might prevent me from going back
but sometimes light the way forward
Bridge
Month: October 2016
Still do
A nasty, proscribed habit that has had the upside of connecting me to like-minded social pariahs during coffee breaks.
Shine and reflect
Walking in Madrid as a wannabe street photographer
Obsessed
I am a walking cliché, a woman obsessed with shoes. Last time I counted, I had (have) 248 pairs of sandals, stilettos, Chuck Taylors, biker boots, ballet flats, ankle boots, platforms, wedges, brogues, kitten heels, slingbacks,pumps, Doc Martens, dance shoes, cowboy boots, peep-toes, combat boots and Mary Janes. I do not own flat moccasins and espadrilles. I find them depressing.
Although this is not in any way comparable to the million dollar collections or to the “shoe estates” of the infamous former first lady or the famous romance novelist, I am aware that the sheer number alone is ridiculous. All the more so because I do not live in some kind of mansion with walk in closets and custom made shelves, I live in a two bedroom apartment with tiny built in closets.I do try and make the most of the generous space available under the bed and have transformed my pantry into a micro walk in closet for coats and shoe boxes.
“And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by
her shoes and her gloves.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
I have no original explanation for my unoriginal love of shoes. I admire their sculptural.even architectural essence, their autonomous quality. I admire them as objects, as affordable art. My obsession did not start with Carrie Bradshaw and I’m not even a huge SAT fan.
I still have my first pair of shoes. My mum had them bronzed. I suppose this was a “thing” back then. Or maybe there’s a hereditary explanation for my obsession. Other shoes did not survive the passing of time.
I remember having little red clogs and triple buckles mary janes and outrageous beige fringed suede boots that my fourteen year-old self thought would work with just about anything. I wore blue velvet shoes across the snow in New York to go to the opera, I have walked miles in New Orleans in bejeweled black sandals that “died” this year during a night visit to the museum of contemporary art here in Porto. I’ve walked barefoot in Johannesburg after the strap on my fancy Sergio Rossi flip flops broke. For my first paid internship I got paid in over the knee black patent leather boots. My choice.
I do not have Manolos in my collection. I have a pair of black Laboutins filed under the category “so special”. They have never been worn. Porto is one of those charming cities with cobblestone streets. Fatal for high heels. This year, for my birthday, I got gold and silver Terry de Havilland peep-toe platforms. Ziggy Stardust shoes.
I don’t know if ” good shoes take you to good places” but, even when you don’t take them anywhere, they can make you feel you could actually get wherever you want.
Featured photo via Facebook
Not moving
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
Weekend at home
Back to black
I have a closet just for black clothes. I also have another one for all other mainly dark colours and reds but these never feel so true to myself as black does. I can’t remember why I started wearing just black but for a long time it felt like the most stylish and comfortable solution to the morning rush of getting dressed. Chic, sophisticated people tend to wear black, so I’m told by a million glossy magazines, books and film imagery. Apparently, I also tend to look smarter dressed in black. I can always try to project the existentialist intellectual that lives in me since my teenage years. I grew up during the post-punk, Gothic 80s and have never managed to be Goth even though I still nurture a special admiration for the whole commitment that kind of aesthetics entails. Some of my most glorious errors are a nod to this sumptuous dark world.
Albeit all the experimentation and character creations around my “cinematic self”, I have never been truly convinced that my clothes could become the visible form assumed by the way I chose to define my public persona. At least not in the sort of spectacular, larger than life way I envisaged.
As a spectacular sub-culture, Goth provides a unique insight into the experience of extraordinary “self-authorship” because of the dramatic and unconventional nature of the external self-constructions of individual identity through dress and personal grooming. Whether or not you are drawn to the “dark side of the human heart”, it is almost impossible to remain indifferent to the dramatic manipulation of appearance and the fantastic narrative that accompanies Goth fashion as an illustration of the extraordinary dimension the stories one writes for oneself can attain, allowing space for the creation of a “historic utopia” as far removed as possible from everyday life.
As superficial as it might seem, fashionable self-construction is not only about “the look”.While designing an aspirational self, fashion “props” allow the individual to construct a personal “bricolage” which gives the access to their extraordinary self via their ability to transform, and in some cases contest conventional social categories through their glamorising discourses (Thompson and Haytko, 1997). While this might not be a characteristic of the Goth subculture alone, both its cultural pervasiveness and the recurring concern with the distinction between authenticity and depth on the one hand, and a fascination with surface and performance on the other, make Gothic a postmodern archetype of “stylistic resistance”. An is this very stylistic resistance that perpetuates its fashionable allure.
Late capitalism produces the desire for an aura that is felt to be prior to or beyond commodification, for a lived authenticity to be found in privileged forms of individual expression and collective identification. For as long as goth seems to answer that desire, it will thrive as an undead subculture: forging communities on the margins of cities, suburbs, campuses and cyberspace; defying constraints on gender and sexuality; and imbuing the stuff of everyday life with the allure of stylistic resistance.
While Goth as a subculture has not faded away, the increasing heterogeneity in styles and fashion and a world that seems to no longer produce a coherent dominant culture or the cultural values against which resistance might be expressed, have transformed subcultural style in an ideologically vacant performance of over substance (David Muggleton, 2000). The incorporation of a subculture in mainstream society through commodification is not exclusive of Goth but its enduring resonance with contemporary fears, desires and anxieties might have exhausted itself: where once Gothic provided a space in which the dark dreams of the Enlightenment could be realized, now it simply exposes the void at the heart of an advanced consumer culture. The seemingly inescapable Gothic now functions as the perfectly protean postmodern commodity
All of the varied elements that once defined street style are now high fashion’s greatest source of inspiration. At Jun Takahashi’s Undercover and John Galliano’s Margiela in particular, they have been incorporated in dazzling and inspiring ways. But sometimes the embrace of street chic comes across as a mere flourish tacked on to spice a bourgeois brand with a bit of danger, to make a woman with a coddled existence feel a bit more in touch. It is an attempt to buy cool.
By taking the style, trends, dress, music etc of the subcultures and popularizing them so that they lose their exclusivity and gradually become mass-produced commodities made available to all, the mainstream cultural industry dilutes or annihilates specific meanings transforming authenticity in “ready to wear” commoditized lifestyles subject to the same cultural logic of “self-help narratives” and consummerism impulses. Being authentic, as La Agrado would say, does not come cheap and you are all the more authentic the more you resemble what you have dreamed for yourself . And this is a rare gift.
References
P.S. While I am selling my 80s vintage gothic errors, a part of me is still reluctant. But then I am not sure if “Gothic Chic” is authentic in me.
Waiting for the ferry
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”
“Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing,” Alan Watts
When I was about 10 sitting in class the girl sitting behind me pulled me back to tell me some little secret. I remember that the sudden movement made me feel dizzy and for what was probably a few seconds but felt like it would become permanent, I thought I had traveled outside myself and was experiencing whatever was happening in class from above. I think this was the first time my wild imaginative child mind came to the conclusion that I couldn’t actually be sure that reality was real.
This experience, coupled with years of being an extremely shy and introverted little girl who spent hours reading whatever books I could find and talking to all the characters that came out of all those pages, resulted in the conviction that indeed the world must be only a stage and we have our entrances and get to play a character, sometimes even an interesting one, and we have our exits and get to seat in the audience and just watch while others dazzle or scare us or are just unable to make us feel anything with their performance.
Not that I ever read Shakespeare when I was 10. I was never that precocious.
If this was so there was also, I thought at the time, little proof of my existence and this conviction has lead to the creation of all the different characters that have helped hide, protect and accept myself in order to keep going. In doing so, I created a multitude of characters some of which did not even get as far enough as the dress rehearsal. Their wardrobe was ready but it never left the archival depths of countless steam trunks and old leather bags. I will have plenty of time to experiment with all that, I thought. I will just get ready for whatever or whomever it is I might feel like playing . This delusional fantasy has resulted in an “identity superflux“.
It would have probably been easier to settle for “the desirable and permanent order of things”, to follow Polonius advice and be true to my own self, but I never managed to understand how it would be possible to be just one. Facing the plurality of the world how can it be that being singular is enough?
And then you actually Realize that even if most days you still might feel that you are 10, time has passed and there might not be enough of it to stage all the plays you have been rehearsing for. Maybe only a few of us are meant for reality but life doe manage to find all of us.
References
King Lear
Hamlet
The book of disquiet
Getting to fly
In December 2009 I finally managed to finish my PhD. In January 2010, as a reward, I took myself to Zambia because I have always been fascinated by Dr. Livingstone.
I am not a particularly brave person, I’m actually quite shy and insecure most of the times.
But I do believe in forcing myself to do everything that terrifies me.
Stories from A Closet of Errors 