Once it meant clothes. But an early miniskirt revealed that my legs were too short from knee to ankle. If it ended fashionably above the knees,
I looked like a foreshortened lampshade – and worse with a skirt (break in the middle to non existent waist). I could work round a shorter dress once I had discovered a becoming shape , the only time I found anything in Vogue I had already bought.
The first psychologist I ever met described clothes to me as “the exteriorization of self”.
And I wish a few more people would look at and dress what is there, instead of what they wish were there in blind hope of transformation.
There are fashions in everything and thank you God, I am past doing more than listen or look and make up my own mind to the imponderables. As in – any camera adds 30 lbs.
Re director Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey.
It’s already taken gazillions at the box office and involves two or three actors I am always interested in. I have read its praise (film critic) through to a professor of classics criticizing the script, emphases and omissions. If it is as much about anxiety as she found it , it is outstandingly fashionable – worry and weirdness.
But nobody has mentioned the obvious.
A book is a book is a book is a book, and a film is a different medium. There are books I can’t imagine filmed and would rather the makers didn’t try. I can see the pitfalls, I have seen enough bad scripts commissioned and earning somebody a living. Incoherent, shapeless and without style.
If the root of the word fashion is to do with making, it developed historically to include style,
the way in which something is made. These are quite separate ideas. I’d like to think Homer earned his breakfast, supper and tea while amassing and writing the stories for which he is known – I am sure he was but one of many jobbing poets – but any film director, especially one operating out of what’s left of an enormous industry, needs to make money on the deal.
Believe me, I was married to a film maker. It’s a very expensive medium – and he didn’t make money. Five years with a clever man who didn’t recognize that if he couldn’t show a profit, the next budget would be even harder to raise.
For a very long time, I have walked round the very word fashion.
Suspiciously. Seemed to be about flesh on dreams. Expensive. But dreams are only ever that and one will succeed another. So, I may consider it but am not easily swayed.
Music: I don’t listen to much music. I have learnt to enjoy quiet, almost certainly a reaction to a noisy world coupled with the rising sensitivities of age.
The music that I like remains the music that I like. There are still sounds and voices that excite me, I could care less who else approves of it, whether memory or innovation.
Too often fashionable experience is governed by how much money you have to play with. “I won’t spend £78 plus on a seat for something I am not interested in” remarked a neighbour recently . I’d have thought she had the money and would spend it happily to see the latest thing. Apparently not.
Same with restaurants and food – because you may like the surroundings while finding the menu not to your taste. Eating out is expensive. Hence the success of the pizza and the joy in a friend’s voice telling you “We could meet at …it’s even affordable !”
The phrase “reassuringly expensive” applies to all too many of the new and existing brands of makeup though I cannot see wearing makeup in 30 degrees of heat. Put it on, sweat it off. Throw money down the drain.
Fashion seems to depend on desperately wanting to be different, then acknowledged for that difference till the difference extends to enough people to make you feel you can safely discard it. Nobody ignores fashion – it’s in the air we breathe. But as breath comes in and goes out again I confess, I am more interested in my own taste than somebody else’s fashion
Annalog 