monique lhuillier

hello!

inspira and mini - thanks so much for the fiber-optic-hugs. i'm feeling better. loads betta ;)

fashion week came and went. and i'm catching up on my reading of the reviews. did you like it? for what i've seen, i love it.



there was a time when fashion meant nothing to me - i only got to say hello to my style when i was planning my wedding... Guy Trebay's article reminded me of that time. a good memory.

“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural
form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist
literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter
added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are
expected to scorn.

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling
around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is
“very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some
variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re
not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God
forbid.”

I find the part about bodies hauling around brains hilarious. Guy continues,

“Fashion is so easy to hate,” said Elizabeth Currid, a professor at the University
of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development
and the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York
City” (Princeton University Press).

“Cultural industries like fashion are sometimes seen as something
only the skinny girls in high school think about,” said Ms. Currid — and less
often as a fascinating field for cultural study and also the bill-payers keeping
thousands of seamstresses, cutters, pattern makers, truckers, real estate
brokers and publicity hacks employed.

Analyzing Bureau of Labor statistics, Ms. Currid arrived at the
not-altogether-startling conclusion that the densest concentration of fashion
designers in the United States is in New York. A glance at the roster of foreign
designers showing at New York Fashion Week, Sept. 4 through 12 — Russia, Turkey,
India and Brazil are represented — suggests a good reason for that.

“Even if, on some level, fashion is fantasy, the concentration of
events that go into producing it and the resulting social spillover,” as Ms.
Currid said, can result in a huge cumulative economic advantage for a city.
While the seasonal shows in the tents in Bryant Park, with their enforced
passivity and aura of feminine spectatorship, lend themselves to derision,
enforcing the sense that all those fops and dandies and flibbertigibbets, all
the socialite geishas and second-rate celebrities and editorial priestesses are
little more than idlers and dupes, big business goes on. Odds are that the same
journals whose critics score easy points off fashion are economically propped up
by the life-support provided by advertising for dresses and bags and shoes.

One of the most startling findings of her research, Ms. Currid
said, was how powerful something as superficial, girly, bourgeois, unfeminist,
conformist, elitist and frivolous as fashion can be in creating the intangible
allure that attracts money, talent, beauty and enterprise to cities.

For me, I could only start enjoying clothes when I was making my own money - in excess. Style, in my book, is a luxury good. and drool is a by-product.

~exp~

{drool-worthy images of Monique Lhuillier collection from Style.com}