The Culture of Fashion

I've never really been much for fashion. Not that I dislike it, or condescend towards those that do love it, I've just always been a "take what's comfy and clean" kind of girl. However, all of this changed when, for the first time in my life, I flipped through some runway show footage of a wonderfully talented designer by the name of Alberta Ferretti. I was immediately taken by the soft night-time hues of chiffon swimming past the models that seemed to float down the runway, weightless and beautiful. The way the designer used shape, color, texture and movement within the pieces made me appreciate fashion as an art form.

     

Designers put (often times) a great deal of thought and abstract meaning into a collection. Fashion is their greatest form of expression and it allows them to make a profound statement about culture masked under a beautiful, wearable work of art. We live in the dreams of these designers, who work for months on end to construct, perhaps, the most incredible lapse of ten minutes the earth has ever seen. They work to see their dreams, if even for the briefest of moments, captured and appreciated.

So, in celebration of these dreams, here's some of my favorite works of art, beginning with the one that started it all, Alberta Ferretti spring 2010.

 Proenza Schouler Fall 2010

Alexander McQueen Spring 2008

 

Oscar De La Renta Spring 2010

Monique Lhuillier Pre-Fall 2010 

Chloe Spring 2011

Emilio Pucci Spring 2011

Alberta Ferretti Spring 2011

 *Sigh* Pretty.

 Happy Holidays.

-M

The Unlived Life

“For some time passes slowly. An hour can seem an eternity. For others, there’s never enough"


One of my favorite books when I was younger was Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt. I loved the woodland setting of Treegap: the oak trees and shady brooks and open-air grottoes and wildlife scurrying about the forest floor...and Winnie. I loved Winnie. I was young, and she was the picture of innocence, femininity, life and change. I wanted to be Winnie Foster, who ran barefoot through fields of lilies and wildflowers in a billowy white dress and ribboned straw hat. I was Winnie Foster when I read the book, falling in love with Jesse and struggling with the choice between a natural life and and eternal life.


What's more, though, is how the book affected my outlook on life. One of my favorite quotes in the entire book occurs when Old Tuck paddles down the river with Winnie and talks about the choice between death and immortality.


"Look around you, it’s life. The flowers, and trees, and frogs, it’s all part of the wheel. It’s always changing. It’s always growing. Like you, Winnie, your life is never the same. You were once a child, now you are about to become a woman. One day you’ll grow up. You’ll do something important. You’ll have children maybe, and then one day you’ll go out. Just like the flame of a candle. You’ll make way for new life as a certainty. It’s the natural way of things. And then, there’s us. What we Tucks have, you can’t call it living. We just are. We’re like rocks stuck at the side of the stream."
 "I don’t wanna die, is that wrong?"
He shook his head.
 "No human does, but it’s just part of the wheel, it’s part of being born, you can’t have living, without dying. Don’t be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life.”




We are blessed to die and make room for new life; to grow old, to change and grow and develop. We are blessed to die, because it means we lived. What short time we get on this earth is a gift, we can pass through this world and maybe, just maybe, leave something tangible, meaningful in the river as we go out.


To this day I read the book every couple of summers, beginning as school ends and making Winnie's journey through time, living as she lived, if only for a moment in the stream of life.

"Tuck said it to Winnie the summer she turned 15, ‘Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live. And she did."
-M
 
P.S. For a much more eloquently expressed interpretation of these thoughts, I encourage you to go pick up the book: Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.