Inspiration

[sipang]

It's just not that interesting. Sure, guys like Shuit & co. always look good but posting that stuff in here feels so literal and a bit impersonal and lame, it's 2nd hand inspiration from predigested aesthetics. It turns this thread into a lazy "how would you like to dress" thing and brings it one step closer to the rampant consumerism and shoppinglists galore so prevalent in most sw&d threads.

This is the one place when you can make abstraction of brands and labels and everything else, not saying you should post about how inspiring old brick walls are but high fashion is already incestuous enough as it is (and tumblrs circle jerks), don't feed the machine. This is how civilisations die. Look outwards and prosper.

 

[sipang]

 

[slstr]

It's just not that interesting. Sure, guys like Shuit & co. always look good but posting that stuff in here feels so literal and a bit impersonal and lame, it's 2nd hand inspiration from predigested aesthetics. It turns this thread into a lazy "how would you like to dress" thing and brings it one step closer to the rampant consumerism and shoppinglists galore so prevalent in most sw&d threads.

This is the one place when you can make abstraction of brands and labels and everything else, not saying you should post about how inspiring old brick walls are but high fashion is already incestuous enough as it is (and tumblrs circle jerks), don't feed the machine. This is how civilisations die. Look outwards and prosper.

While I agree with 90% of what you said, the basis of this forum IS rampant consumerism, whether we like it or not. It's a fashion forum and that's what we tend to visit here to post/read about; well dressed people, great clothes, etc.

That being said your posts bring a breath of fresh air to this thread and the forum, but I think it's kind of stupid to be getting fed up of rampant consumerism on a forum that is centred around that very thing.

 

[LA Guy]

I like Sipang's original idea for this thread - it was actually the idea behind my apparently dormant "landscapes of the mind" thread. Don't get me wrong, I love shopping, and feeling great material, and seeing interesting designer clothes, or just beautiful designer clothing, etc..., but it's an ouroboros after a while. YOu do have to have external stimuli to make something interesting and occasionally amazing.

Here are some more from my California, and explains, to some degree, at least, why I don't wear precious materials, open toed shoes, or anything that can't go through war:

 

[LonerMatt]

I've always found guitars, and instruments in general, to be pretty inspiring. Not in the sense that I try to emulate a guitar when I dress, but more that the artistic/aesthetic nature of the instruments informs how I think about appearances, visuals, etc.

From the very extreme, almost severe styling of luthiers like Matsuda:



To the almost overtly cartoonish painting skills of Jens Ritter:



To some inverted colour schemes:


I find the way an instrument is constructed and put together increibly thought provoking, inspiring and generally ******* awesome.

This extends to an interest in how many performers put together a show, some of my favourite performers obviously put a great deal of thought into presentation, visuals, aesthetic, etc. All of which creates a pretty interesting and intense effect on how I view what's 'cool'.

From smoked out, loud, dirty and intense performers like Boris:



TO weird, eerie, cutting edge strnage Porcupine Tree:


To the reckless abandon and intense mastery that is Hiromi Uehara



..but like Fok, I also find scenery quite inspiring, which is one of the reasons national geographic's website is ******* amazing: great quality, great images:

Sparse, desolate, and fragile is what I find particularly provocative:






...and, of course, the ocean is perhaps the most amazingly thing of all. Spending summer's swimming and surfing along some amazingly dramatic and quiet beaches. Growing up near the ocean, walking past it every day, well it is important:



I could write a lot more, but I think the pictures make the best case. None of these things directly makes me want to dress a certain way that often (with the exception of visiting a place), but each one moves me and excites me in different ways, and when I look at what people are wearing online, or face to face, often I'm excited in the same way - there's something intruiging about appearances, for me.

 

[1969]



I like Sipang's original idea for this thread - it was actually the idea behind my apparently dormant "landscapes of the mind" thread.

The thread was started years ago by someone else and makes it clear that this is the place to look fashion in the eye, as opposed to Coming Soon or the Landscape threads which are more oblique. I do agree that face value fashion photos don't show much originality but maybe this isn't the thread to make the point that you dress a certain way because of a Francis Bacon exhibit.

 

[sipang]

But threads evolve over time, for example SOON has strayed from its original purpose and is now a dump for quick posts about cool stuff without much (after)thought, but yeah that's the kind of obliqueness I wish it had fostered. I do think that kind of stuff has its place here too however and I find the two posts above enjoyable for the insights and fresh POV they bring. But for the record, I'm not at all against fashion posts in here (not that it matters...), I just think that inspiration is about imagination and the weird and personal connections our brains make between a diversity of stuff we're interested in. When you post a waywt or a pic from a lookbook/collection or an item from a webstore without explanation or context I'm going to assume it's the whole look or aesthetic or whatever you're inspired by and I just don't see any room for imagination or personal expression in that, someone else already did all the work. It's sterile ground. And as Fok said, the whole thing starts to eat itself out after a while and you're left with copies of copies of copies without substance, each poorer than the last.

Now if you post an outfit and post about how you like how the trousers interact with whatever or how it makes you want to incorporate belts or how the leather of CCP derbies makes you think of blablabla, that's an other story entirely, there's a POV, there's a thought.

And fashion is also so much more than designer-fashion only.

To bring this full circle, I guess what sometimes annoys me is not so much the rampant consumerism mentioned earlier but the fact that there's nothing else. For the most part, people seem content posting about buying stuff, owning stuff, salivating about stuff GRAILS GRAILS GRAILS and that's it. If this is indeed a fashion forum, shopping is only part of the equation. The boring part.


I'll be here all summer fighting windmills, thank you.

 

[spacepope]

John Divola - Isolated Houses series, 1995-1998.









Kurdish religious dancing ceremony (???)

I grew up outside of Boulder, Colorado, the spawn of two semi-reformed-hippy artists. I'd definitely call my neighborhood suburban, but we lived in a bungalow from the 1920's with art deco appliances, ancient furniture, a basement I still believe to be haunted, a huge back yard, and a 90-something neighbor who burned her garbage, called my dad "kid," and generally took no **** from nobody. In classic form my parents didn't really let me watch TV, play videogames, or do the cool **** other kids my age were doing. So while I did live my early life in a suburb, I lived it in this funky bubble of granola, gardening, bug catching, hiking, etc. etc. Some of my most vivid memories are walking along dirt trails and finding rattlesnakes or deer, or staring out the window while I drove with my dad up into the mountains, through tundra and huge clouds, this sense of scale and vastness and desolation that I don't think I ever appreciated until my parents divorced and I moved with my mom to a grimy, wonderful east coast city. A couple summers ago I drove with my dad out to the Great Sand Dunes, where we camped for a night. Neither of us could sleep so we walked out to this very shallow river that ran on the edge of the dunes and just stared up at the sky. As soon as the sun rose we climbed the dunes. The next night we camped up in the mountains and I woke up in the dead of night to wolves howling right outside our tent. While I definitely consider myself a city boy there's something there I love so much, the emptiness and dryness and rugged life of Southern Colorado, the strangeness of the mountains, almost as if you're moving through a different continent, something not so different from the ocean just an hour's drive from Providence.

Only half-sure about what this has to do with fashion. I write a lot and in my writing I take most of my inspiration and subject matter from my environment. Clothing is the same way. When I wore a lot of EG and geeked out over Kapital I suppose I was trying to channel those crunchy, outdoorsy elementary school years. When I wore a lot of Devoa (nice aesthetic jump bru) I suppose I was trying to reflect the city. Now, while I still wear some Devoa and while I still definitely geek out over Kapital I'm more interested in Damir and The Viridi-Anne some of the rawer M.A+/Carpe Diem/Zam/artisanal brands. Maybe a reflection of those landscapes my father drove me across? I remember my mother pointing out a fox in the dead of winter, bright orange in the snow, as it ran into the rotting door of an abandoned barn. Maybe something there? I can't say that those years of my life were the happiest, but they were my childhood, and how could times like that not be formative, even to something like fashion?

Also bonus pics:


Very young, pointing out passing train. That was the neighborhood I lived in. The mountain directly above me was the site of many a hikes.


A little older, on the left. In Wesport, MA. Ten minute walk through a cornfield to the beach. visvim/wtaps/eg/birks

 

[Ivwri]

Here's some stuff that has been on my mind recently. Pardon any rambling (I am making this up as I go along right now).

I have found myself more often than not, trying to capture a particular vibe in my approach to everything I am doing these days. Design, creative direction, reading, interacting with my family etc. and I have been trying to capture it in the way I dress. It is not something I can put into words easily, but I guess I would say it is a bit like wanting to have a bit more control of my own narrative...not in the sense of having a "direction" or what have you, but to have even a just an inkling more awareness of my place in the whole scheme of things. Nigeria is a cool place to be in because so much that I see people take for granted elsewhere (primarily off the continent itself) is absent. There is inspiration out there. There are artists, poets, writers, musicians, athletes etc that have passed on from being just people and have almost become myths and legends in their own right. These things allow one to populate their mind space with pretty cool **** that further informs their own progress as human beings. That kind of stuff is almost completely absent here and the raw materials to create some are pretty hard to come by. So, I resort to looking outwards.

Recently however, I realised that maybe one could generate myth by using people in the present instead of from the past. It is possible to act like a character in some mythological cycle and affect your own narrative and kind of make it inspiring to yourself by the way you act on a daily basis. Of course, this leads into how one dresses. Characters in myth are always represented symbolically and their clothing is a strong part of this. Colours, the actual items of clothing themselves, accessories, weapons, all of these things plug into the overall myth. It got me looking at myself in a different way and now I am trying to conjure a representation of myself that can serve as a baseline for creating even cooler stuff in the future. Having a daughter has made me think a lot more about what kind of environment I am creating for her to grow up in and I think that sort of responsibility means I should be more particular about how I interface with the world and myself.

This ties into clothing too of course and while I am definitely still wearing a lot of Yohji (because he ties into this very neatly for me), it has also gotten me very interested in brands like Cherevichkiotvichki and Aitor Throup among others because they evoke a lot of that mythbuilding process for me. They inhabit a separate world from this one and it is like their various creators are obsessed with bringing them into consensual reality by sheer force of will. I enjoy being part of that process even if it is only by purchasing their goods .

Anyway, inspirations -

Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you...Actually, art and magic are pretty much synonymous. I would imagine that this all goes back to the phenomenon of representation, when, in our primordial past, some genius or other actually flirted upon the winning formula of “This means that.” Whether “this” was a voice or “that” was a mark upon a dry wall or “that” was a guttural sound, it was that moment of representation. That actually transformed us from what we were into what we would be. It gave us the possibility, all of a sudden, of language. And when you have language, you can describe pictorially or verbally the strange and mystifying world that you see around you, and it’s probably not long before you also realize that, hey, you can just make stuff up. The central art of enchantment is weaving a web of words around somebody. And we would’ve noticed very early on that the words we are listening to alter our consciousness, and using the way they can transform it, take it to places we’ve never dreamed of, places that don’t exist.

- Alan Moore from this interview

Page from Mike Mignola's utterly amazing "Hellboy in Hell" series

Cover for Daredevil by Chris Samnee (can't remember issue number now)

Ryoji Ikeda's The Transfinite exhibition

Installation for Cherevichkiotvichki by Studio Toogood

Ryoji Ikeda's Test Pattern

Sculpture by Louise Nevelson

Installation by Alafuro Sikoki (RESURGAM)

Variations of incomplete open cubes by Sol LeWitt

Can't remember now...

Daniel Libeskind's devices

Detail of art by Toyin Odutola

Turkish Dervishes

Aitor Throup Sketches

“ ‘I can resolve your perplexity,’ said Fianosther. ‘Your booth occupies the site of the old gibbet, and has absorbed unlucky essences. But I thought to notice you examining the manner in which the timbers of my booth are joined. You will obtain a better view from within, but first I must shorten the chain of the captive erb which roams the premises during the night.’

‘No need,’ said Cugel. ‘My interest was cursory.’ ”

- Jack Vance "Tales of the Dying Earth" (possibly Cugel's Saga specifically)

 

[spacepope]

Recently however, I realised that maybe one could generate myth by using people in the present instead of from the past. It is possible to act like a character in some mythological cycle and affect your own narrative and kind of make it inspiring to yourself by the way you act on a daily basis. Of course, this leads into how one dresses. Characters in myth are always represented symbolically and their clothing is a strong part of this. Colours, the actual items of clothing themselves, accessories, weapons, all of these things plug into the overall myth. It got me looking at myself in a different way and now I am trying to conjure a representation of myself that can serve as a baseline for creating even cooler stuff in the future. Having a daughter has made me think a lot more about what kind of environment I am creating for her to grow up in and I think that sort of responsibility means I should be more particular about how I interface with the world and myself.

This is basically perfect. Awesome post. RIP Vance.




Drop City

 

[LonerMatt]

Excellent quality posts SP and Ivwri, IMO.

Pope - I think you're on to something with the childhood memories/influences. I think it;s uncanny sometimes - I grew up in the 90s thinking baggy clothing, industrial fashion and blacked out intense-o dramatic **** was cool. Now I look at some stuff from CCP, CD, Devoa, etc, etc, etc and I'm like "**** yeah, so bad ass, look at how cool that MF is" - and it's just a fulfillment and maturation of things that grabbed me when I was small.

The same way walking with my Mum in the Italian part of town and seeing all the businessmen impressed me, and seeing someone just wearing a suit properly is still pretty special, despite how often I see it on the internet.

I guess what I'm suggesting is that, for some, inspiration/history plant seeds and ideas and clothing can allow those to come to fruition. To me, that's pretty awesome, that I can use clothing to play out fantasies, dreams and ideas.


...or maybe I'm overthinking things and am a total wanker. Who knows!?

 

[slstr]

Really great posts here, glad to see this thread getting more attention.

This interview with Luca Laurini has really changed the whole way I look at clothing, art and a whole load of other stuff recently, he has such a great way of designing:


Quote:

By real world Laurini means the world of tangible things that humans can experience. When it comes to clothing, the experience of the wearer comes first. “I trust people, a real way of living and not the image. I don’t like it when people are just showing off a garment. If a person is truly comfortable with the garment, they can express themselves through it, because it becomes a part of them. It’s a matter of the wearer’s personality working together with the garment. I don’t like the mindless following of trends. To wear something because other people are wearing [it] is shallow. I prefer people who really want to communicate themselves, not the brand they are wearing. You can buy a garment in a flea market, or take it from your father’s closet, or buy it at an exclusive boutique, but you have to feel it. Of course, if there is an energy in the garment itself, that feeling becomes stronger. You can wear the simplest thing in the world well, but if you have a strong personality, probably you can communicate with a more complex piece.”
His humble view notwithstanding, Laurini produces some meticulously designed and unconventionally constructed garments. He creates his own fabrics from yarns that he carefully selects from small suppliers around the world, and then goes through an intricate creative process that allows him to manifest complicated ideas. “Every piece is a new project for me,” says Laurini, “There is a lot of research behind it. For example, I am fascinated by mistakes. I think that making mistakes is intrinsically human. But, machines also make mistakes and people tend to get mad at the machines for that. I like that machines can make mistakes. This sweater,” Laurini said as he handed me a brown garment punctured by chalk thread, “is a result of a deliberate exploration of machine-made mistake. The outer side should be completely brown and the inner one chalk color, but all the lines come from a machine using wrong thread tension. This thread reversal happened by chance.” The seismograph effect, as Laurini called it, resulted in the uneven, jerky, and unstable lines that were nonetheless beautiful. They reminded me a little of the fractals of chaos theory. Laurini’s fascination with imperfections resulted in another technique, called “broken-needle.” Indeed, it involved a needle that was snapped at its point, thus having a jagged edge. “On the way to making the garment, you destroy the fabric. If you do it in a precise way, you can achieve interesting results.”
He invited me to examine a tailored dress shirt with a check pattern. The check was not a different color, but a different texture. Laurini explained, “The check is created by needle-broken effect: the needle hooks the fabric and destroys it from the inside, but on the outside it remains unbroken. Thus the check becomes a different texture, which is further emphasized by over-dyeing the shirt with graphite, since the breakages absorb the dye differently from the rest of the shirt.”
The mad-scientist approach is not the only one that Laurini champions. He also likes to think about reusing existing resources. “We are developing a story from recycled materials. For me, fabrics that have a history, the surface that changes through the years possess immediate power. They are old, but we give them a new life. I also like to build new fabrics from old ones.” Laurini handed me a knit blazer that was monochrome charcoal on the outside, but the inside was constructed from different pieces of fabric. I could not figure out how the same fabric could have not only different color and texture, but be continuous on the outside and have a patchwork on the inside. “For this garment,” he explained, “I started from recycling knit pieces, such as pockets, sleeves, and fronts that we initially discarded because these pieces did not pass our quality control. I collected all this material and I made a new fabric, fusing these pieces with a jersey base. This resulted in a new fabric, consisting of two layers. What makes it even more special is that there are no two pieces alike. Each piece has its own personality, just like people.”
To continue with the reuse theme, most of Label Under Construction garments are reversible. In a way, it’s like getting two garments for the price of one. The reversibility is carefully thought out. All tags for each garment come attached to a metal wire that is easily removed from the garment. Because many of the knits are screen-printed, they are often a different color on each side. “Clothes-makers like to hide the inside, but, like with people, the inside is more important than the outside, and I wanted to show that. The knits are perfect for reversibility. Like the body that has no seams, many of my garments are seamless, so you can easily turn them inside out. Or, I make the seam as thin as possible, so it becomes just a line, merely visible to the eye. I collaborate with a screen printer who still uses silk-screening and print one piece at a time, each one comes out different.”
Because Laurini insists on this complexity, he is finding himself in a privileged position of an experimenter. “When I start a new project, I don’t think, ‘I have to sell this’. I just follow my heart and my knowledge. Sometimes we sell only three or five pieces of a certain garment, but it would be the one most dear to me. And I am extremely happy that right now we sell a lot of difficult pieces, not just the basic ones.” This is certainly a welcoming statement in a fashion world that, having been beaten into submission by the recession, is becoming increasingly conservative.
The buyers in the showroom seemed to support Laurini’s vision. “I have to control the size of my order,” the buyer from Lift, the iconic Tokyo boutique, said with a smile.

​

 

[zapatiste]



Spoiler: quixotic soliloquy

But threads evolve over time, for example SOON has strayed from its original purpose and is now a dump for quick posts about cool stuff without much (after)thought, but yeah that's the kind of obliqueness I wish it had fostered. I do think that kind of stuff has its place here too however and I find the two posts above enjoyable for the insights and fresh POV they bring. But for the record, I'm not at all against fashion posts in here (not that it matters...), I just think that inspiration is about imagination and the weird and personal connections our brains make between a diversity of stuff we're interested in. When you post a waywt or a pic from a lookbook/collection or an item from a webstore without explanation or context I'm going to assume it's the whole look or aesthetic or whatever you're inspired by and I just don't see any room for imagination or personal expression in that, someone else already did all the work. It's sterile ground. And as Fok said, the whole thing starts to eat itself out after a while and you're left with copies of copies of copies without substance, each poorer than the last.

Now if you post an outfit and post about how you like how the trousers interact with whatever or how it makes you want to incorporate belts or how the leather of CCP derbies makes you think of blablabla, that's an other story entirely, there's a POV, there's a thought.

And fashion is also so much more than designer-fashion only.

To bring this full circle, I guess what sometimes annoys me is not so much the rampant consumerism mentioned earlier but the fact that there's nothing else. For the most part, people seem content posting about buying stuff, owning stuff, salivating about stuff GRAILS GRAILS GRAILS and that's it. If this is indeed a fashion forum, shopping is only part of the equation. The boring part.

I'll be here all summer fighting windmills, thank you.

i used to think this place to be about nothing in particular, often involving music, film, and other inspiration of a visual kind and otherwise, with coverage of items of mutual interest in art, music, film, literature and pretty much anything that inspires us to want to research, write & desire to share with others. i'm not sure about what time the forum/swd has finally stagnated to the point that no conversation of substance occurs any more, the closest being absurd rumors of who will take over where next (no, siki is not going to HL, he's working on some other project but at his own crappy line still, regretting having overlooked Atelier years ago) and i'm not sure what reason there is other than for the management's insistence that the forum was strictly a bar catering to the desires of its patrons -- well if you let a bunch of drunkards rule the land then you shan't expect great returns. anyway that's neither here nor there ...

Kurdish religious dancing ceremony (???)

Turkish Dervishes

i liked your stories, my papal friend. just wanted to humbly inform you that your Kurds were related to those mr. naija posted, the whirling dervishes, stemming from a mystic asceticism spawned ouf of islamic philosophy.

Spoiler: video whence came your stills

***WARNING***
second video is rather graphic and I sincerely hope provides you no inspiration.

A couple summers ago I drove with my dad out to the Great Sand Dunes, where we camped for a night.

a friend of mine just went out there (seems to go every few years, he's from Pueblo but resides farther south where we met in the past)

Spoiler: some photos from Great Sand Dunes

P.S. stick to now "vintage" damir ;-)

And a contribution:
since it seems I'm doing nothing but twiddling my thumbs outside the main arena of discourse here,

 

[1969]



It got me looking at myself in a different way and now I am trying to conjure a representation of myself that can serve as a baseline for creating even cooler stuff in the future. Having a daughter has made me think a lot more about what kind of environment I am creating for her to grow up in and I think that sort of responsibility means I should be more particular about how I interface with the world and myself.

This is, to me, the most interesting question about clothing/culture and something I think about more often as it relates to my own dress. Am I adding to or stripping away? Within western tailored clothing I feel like the window for doing either is pretty limited.

 

[pickpackpockpuck]

shah, you're just sounding cranky now. i'd say discussions of who might take over where next are better than relentless posts about what someone bought/wants to buy, no?

something i think gets left out of the discussion about inspiration, which Ivwri sort of touches on in talking about making a mythology, is that, in addition to creating an image of ourselves that we like, we also try to create an image that we want other people to see. clothes send a message, a loud one if you don't dress like everyone around you. i always find that interesting. there's a lot of discussion of how people want to take from the world around them, but not so often discussion of what they want to put back out to the world.