I remember when I was about 17 and looking through Australian Vogue that I experienced a momentous occasion. I turned to my favourite (now defunct) section of the magazine which featured a real person (probably from Surry Hills!) and their wardrobe. It was usually a babe sitting with her knees all curled up in her bay window, with her shiny hair and genius outfit.
The girl I remember most clearly was amazing. She had cropped soft pixie hair, and she was wearing a Vintage skirt as a dress! With a BELT! around her waist and slouchy boots! I had never set eyes on such an ensemble. I was inspired. I bought slouchy boots. I used to dream about her life – what she must do for a living, and that every night of her week must be so busy: eating dumplings in obscure and incredible restaurants, and so many parties! And that her floors would be white painted floorboards. And that she probably always moisturized her legs.
Years, and three separate magazine subscriptions later (Vogue Australia, Haha’s Bazaar, and i-D) I can’t even think of how many incredible images of outfits my eyes have absorbed, and how many women have unknowingly undergone my ruminative dissections of their lives and style. So now I am in a tricky situation. Previously my position as viewer of fashion images was to only participate by way of dreaming. But now I AM one of those images.
Last week I was getting a ‘quick coffee’ with my boyfriend (TOM!) and a friend when an American guy approached me to ask for a photo for his Blaug. I tentatively said yes, assuming that it was a small blog and that no one would see it. He said he liked my ‘funky’ jacket, his word choice seemed to confirm my suspicions of it being just a very little one. After the photo was done he said that I could look at it on the Sartorialist. Being a word that is hard to remember I wrote it down on a piece of paper so that I could look it up when I got homeONE HUNDRED COMMENTS WHAT!?!??!?
I seem to be the only person in Sydney who hasn’t heard of this blog, so I won’t bother describing it.
So the point now is this – how do I begin to dissect the situation I am in now? As someone who wasn’t Waiting For the Sartorialist, this could not be more of a surprising situation, and is, I’m sure, the closest thing to fame I will ever experience.
I haven’t received written commentary on myself since school reports and have NO idea on how to take it (I check it three times a day, have read every one, and have constantly been measuring myself by the number and weight of the comments I’ve received in comparison to other ‘Sarts’).
When I look at this image that has been caught by a camera and put in a global network of blog-readers (3 millollion people read it a month!) and where anonymous people comment on this tiny little version of myself they subsequently make this image of me, anonymous to me.
My image (well, that particular image) is no longer mine. My staple winter jacket is no longer mine. And what is also no longer mine is my (previously well exercised) ability to dreamily pour over images of women in great clothing; it feels broken to me now.
Although I’m no Giovanna Battaglia (stupidly well put-together Editor of L’Uomo Vogue), I don’t feel so separate from her because she’s only a scroll away. I loved the hierarchy and the aspiration that came with fashion, and now what do I have left to aspire to!? Besides the obvious answer of any of the hundreds of people who are a thousand times better dressed than me and who are also featured on The Sartorialist, I do feel like the aura is gone. That hypnotic fashion image has disintegrated for me! Because I was there! It just felt like a regular old afternoon, but it doesn’t look like one! The whole image looks luminous!
I read an article this afternoon that mentioned the 90’s Rave movement, and that it marked a turn for music fans where instead of staring at a band, audiences focused on themselves and on those like themselves. And without ecstasy there to liven the occasion, and keep the image compelling (as in Rave scenes) we have The Sartorialist’s keen eye for dazzling sunlight through the hair and/or people with fascinating looking lives and/or REALLY good looking people – all of them wearing sick clothes, components which, separately or together, make for an intoxicating image. And when reality looks so sensuous don’t we just end up dreaming about our own image, and images like ours?
It's as though getting dressed in the morning in anticipation of meeting, and being seen and interpreted by others, is validated by strangers publicly assessing the decisions you privately make. Imagine stepping out of your house and being greeted by a chorus of onlookers who approach you, and tug at your jacket and glide their fingers through your hair and talk to themselves about your outfit, without really listening to each other, reiterating the same points over and over.
[click to enlarge] What my confused and wide eyed ‘who, me!?” approach towards this image could signify is a certain end of innocence. I am no longer a child living in my parent’s home on the North Shore dreaming of how I might assemble an interesting outfit (and life along with it), I am now an adult living in my parent’s house on the North Shore with outfits and a life that I am happy with.
This won’t mark the end of time spent looking at fashion magazines for me, but this event certainly has fragmented some of the fashion image. I think I would have written to the girl with the skirt-as-a-dress the same thing that young Chessa! wrote to me.
Maybe all this means is that instead of just looking on and dreaming, I have been pushed into the position of participant in a fast moving dialogue, soon to be archived under April 2009.
Images via V Magazine: see them all here
