love letter
Semi-autobiographical love letters addressed to fashion; drawing from personal experiences and recollections on norms and myths within fashion, interwoven with those of others.
From A[lienation] to Z[oen]
Bundled with love.
Sealed with a kiss.
Bundled with love.
Sealed with a kiss.
A curated volume of three single-handed love letters will offer you, the reader/listener, an insight into my personal correspondence with fashion. A system I - as you might come to tell – both love and hate at the same time. The format of love letters manifested itself as leeway for the normative, offering the possibility of an alternative methodology on the intersection of fashion and embodiment. Me taking matters into my own hands to - for once and for all - [re]claim my sense of agency.
Retracing my steps in a postscript, I’ll give an insight into a handful of sources which informed the research I’ve done over the past two years and in turn made for the very format of this thesis, one at every fingertip…
“The Deceptive Mirror: The Dressed Body Beyond Reflection” [2022]
They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life [2023]
Fashion Myths: A Cultural Critique [2013]
Thinking Through Fashion [2019]
A Lover’s Discourse [1978]
Ultimately culminating in the question:
Can you seize LANGUAGE as a matter to go beyond the visual [sur]face of fashion? To give back [a] body to fashion and in turn [re]claim a loving sense of agency for both your body as well as your garments?
As a backdrop for my overall research, I developed a framework which aims to bring together the elements of embodiment, love and LANGUAGE within the realm of fashion:
the consumer CAGE and its magnetic MYTHS
caged in by TIME [memory] and SPACE [movement]
memory - - - TIME
bodies/garments/thoughts, when considered relevant?
or better, up until when?
movement - - - SPACE
bodies/garments/thoughts, taking up space,
preferably as little as possible
the body sentenced to a restricted sense of embodiment
by means of conspicuous LANGUAGE
Informed by three out of five alleged love LANGUAGES, each letter addresses an element of this metaphorical framework - respectively TIME [memory], SPACE [movement] and LANGUAGE - which lend themselves very well to the construct of love letters.
Love Letter I – individual.collective.muscle MEMORY [quality time]
Love Letter II – MOVEMENT of bodies.garments.thoughts [physical touch]
Love Letter III – written.spoken.body LANGUAGE [words of affirmation]
Whereas to some extent LANGUAGE - in how it’s applied in fashion - can be considered the antidote to all things rational, here I tried to seize it precisely as the antidote to what initially felt like this all-consuming, overwhelming sense of alienation. Ultimately to unfold into a genuine sense of love.
From A[lienation] to Z[oen]
Bundled with love.
Sealed with a kiss.
At odds with the visual rigidity reigning in the dominant fashion system, I do believe there to be a hidden eloquence and power of multitude to fashion. A stepping stone to affect – the emotive, sensorial - which according to Eugénie Shinkle “[…] resists critique and lacks a precise theoretical vocabulary.”[2] However, this by nature norm-defying feature could well be the reason as to why fashion is so reluctant to affect, as fashion as a system thrives off of norms - albeit shifting ones. Hence fashion in the letters being addressed as Norma[n]. Precisely this denial of what we could identify as affect, informed the very format of this thesis. My emotional [im]balance given free rein. Whether unilateral or reciprocal letters, that is for you as reader/listener to uncover in the written/spoken tissue of my being. As well as the answer to the proposed question:
Can you seize LANGUAGE as a matter to go beyond the visual [sur]face of fashion? To give back [a] body to fashion and in turn [re]claim a loving sense of agency for both your body as well as your garments?
Written as semi-autobiographical letters, I hope to have compiled a compelling bundle of love letters that show the eloquence of LANGUAGE when availed instead of adhered to. For you to hear echoes of yourself in the letters, to feel heard and in turn intrigued to reach for your pen yourself.
From the growing addendum of love letters – of which the aim was to foster and rekindle relationships between people and their actual garments - it becomes apparent just how difficult fashion can turn out to be, but equally just how uncomplicated. Once we start to eliminate any excess noise - which in this case would be the dominance of the gaze [both of yourself and of others] – we are granted a preview of what it could [and dare we say, should] be like: wearing for oneself and oneself alone. The [sensorial] self ever at the heart of fashion, to literally wear your heart on your sleeve.
[PS]
June.2024
MA critical fashion practices.artez
... thesis