"Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: we are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live.
Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. and everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds.
Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous[.]"
To have a body is an inherently uncanny experience. So is being perceived by others. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately) we must subject ourselves to these experiences every day. There are so many things about our outward appearance (and inward functions) that we cannot control, and that loss of control is terrifying.
But we can control what we wear.
Fashion is our world's oldest art form. We painted on each other before we ever painted on cave walls. One of the most important moments in human development is when our ancestors first started wearing clothes. It's one of the few things that connects us all; we all eat, we all sleep, and we all wear clothes. Fashion is a lot of things: a practical protection from the environment, a form of self expression, a symbol of oppression or rebellion, freedom, conformity, something to hide in, something to stand out in, something to simply exist in.
Beauty and fashion go hand in hand, but so do fashion and ugliness. In a day and age where "fashion" is often synonymous that endless capitalist pursuit of an impossible standard of (thin, white, rich, cis/heterosexual) attractiveness, it can be hard to imagine fashion existing in any context except that of beauty. But fashion can be so many things: ugly, frightening, thought-provoking, political, empowering, shocking, and revolutionary.
This is a blog about what happens when fashion and the world collide.
 |
| Manish Arora S/S 2020 |
WHO I AM
My name is Rosie Albrecht. I'm a writer, a musician, a fashion history nerd, and an aspiring magical girl. I write for the fashion magazine MODA and I'm the founder/editor in chief of the solarpunk magazine Optopia. I'm particularly interested in the intersections of fashion with:
- History
- Queer identities
- Sustainability/ethical production
- The monstrous/grotesque
- The inherent horror of being a walking meat sack that is perceived by other people on a daily basis
 |
| hello, this is my flesh vessel. i have adorned it with woven fibers. |
Can't wait to see where this ride takes me. Thanks for joining me here!
<3 Rosie
0 Comments