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  • laika
    moderator
    • Sep 2006
    • 3787

    Quotes About Fashion and Clothes



    [From The Book of Disquiet. This is amazing, and rather appropriate to this forum, I think.]
    </p>

    <p class="MsoNormal">"I'm in a trolley, and, as is my habit, I'm slowly
    taking notice of the people sitting around me. For me details are things,
    words, sentences. I take apart the dress worn by the girl in front of me: I
    turn it into the fabric that makes it up, the work that went into making it -
    but still I see it as a dress and not cloth - and the light embroidery and the
    work involved in it. And immediately, as in a primer on political economy, the
    factories and the labor unfold before me - the factory where the cloth was made,
    the factory where the twist of silk, darker in tone than the dress, was made,
    which went into making the twisted little things in the border now in their
    place next to the neck; and I see the components of the factories, the
    machines, the workers, the seamstresses, my eyes turned inward penetrate into
    the offices, I see the managers trying to be calm, I follow, in the books, the
    accounts involved in it all; but it isn't only that: I see, beyond that, the
    domestic lives of those who live their social lives in those factories and
    those offices ... All of them pass before my eyes merely because I have before
    me, below a dark neck, which on its other side has I don't know what sort of
    face, a common, irregular green edge on a light green dress.



    The entire life of society lies before my eyes.



    Beyond all that I sense the loves, the secret life, the souls of all those who
    worked so that this woman seated in front of me in the trolley can wear around
    her neck the sinuous banality of a band of dark green silk on less dark green
    cloth.



    I become stupefied. The seats on the trolley, made of tightly woven strong
    straw, carry me to distant regions and into multiple industries, workers,
    workers' houses, lives, realities, all.



    I leave the trolley exhausted and sleepwalking. I just lived an entire life."<o:p></o:p></p>

    <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
    ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.
  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    #2
    Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

    I'm smitten. Who is this guy?
    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine

    Comment

    • dontbecruel
      Senior Member
      • Sep 2006
      • 494

      #3
      Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



      I don't speak Portugese and I've never got into reading poetry in translation, so personally I only really know Pessoa from a beautiful quotation on the back of my copy of The Pickwick Papers, which I keep coming back to like a tune you can't get out of your head (the Germans call this an "ear worm"):
      "One of my life's greatest tragedies is to have already read Pickwick papers - I can't go back and read it for the first time"</p>

      Comment

      • laika
        moderator
        • Sep 2006
        • 3787

        #4
        Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



        "One of my life's greatest tragedies is to have already read Pickwick papers - I can't go back and read it for the first time" </p>

        That's beautiful, don'tbecruel. </p>


        [quote user="Faust"]I'm smitten. Who is this guy?
        [/quote]</p>

        He was a Portuguese poet, well known for writing in multiple personalities and under various names. One of the most important poets of this century, I believe. The Book of Disquiet is actually a bunch of prose fragments that were published after his death. Very good stuff. </p>

        Anyway, I suppose this bit could describe any commodity, but I think it's interesting that he chose to express his point in terms of fashion. I like the idea that clothes are encrypted with all this history; and that you could recover the process of their formation/production in this way.</p>

        I suppose such meditations are likely to drive one mad after awhile....</p>

        </p>
        ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

        Comment

        • Faust
          kitsch killer
          • Sep 2006
          • 37852

          #5
          Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

          /\ Laika, I need more stuff like that. It maybe helpful to my thesis. [W]
          Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

          StyleZeitgeist Magazine

          Comment

          • laika
            moderator
            • Sep 2006
            • 3787

            #6
            Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



            From Paul Valéry (Faust, I am going to use this thread to post potentially interesting quotations--hopefully others will contribute also.)</p>

            "[The] patient process of nature was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of thin, transparent layers are placed one on top of the other--all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."
            </p>
            ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

            Comment

            • Faust
              kitsch killer
              • Sep 2006
              • 37852

              #7
              Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

              /\ this is gold. thank you, very helpful!
              Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

              StyleZeitgeist Magazine

              Comment

              • laika
                moderator
                • Sep 2006
                • 3787

                #8
                Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



                One of the central departures for my own project:</p>

                "Fashion's most burning interest for philosophers lies with its extraordinary ability to anticipate...Every season brings in its newest creations secret signals of coming things. Whoever understands how to read them can know in advance not only the newest trends in art, but also about laws, wars, and revolutions. Without a doubt this is fashion's greatest attraction, as well as the greatest obstacle to making it fruitful."</p>

                Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project</p>
                ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

                Comment

                • Faust
                  kitsch killer
                  • Sep 2006
                  • 37852

                  #9
                  Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



                  Thanks. The Arcades is also on the reading list. Is it a big book?</p>

                  P.S. So far what I've been reading is not helpful, including Barthes. It's all sociology, very much reductive.</p>
                  Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                  StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                  Comment

                  • laika
                    moderator
                    • Sep 2006
                    • 3787

                    #10
                    Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



                    Faust, it is absolutely MASSIVE. Not a book that you can carry around with you very easily, and it's really hard to navigate. All fragments. More inspirational than a resource at this point.</p>

                    Yeah, I'm not sure what Barthes can do for you at this point, other than provide a semiotic methodology that you might not want anyway. I think the stuff by the modernists is a lot more fun and a lot more relevant to what you are doing. </p>
                    ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

                    Comment

                    • Faust
                      kitsch killer
                      • Sep 2006
                      • 37852

                      #11
                      Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

                      [quote user="laika"]

                      Faust, it is absolutely MASSIVE. Not a book that you can carry around with you very easily, and it's really hard to navigate. All fragments. More inspirational than a resource at this point.</p>

                      Yeah, I'm not sure what Barthes can do for you at this point, other than provide a semiotic methodology that you might not want anyway. I think the stuff by the modernists is a lot more fun and a lot more relevant to what you are doing. </p>

                      [/quote]</p>

                      Yes, I think so too. They were FUN. Academic writing like Barthes makes me want to kill myself sometimes.</p>
                      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                      Comment

                      • laika
                        moderator
                        • Sep 2006
                        • 3787

                        #12
                        Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



                        Wim Wenders, on first wearing clothes by Yamamoto.</p>

                        "I had bought a shirt and a jacket. You know the sensation you feel when you put on a new garment: you look in the mirror, happy and a bit excited in your new skin. But wearing that shirt and jacket I was different; they were old and new at the same time. In the mirror I was myself, undoubtedly, only I was more myself than before. I had a strange sensation...yes, I was wearing the shirt par excellence and the perfect jacket, and beneath them I was myself. I felt protected, like a knight in his armor."
                        </p>
                        ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

                        Comment

                        • laika
                          moderator
                          • Sep 2006
                          • 3787

                          #13
                          Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



                          Marguerite Duras, from The Lover</p>

                          "I tried on that hat, just for a laugh; I looked at myself in the shop mirror and saw, under that man's hat, the awkward skinniness of my frame, defect of my age, become something else. It ceased to be a crude and fatal fact of nature and became the opposite, a choice running counter to nature, a choice of spirit. I see myself as another, as another would see me, from the outside, available to all, exposed to everyone's gaze, let loose in a circuit of cities, streets and pleasures. I buy the hat. I shall wear it always. Now that I own a hat that completely transforms me, I'll never abandon it."
                          </p>
                          ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

                          Comment

                          • Faust
                            kitsch killer
                            • Sep 2006
                            • 37852

                            #14
                            Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

                            [quote user="laika"]

                            Wim Wenders, on first wearing clothes by Yamamoto.</p>

                            "I had bought a shirt and a jacket. You know the sensation you feel when you put on a new garment: you look in the mirror, happy and a bit excited in your new skin. But wearing that shirt and jacket I was different; they were old and new at the same time. In the mirror I was myself, undoubtedly, only I was more myself than before. I had a strange sensation...yes, I was wearing the shirt par excellence and the perfect jacket, and beneath them I was myself. I felt protected, like a knight in his armor."
                            </p>

                            [/quote]</p>

                            This quote is priceless. I've watched it over and over again.</p>
                            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                            Comment

                            • laika
                              moderator
                              • Sep 2006
                              • 3787

                              #15
                              Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



                              Yes, I think it fits in very well with your line of thought. The Duras is an interesting counterpoint--it is almost the exact opposite!</p>

                              BTW, do you want to change the name of this thread--perhaps other people would contribute as well.</p>
                              ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

                              Comment

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