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February 20, 2005

fashion design and costuming

many, many thanks to pinky for blogging about the leigh bowery documentary. i watched it last night.

she does a good job of describing the film and the man, but just to very quickly summarize: he was a performance artist/costume designer who took fashion design to the level of art, and he made his body a living sculpture through his designs.

in the 80's, during the time when he was active in the club scene in london, during the time when the New Romantics were taking clubbing fashion waaaaayyy over the top, i was a dorky teenager catching tantalizing snippets of all this on tv.

we all remember the 80's fashion as displayed in molly ringwald films-- preppy, a little 50's retro but in a really tacky way, lots of pastel colors and big, hairsprayed hair. there was an element of costume to some of this stuff, but only in a very conservative way.

watching this film reminded me of the other 80's fashion... the stuff that is pure costume and artifice. the world where adam ant was almost conservative.

back in those days, i had free access to a lot of fashion magazines, because my stepfather was a cover girl salesman, and the company sent him subscriptions for free so he could keep up with the advertising. we got mademoiselle and glamour pretty regularly. cosmo would appear from time to time; mom didn't really want me reading cosmo because of it's strangely skewed, trashy view of sexuality, but i got my hands on them anyway and just took a lot of that stuff with a grain of salt.

the fashion, though, was of great interest to me. i clipped a lot of photos of looks that i liked and plastered them all over my bedroom. my favorites tended to be loose clothes with a vintage 20's or 30's feel that created a long line with no curves. i was skinny enough back then that i probably could have pulled something like that off had i been able to find the right things at the thrift stores.

i raided gran's 50's clothes from the attic. the clothes were great, but the colors were all wrong for me, and i knew it but wore the clothes anyway. i still have the most awesome of those dresses up in my attic, but i don't know if i'll ever fit back into it.

every night i'd spend a lot of time trying on different outfits. i was always interested in what sort of shape i could create on my body, as well as what sort of mood i could create. the most outrageous outfits were never seen outside of my house; even my family didn't see those, although i had to sneak out into the hall to look at the full-length mirror. we're definitely not talking leigh bowery outrageous, but stuff that would have provoked too much of a reaction in the halls at school.

my senior year of high school, i started to go a little more over the top in what i'd actually wear out of the house. clothing became one of my primary means of self-expression, and of course also of identifying myself culturally. i'd get laughed at in the halls pretty regularly. once i happened to wear one of my more silly outfits on a day when i received an award at a school assembly, and the entire assembly started laughing at me when i walked out on to the floor. unlike leigh bowery, i didn't really enjoy this kind of reaction.

it amazes me, though, that with all of that experimentation, i never really discovered what looks good on me, and i had a completely skewed idea of how i actually looked in clothes. i would think that those excercises in fashion would have raised my self-awareness, but instead they seemed to obliterate it. interestingly, bowery seems to have had this problem as well. in the film they talk about how he would dress during the day, on the street, and how he would wear these terrible wigs and think they looked perfectly natural.

i do still experiment from time to time, though my experiments rarely see the light of day now. i'm too old to be laughed at. i've worn my share of outrageous things in the workplace. but i wonder if i shouldn't explore this side of myself in some other way... pretend i am a couture designer and create my spring 2006 collection out of things from thrift stores and the scrap exchange. and make you all be my models and traipse up and down someone's living room in my creations while our friends get drunk on cosmopolitans.

heh.

Posted by lisa at February 20, 2005 10:46 AM | TrackBack

Comments

go for it - it's never too late :-)

and I can't put my finger on why Bowery is so fascinating - he just is. He seemed like a total monster (and the scene of him giving birth to his wife/assistant and what she does afterwards has traumatized me permanently) but what a tall, fat, gay, otherwise unremarkable man managed to do with his appearance just amazes me. He transformed himself in ways that most people could never conceive of.

Posted by: pinky on February 21, 2005 08:39 AM

pinky, i think that means you have to be my first model!! heheheh.

i think bowery had tremendous charisma in addition to obviously having tremendous imagination. that's probably part of the source of fascination.

Posted by: lisa on February 21, 2005 08:47 AM

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