What’s the allure of fashion? For me, oddly, it shares something with engineering: there are tasks to be accomplished, aims to be met; I can admire seeing how those things are done and what extra qualities, of subtlety or flair or extravagance, are displayed in the doing. In a way, fashion exerts the appeal of the nonessential. From another angle, that’s all wrong, because markers of status and power, of individual and group identity, aren’t at all unimportant, though we might sometimes wish that status and power themselves mattered less. But I don’t mean to go into it here. I want only to mention, for readers who might otherwise have missed it, that a recent New Yorker contained a report on a cache of dresses by Callot Soeurs. Perhaps you know the name, along with those of Paul Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet; perhaps not. (I’m at a loss to explain why I do.) In any case, if you’re susceptible to the romance of certain old clothes, to borrow the title of an early Henry James story, I suggest you turn here and read the short text by Jessamyn Hatcher, which is accompanied by a few (too few) tantalizing, almost tangibly textured photographs by Pari Dukovic.
Je Suis, Ergo Sum 