the reflective amongst us might do well to look and think because strange and unfamiliar to most people as it was, the collection in question may well turn out to be one of those directional eye changers.
When, as with Sarah Burton, there's house legacy in the mix, there's an additional albatross. Lack of faithfulness to the spirit of the founder runs the easy quip. Yet it does seem to have been widely accepted, and approved of, in Sarah's collections to this point that Sarah's work has a more feminine slant than Lee's. So as critics we will accept some measure of change/adaption. That this is Sarah's most 'feminine' collection to date I don't think is the problem for the critics. The difficulty lies in this being her most conceptual collection to date. Lee was a conceptual designer, a designer's designer, a directional designer. So conceptualism is an integral part of the legacy of the house. I almost don't want to go to the point that perhaps we won't allow women to be conceptual. I do believe we're beyond that. But certainly there's a well documented history running across the arts of such a bias. I hope that bias is now consigned to history.
With radically altered pieces backstage for retail, the runway samples themselves have a life confined to the mediated world from show to editorial to collectors item to, perhaps, museum. If, that is, they come to be seen as works of art. Sarah hasn't yet said a great deal about inspirations/meaning/claim to art. But just enough for secondary commentators such as ourselves to fill in the gaps.
''Pods'' ''Exploding'' we're asked to consider. That the central point to which our eye is drawn at/near the waist is fashioned in silver metalic and the presence of the visors, leads to an evocation of something cosmic. Nature - fur, feather - bursting out from a central point or 'pod'. The inference is that the creation of the universe, the big bang, god, or creation itself, is gendered feminine.
Importantly this is much wider than merely worshipping the feminine as the creator of human life in the biological giving birth to babies sense. It's all too easy whenever, as now, silhouettes turn more curvaceous - nipped in waists, volume at the hip, breast, anywhere, everywhere, else, to be taken off into a critique that what that amounts to is a conservative biological determinism. There's a sense in which that very thought, that very way of equating silhouettes is a sexism in and of itself. There is no necessary connection, is there?, between proferring a shapely form and seeing that as a desire in women to return to domesticity.
Rather, in drawing attention to the waist (or womb), we can posit woman as creator, driver, in a more general cosmic sense. ''Optimism'' also says Sarah. And clearly this is optimism in and of women. Women and the West? Right now when viewed from the male perspective of 'growth' there could be questions there. But perhaps in the contemporary West, where, relative to more 'antiquated' societies, women have acquired approaching equal powers with men, something entirely fundamental has changed not just with regards economies but life in general.
And when, dear wearer, you come to nip in your waist. And enjoy volume elsewhere in your silhouette. It doesn't necessarily have to evoke some sort of nostalgia for 40's/50's/80's, nor that you are defined either 'for men' or as having a solely reproductive and/or domestic function. Whilst it is still an association which needs deconstructing, that is far too narrow a signification and Sarah Burton has offered you something entirely wider, figuratively speaking, in her most conceptual work to date.
To conclude I wish to consider fashion's status as an art form. This notion that I derive that there's a statement available here of the universe, creativity itself, to be seen as gendered feminine - I'm not sure that philosophy or art contains such an assertion. Julia Kristeva or Judith Butler may have come close. As perhaps distinct from sculpture, painting or performance art, fashion's necessary association with the body allows it to speak from and of the body. It must necessarily engage with difference. As such we may say that it is the art form which most readily speaks to and of gender. And here, in this collection, Sarah Burton may well have created that rarest of all things - a statement that is original, profound and useful.
I first need to make several points about the nature, now, of fashion criticism. Or, better, we might say, fashion evaluation.
The internet, of course, democratises everything. In terms of 'open access fashion discourse' all have a stake because everyone wears clothes, everyone has a body. This open access is fascinating, I wouldn't seek to change it for the world. But it does mean a skew toward evaluation based, ultimately, on an overemphasis on criteria of wearability. The imagined shopping trip, game of dress-up, expression of one's particular sartorial tastes at that particular time.
That's fine and dandy for commercial collections but let's judge collections on their own terms? If a collection is editorial, conceptual, directional, in it's intent, saying you don't like it because you couldn't/wouldn't wear it is entirely meaningless. You're not meant to wear it. The runway samples in the McQueen AW12/13 collection is case in point: backstage there is a whole other set of garments converted for retail. What we saw on the runway should not be assessed on grounds of wearability.
When someone says they don't 'like' something- on initial gut reaction first sighting- it means more often than not that it's something unfamiliar to them. I believe that quite a few people are coming round to what we might call 'The Balenciaga effect': that with Ghesquiere's work, it's wise to give it time and repeated viewing and dare I even say, thought, because that initial reaction that the looks were somehow too weird, strange, unpalettable to the eye, will, in time, be replaced by a change, a shift in our eye, our appreciation of what fashion is. Fashion, and our eye, does change. It sort of has to?
So, sometimes, where the consensus in terms of initial critical reception on here is negative, the reflective amongst us might do well to look and think because strange and unfamiliar to most people as it was, the collection in question may well turn out to be one of those directional eye changers.
When, as with Sarah Burton, there's house legacy in the mix, there's an additional albatross. Lack of faithfulness to the spirit of the founder runs the easy quip. Yet it does seem to have been widely accepted, and approved of, in Sarah's collections to this point that Sarah's work has a more feminine slant than Lee's. So as critics we will accept some measure of change/adaption. That this is Sarah's most 'feminine' collection to date I don't think is the problem for the critics. The difficulty lies in this being her most conceptual collection to date. Lee was a conceptual designer, a designer's designer, a directional designer. So conceptualism is an integral part of the legacy of the house. I almost don't want to go to the point that perhaps we won't allow women to be conceptual. I do believe we're beyond that. But certainly there's a well documented history running across the arts of such a bias. I hope that bias is now consigned to history.
With radically altered pieces backstage for retail, the runway samples themselves have a life confined to the mediated world from show to editorial to collectors item to, perhaps, museum. If, that is, they come to be seen as works of art. Sarah hasn't yet said a great deal about inspirations/meaning/claim to art. But just enough for secondary commentators such as ourselves to fill in the gaps.
''Pods'' ''Exploding'' we're asked to consider. That the central point to which our eye is drawn at/near the waist is fashioned in silver metalic and the presence of the visors, leads to an evocation of something cosmic. Nature - fur, feather - bursting out from a central point or 'pod'. The inference is that the creation of the universe, the big bang, god, or creation itself, is gendered feminine.
Importantly this is much wider than merely worshipping the feminine as the creator of human life in the biological giving birth to babies sense. It's all too easy whenever, as now, silhouettes turn more curvaceous - nipped in waists, volume at the hip, breast, anywhere, everywhere, else, to be taken off into a critique that what that amounts to is a conservative biological determinism. There's a sense in which that very thought, that very way of equating silhouettes is a sexism in and of itself. There is no necessary connection, is there?, between proferring a shapely form and seeing that as a desire in women to return to domesticity.
Rather, in drawing attention to the waist (or womb), we can posit woman as creator, driver, in a more general cosmic sense. ''Optimism'' also says Sarah. And clearly this is optimism in and of women. Women and the West? Right now when viewed from the male perspective of 'growth' there could be questions there. But perhaps in the contemporary West, where, relative to more 'antiquated' societies, women have acquired approaching equal powers with men, something entirely fundamental has changed not just with regards economies but life in general.
And when, dear wearer, you come to nip in your waist. And enjoy volume elsewhere in your silhouette. It doesn't necessarily have to evoke some sort of nostalgia for 40's/50's/80's, nor that you are defined either 'for men' or as having a solely reproductive and/or domestic function. Whilst it is still an association which needs deconstructing, that is far too narrow a signification and Sarah Burton has offered you something entirely wider, figuratively speaking, in her most conceptual work to date.
To conclude I wish to consider fashion's status as an art form. This notion that I derive that there's a statement available here of the universe, creativity itself, to be seen as gendered feminine - I'm not sure that philosophy or art contains such an assertion. Julia Kristeva or Judith Butler may have come close. As perhaps distinct from sculpture, painting or performance art, fashion's necessary association with the body allows it to speak from and of the body. It must necessarily engage with difference. As such we may say that it is the art form which most readily speaks to and of gender. And here, in this collection, Sarah Burton may well have created that rarest of all things - a statement that is original, profound and useful.
Well said.
TianCouture
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If you're going to make such an impactful statement, please back it up with some opinion...I would love to know the logic behind your reasoning...
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