Horse Rotorvator is my favourite Coil album. Sometimes it is the only thing that can dispel the existential chill. The text is from Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Angels. It’s fair to say this song inspired my newest piece, a pin made of salvaged rhinestones and a highly detailed brass wing.
The angelic half-nelson– I think we’ve all been there. This trophy brooch is one of a kind. (Though some have said that angels’ wings can grow back there is yet no forensic evidence of such phenomena.)
My building is on the right. Taken with my mobile phone.
I have a job in the very heart of the city, across the green of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This morning I sat alone on the steps of the cathedral, before the rush of commuters and tourists, listening to the slap of water on the steps. Bucket after soapy bucket the water coursed down, and the man who washes the steps of St. Pauls smiled at me.
My job isn’t very glamorous. There are moments where the monotony can get to you, and your life flashes before your eyes. You have no choice but to luxuriate in the emotional channel-surf/reverie. It’s almost like being high. Or you can look at it that way.
After work, I went to a birthday get-together for a dear friend of mine. The pub was a trendy place full of media professionals. All the people who showed up for the shindig were were fashion designers and fashion-industry media types. I had just come from work sporting my Marks and Spencer synthetic suit, my best attempt at faking a professional face. The men were wearing bespoke suits that cost more than I made in a month.
So I met the social challenge with gusto– I stared at the wall. I was happy the walls were entertaining– filled with posters, a rhino head and naked ladies embroidered on hankies in a faux naive style. I read with irony a green 70′s poster in a circus font:
Tis true my form is something odd, But blaming me is blaming God. Could I create myself anew, I would not fail in pleasing you. If I could reach from pole to pole, Or grasp the ocean with a span, I would be measured by the soul, The mind’s the standard of the man.
a poem attributed to Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man”.
I looked to my lap and was mortified: in this crowd of fashionistas, my fly was open.
A man sat between my friend and I and I decided I’d had enough of the freeze outs from the table; I introduced myself. He asked me what I did, which is the rudest and most suspect of questions a stranger can ask. I told him, I needed money so I got a job in the City. He persisted, “but what do you do.” I said I worked at (insert name of multinational investment banking firm here), and this impressed him. He rubbed his fingers and thumbs together in the universal “moneymoneymoney” sign. I told him the best part of my job was that I got to go to the Tate during my lunch break and I as mumbled something about Cy Twombly I could tell he wasn’t listening anymore. He said, “That doesn’t sound good. The best part of your job is your lunch?”
I think most of the people working in the city could say that, frankly. A lot can be fit in an hour. A lifetime if you try. I make every lunch a pilgrimage. I go to the Tate and visit the Francis Bacon paintings. I sit in the church yard of St. Pauls. I watch detritis go by in the dirty river from my lichen-covered perch on the bank. Tourist season is waning, and I take my lunch late. On gloomy hours like this afternoon, the city and I have bit of privacy. If I listen closely enough it whispers endearments like a stubborn, proud lover.
At lunch, I perch on the bank and watch tourists wobble over the bridge
Image by twinkleboi.com on flickr
Yesterday I was in Ealing where a new Primark has opened. At first I didn’t realize this. I used to live in Ealing where there is a shopping centre which housed a library I would frequent. That library has since closed. When I first saw the huge crowd lounging on the benches in the centre of the outdoor mall I naively thought that maybe the library had opened again.
No one ever used that library. These people were here for Primark, which is a phenomenon. The clothes are dirt cheap– cheaper than most clothing in America, even. More recently the store has been upping its game style-wise, carrying runway inspired clothing with vintage prints and tailoring (if you can call it that). I admit I was very tempted by the 60′s print summer coats and the 80′s-40′s cocktail dresses, but shame won out.
I have never been a “saler”– someone who goes to sales to get a bargain on things they really don’t need. I have read about women fighting over things in sample sales, or adopting competitive shopping attitudes, and this behavior is encouraged in women’s magazines. There is something about the absurd prices in Primark– basically, you can afford EVERYTHING– that brings out a version of this behavior. Except that no one is really fighting with each other– it’s more a private fury. Shoppers wander the isles like mesmerized Augustus Gloops, filling their massive, Primark-provided mesh baskets with £2 tee shirts and £10 dresses.
If there is a true representation of London demographics it can be found in Primark, from the groups of muslim women in hijabs and chadors, Polish families, bored British teenagers and even white, middle-class mums with their heads down. The people leaving with huge bags are not poor– many are fashionistas who no doubt have closets full of clothing already.
Last month, Channel 4 cancelled the airing of the expose documentary, “The Devil Wears Primark” and one has to wonder what the claimed “editorial reasons” were. The opening of any Primark is an event. Could it be that Primark is so successful, that people seem to need this store so badly that they wouldn’t dare spoil the party?
Yesterday as I walked around the disheveled racks, dodging the aggressive, buggy-pushing mums and giggling teens, I saw a woman looking through the shoes while she breastfed her infant. In general I am not against breast feeding in public, but it is a bodily function and hey, the kid is still eating in a store. Does one really need to be shopping while doing this? But it must be the Primark spell cast on even a nursing mother. She of course doesn’t know about or can’t think too long on Primark’s history of child labor.
115 million children are trapped into forced labor in India. It has been documented that beaded clothing in Primark was sewn by children in refugee camps earning 60p a day. Rahila Gupta argues in the Guardian, “Maybe, as with messages on cigarette packets, we should pass legislation to ensure that every item produced in inhumane conditions comes with a warning.” Preferably the warning should be sewn on the outside of the garment.
I love clothing and fashion but it seems like every high street chain is guilty of sweat shop abuses, and this just affirms arguments bloggers like bitsandbobbins have been making, that the future of fashion is not in this cut-rate trend, but in using what you already have in new ways, making your own, and realizing that style is really a personal vision projected onto the self and the rest of the world.
Last night my friend Kate and I hit the V&A late– it was some kind of couture evening, so they had movies, wine, DJ’s and workshops. We went to a pattern cutting workshop taught by knitwear designer Juliana Sissons. She was a pattern cutter for Alexander McQueen. We learned how to make a pattern block and got started on making a corset pattern. She gave us handouts for making a 19th century corset and I hope to attempt making one.
She was a great teacher, but beyond that her knitwear designs were spectacular. This is one of her designs to the left. Here are her designs from London Fashion Week, 2006. Totally inspiring. It made me want to break out of the chunky knitting i’ve been doing and really dive into some lingerie inspired matrix-y sweaters.
We watched most of The Secret World of Haute Couture. The director’s persistence in gaining access to the highly guarded world of designers and their obscenely rich clients was admirable, and the film argued convincingly that this was a dying art, as even rich people are wearing pret-a-porter now. But the hideous women clients and the designers themselves seem to belong to such a rarefied and sychophantic world where starving was openly mentioned numerous times– it was hard to feel convinced by any of it. We found ourselves laughing openly at much of it. After watching countless rich ugly women in ugly clothes, we decided to go get some wine, listen to the DJs playing remixes of 80′s stuff like Bronski Beat and people watch. Maybe it’s time for couture to die, I thought while looking around at the street-wise fashion in the main hall. I love people watching at the V&A– it’s the one place in London where you can count on seeing people dressed in high spirits.
M.I.A.’s new video Boyz. She tried to get “every dancer with a name in Jamaica” in the video. I love her– her music, her 80′s radioactive tropicalismo aesthetic, everything. When I hear her music I think, that’s a London I love– screw the estate agent buckle-down, the “white girl respect your race” knuckleheads on the bus. Somewhere in her music I hear new London’s marching orders, burning up every St. George flag into a day-glo pixel kaleidescope.
Adorable Shopgirl, originally uploaded by velvetdahlia.
Here is a rare creature: a Londoner with personal style. She’s a shop girl at Office on the King’s Road. She had tattoos of red roses on her wrists and said she got her glasses at Spitalfield’s market, “Just go there and ask for Andrew.”
Or, What Damien Hirst’s £50 million skull means to me.
I must confess to never really being compelled by Hirst’s morbid insincerity. When I first saw his suspended calf and sheep, “Away from the Flock” and “Child Divided” in Art Forum in the early 90s, I was repulsed. At the time, I was involved in animal rights quite seriously, but also there was something about his glib approach to suffering that put me off. Now that I live in England, I understand them in a new way, as a comment on an English pastoralism that’s now clouded with the nightmare of foot-and-mouth and mad cow disease. Both catastrophes saw the countryside marked with massive burial pits for livestock.
Of course, if one thinks hard enough about something, one can find meaning. This doesn’t make the something art. While I’m usually up for the carnavalesque sensibility conceptual art often offers, I definitely won’t be queuing for tickets to see For the Love of God.
And who’s skull is it anyway? Some poor 18th century sod whose remains ended up in a London taxidermy shop. Apparently Hirst funded the making of the skull himself, which cost over 26 million to make– assuring the public that the diamonds are “conflict free.” In the most facile sense, the skull is a comment on the “you can’t take it with you” cliche. Ultimately, we’re all meat to Hirst, but a few of us have deep pockets, and this is his universe. When I see pictures of him, I just think “slick, cruel dork.” It makes sense that at this time in history someone so culturally impotent would be rich and famous. I’m sure some people think he’s laughing all the way to the morgue, but the only thing I resent is that his deteriorating body of work will continue to be foisted on us, and eventually it will be his own deteriorated body which will become spectacle. Mark my words– there are probably some obscene conditions in his will: his head in a vitrine, set upon by maggots and flies. Instead of A Thousand Years it could be called Fifteen Minutes.
Perhaps in For the Love of God, Hirst finally admits he’s not only mortal, he’s an art-history faddist stumbling after the zeitgeist. I ask you, how many skulls have you seen this week– on cereal boxes and kid’s sneakers, in the windows of H&M and New Look, on movie posters and chapstick and candy? You can’t walk a foot down the high street without being confronted by a skull on something, usually pink and intended for consumption by a 13 year old girl. Pirates are everywhere, and perhaps it’s fitting that Hirst would choose the most played of images to break the bank. He is a pirate, after all.
He’s not the first to decorate a skull– skull oracles, Aztec skull mosaics– Hirst has acknowledged their influence on the current work. But there is also Hirst’s contemporary, Steven Gregory, to consider. Gregory has been creating bejeweled skulls for some time now. Hirst actually wrote an essay for Gregory’s Skullduggery show catalog, and owns many of Gregory’s skulls.
And this is not the first time Hirst has merely taken someone else’s genuine product and turned it into a high-priced stunt. Stuckism, an anti-conceptual art movement, has argued that Hirst stole the idea for his shark vitrine from Eddie Saunders, “fish artist” and electrician who displayed a very similar shark in his Shoreditch shop window years before Hirst paid someone to catch a shark for him. Unlike Hirst, Saunders caught the fish himself. Stuckism’s photos of both works side by side make quite a convincing argument.
The Guardian quotes Hirst as being satisfied with the final object: “To me it seems gentle, quite soft,” he said of the skull. “I would hope that anybody looking at it would get a bit of hope, and be uplifted. We need to line the world with beautiful things that give you hope.”– proof of either his profound disingenuousness or his own numbskulled delusion.
When I first came to London 8 years ago, the street fashion excited me. Already the 80′s revival was making a quirky come-back, and the cyberdog candy-borg look was in full swing on the streets of Camden.
Now, London street fashion seems nowhere. Maybe I am just older and more jaded? Or perhaps we can blame it all on the demise of rave culture, or the banning of mushrooms as a harbinger of grim new times. Or blame sky-rocketing rents which drive out anyone who lives a life that allows them to express themselves. Who knows.
Just to make sure it wasn’t my own pessimism, I sought out some London Street Fashion blogs. First I found London Street Fashion, and it just confirmed my dismal conclusions. I understand how much work a project like this must be for the documenter, but that won’t stop me from being critical.
Most outfits featured on London Street Fashion are a combination of grey or brown or black or khaki. All oversized, ripped, drooping, hooded. Camo overload! Basically ugly as hell. The editors clearly have a bent against things femme or colorful. Depressingly, this does seem represent what a lot of people are wearing in London. I won’t use a screen capture because in the site’s words, “they don’t play.” But take a look at the grey-hoodie misery. From looking at this site alone, one might falsely assume that everyone dressed in London is under the age of 25 and thin. I’m assuming this is not an active site, because I believe the “Sloane Square Coming Soon” has been up for a year. The “neighborhood” format limits sightings to trendy, expensive neighborhoods and shopping districts, as if the site has also fallen prey to the post code snobbery so prevalent in the capital. I suppose they are going for a Fruits, Shibuya-style focus, but in London people don’t get dressed up to go shopping, so what’s the point?
However, I then found Style Scout, which reflects the London style I actually admire– the demure, the whimsical and subtly wacky. I recognized a shop girl from Carnaby Street featured there, in her signature pink lipstick and pearls.
And then I came across Savvy London and was rather gleeful. Clearly this (also American) blogger is excited by personal style, regardless of the subject’s age or body type. Risk is admired, and each entry carries a delightfully brief narrative.
But on the whole, London is not very inspiring, street-fashion-wise. I was more impressed with Glaswegian style– girls with Biba-black eyes and vintage tweeds, huge rhinestone brooches– men in fitted trousers and elaborate scarves. There are a few flashes of style I see on the street, mainly in the Sikh community here in Southhall– with the mixing of prints, textures and traditions. Or the art school girls mixing it up in Hackney, or a stray man on the tube wearing some Saville Row masterpiece– but on the whole people are stuck wearing the disposable crap from Primark, etc., and nobody’s trying anything new or different. Second hand shopping and even flea markets are, well, sorry-ass. In the words of Tricia Royal, it’s loathian thrifting here in London.
I’ve come to accept that most of London fashion is decidedly top down– Liberty’s anachronistic styling and new designers like Social Suicide Suits may get the blood going, but it’s out of reach of most Londoners. Let’s face it, by the time most of us have paid rent there’s little left for even modest indulgences, much less playful risks. On the whole, the city seems dispirited, and fashion is a barometer of this (One can trace the takeover of San Francisco by dot-commers, as well as the dot-bomb through street fashion, but I digress).
I am of course looking at it all from the bottom up. I live in W7, a nowheresville post code ghetto of immigrants and laborers, not trust fund art students and socialites. London’s working poor have a strong tradition of defiant style, but as I see it, the look on the street at present is nowhere.
Helsinki, with its playful absurdities, puts London to shame.
