tohm's Fashion Week (Or 5 things I don't like about fashion): 5

Once again I can't deliver what was promised. I'm going to be positive today. Let's talk reform, how I think clothing should be made. Let's address it in 4 subheadings drawing on this weeks prior complaints:

Increased Mutation:

If you accept and are preturbed by the high fidelity with which fashion is spread globally, then chances are you have devised a bunch of solutions already. But let's talk process - the clothing design starts with you. Remember that even genetics is basically binary, we are the sum of a trillion on/off switches that have created all the mutations that are not only present in the human species, but all species.
So why not start with you? You're somebody, and you occupy a space that is impossible for anyone else to occupy.
Question: By what divine intervention did all the renaissance masters gather in Florence (Firenze) during the renaissance? No divine intervention necessary. Mayhaps a genius like Da Vinci is rare, but you would find in a sample of every million or so, people that are 1/1,000,000 and many of the renaissance masters, were perhaps even less. What's the point?
There is no need to direct your attention towards New York, Paris, London, Tokyo in the hope they are going to say something interesting about fashion. Start with yourself. What do you do? Who do you like? What qualities attract you in other people? Where do you feel you are lacking? Who do you want to be? (dangerous path, globalisation wise, please don't say 'someone from Brooklyn!') where did you grow up? What sports do you play?
Do you see how mutated you are from the fictitious concept of 'the norm'? How the fuck is some designer in Paris, London, Tokyo or New York going to guess all your permeatations?
Let your clothing start with you. Sure a designer of some renoun already may be able to create something you would like to wear, but that does not disqualify everyone else.
My experience with creatives, is that the good ones love to work, love their work, and love you for giving them an opportunity to work. They'll wince and bluff when they try to quote you for the job, because they are desperate to blurt out they'll do it at any price just so long as they get to do it.
Okay maybe that's a little far fetched... word of advice, never treat somebody you want to create something wonderful for you like a bitch/dog/slave.
The qualities you are looking for are 1. someone local. 2. somebody who wants to push themselves. 3. somebody who loves their work. 4. they listen to you, not to trends.
If you cant find people with all 4 qualities, just buy out of season clothing and be happy to be done with style alltogether, by linearly displacing yourself one season behind in time.

Now you need to brief the tailor, here is what you must insist on - 1. that they are making a finished piece not practicing some skill. 2. they are making it for you, you are there most reliable source of information and inspiration to make you happy. and that's it, a one-two punch.
This should promote mutation. And by all means, you need to stop reading the fashion magazines etc. It literally is the case that if someone has taken a photo and put it in a magazine it is already stale. It is already an idea by someone else for somebody else. It is information put their for opinion takers, not opinion makers. Instead read everything else, look at anything else, anything but fashion itself for inspiration.

Full Spectrum Values:

Love yourself first. Stop confusing your dreams and desires too. Write them down, then seperate out each individual achievement. For example - you don't have to be sexy to have a successful career (not even in porn).

Start perhaps with your friends, write down all of them and list the qualities that you find attractive in them. There is this neat reversal trick, where you then write those qualities down about yourself. I.e. if you say 'Jim is a giant of a man' and then write your name 'Eugene is a giant of a man' you'll feel really good about yourself. And it will probably be true.

It's a good way to stop yourself from being sidetracked by the positive quality of your ideal self that you feel an overwhelming need to emulate (ie. sexual attractiveness) and refocus yourself on the smorgasboard of positive qualities you could be choosing to flavour your clothing. 'Giant' should produce some really interesting clothes.

And like I said, if people were learning to design, start with animals, it's also going to fleshout different positive qualities like 'speed' for a cheetah. 'Dignity' for an elephant, 'humanity' for the great apes and so fourthwards.

Any suit, dress, shirt, or pants 'for all occassions' is going to be some monochromatic garment that claims to make you sexy. There's nothing wrong with being sexy, but there are many roads to Bethlehem, or some shit. Power can be sexy, confidence can be sexy, dignity can be sexy, humanity can be sexy. But plain old 'sexy' needn't necessarily actually be 'sexy' particularly when your pubes crop up over your waste line.

How to Be Interesting:

If you simply do something with your life, the interestingness will take care of itself. Try, fail, try again. What? Anything.

Get control of your time, I don't like the concept 'me time' because it sounds like therapy or recuperative process. If you feel like you are being used up by your day to day existence, don't put on a mask or outfit to try and cover it up.

Career going nowhere? Ditch it. Embrace as Germaine Greer says 'Insecurity as freedom', people get into property to give themselves security, I have never met a person who owns a mortgage that radiated security outwards to me. At best they were normal like a renter. Many are more stressed and feel trapped and that's the sad ass truth of it.

This one is a bit negative and it's hard to not be negative when trying to come up with ways to 'not steal other people's identities'. I guess positively it is simply embracing the fact that any attempts to outwardly emulate your role model without adopting their inner traits is doomed to fail. To be a hollow shell of what they represent.

So here's where to start. Buy the plainest outfit you can imagine. Think of it as a 'white room' then over time accumulate your clothing, and subsequently your style when your life demands it. Just as you would gradually be given crap, forced to buy crap for school, and so fourth that would assemble seemingly randomly in your room, how you would pick up books that are interesting, borrow shit and never return it and have ex's leave clothing in your closet just before a very bitter breakup - your clothing will do this too.

Fact 80% of the shirts I wear are gifts from other people. 10% are the promotional shirts that come from events I ran in and the rest I actually bought myself (about 1 a year). It's a great way to accumulate a style, because every gift is a communication about you potentially originating from a blind spot. One caveat though, be weary of partners who buy you clothes in an attempt to 'smarten you up' or otherwise change you. They may be dressing you as their 'ideal' partner, not dressing you as a genuine friend.

Dressing From You:

Here is an abbridged version of 'Horstman's Wager' for job interviews - you the interviewee hopeful for a job offer have two choices 1) be yourself. 2) pretend to be somebody else. Likewise the recruiting officer has two choices A) offer you a job. B) Take a pass.

You end up with:

1A: Offered the job for being yourself - result you love your job and your job loves you.
1B: Rejected from job for being yourself - you successfully avoided a job that wasn't right for you.
2A: Offered the job for pretending to be someone you are not well. You have a job! But you hate it and it hates you.
2B: Rejected for job for pretending to be someone you are not well/poorly. You have no job, and you'll never know whether you would have gotten the job and loved it if you had just been yourself.

Freedom for any individual involves going with option 1. The recruiter will never know whether you are or not, until time passes and it becomes clear you were the right candidate for the job.

Dating is the same, dressing is the same. You have the same two choices. 1) Be yourself. 2) Pretend to be somebody else.

Always, always pick 1. You don't have to apologise for your existence. The only way you can get satisfaction from any other person on earth is as yourself. You cannot Hannah Montana it.

Don't dress like bait on a hook for any old fish to come along. Dress like the fish, or better yet, the fisherman. Either way you would be an enlightened consumer.

Never put on clothing to make yourself invisible, to apologise, or because it will make you more pallatable to somebody else. There is no universal pallet. Some people like durian, others hate it. Some men like armpit hair on a girl, some people hate it. The question is: Do you like it?

Secondly, be conscious, as conscious as you can be of what you consume and why. Keep a journal, your very on fashion journal, and complete this simple sentence:

'I want to wear [item] because [reason]' and be honest as you possibly can. Don't trust yourself, question it.

For example you write 'I wear foundation because it offers SPF protection and keeps my skin relaxed' when you should be writing 'I wear foundation because I feel ugly and can't confidently show my face in public'.

If you do this, you will over time make more intrinsic and informed choices about what you wear and why. And fashion will start to follow. You'll start noticing when people are selling you insecurity instead of security. Like people eventually learn mortgages create stress not peace of mind. (I assume).

Bonus tohm's fashion design school curriculum:

Say you are a designer, not just a consumer. How can I set myself apart (hopefully so I'm not running shows in Paris, London, New York and Tokyo).

Year 1 - character design.

I give you random animals, and you have to design outfits for them. Be they sphere, oblong, crustacean or otherwise. You make no clothes (I wouldn't know how to teach it anyway) then we move onto comic book character design. Here we segue from cartoony animals to cartoony people, and look in depth at the various geometric shapes and motiv's that go into character design for cartoons and comic books.

Year 2 - clothing for people.

6 months of life drawing kicks it off. This is to shake up the concept of beauty. When you start drawing people beauty inverts. The hardest and most tedious people to draw are pretty young girls. You have to omit pretty much every line on the surface of their body, and their bodies are boring, being a smooth collection of 6 to eight curves. People who life draw see a lined old hobo's face and fall in love. I want my designers to experience this.
Second semester you actually meet some people. 6 random people, selected for a variety of heights, shapes, ages and interests. You have to interview them in depth, find their most positive qualities and design a set of clothes for them. Again I wouldn't know how to teach someone to actually make clothes, but presumably we could hand the sketches over to somebody who can and they could haphazardly make the clothing for the people.

Year 3 - Materials and shapes.

Hopefully by then I would have been able to read up on the technical aspects of clothing materials, and also look at more purely geometrical concepts of design. Like what vertical stripe patterns do vs horizontal and so fourth.
This would be the year to embue more architectural ideas into the students so they can innovate and better problem solve, now that they have well and truly had the fundamental process of beginning with the person who wears the clothes drummed into their brain.

That's it, fashion week over. It was fun.