Iconic Photo: Photo 30 (2 days late)

The Truth Is Always This--I look good in black leather, and black leather-like, or black plastic, black rubber, or other black leather-like variants, but I really love a marshmallow: A Book To Be Written by Lily-Elaine and Matt

Or, The 30-Day Iconic Photo Challenge, A Consideration of Relationships, and An Account of Why Daphne Guinness is Important, plus snacks, plus wine

(Also known as: there's too damned much in this here post but we're going to do it anyway)

Daphne Guinness
Vogue Italia 2010

Here's the thing. In an attempt to refocus on my blog I posed a 30-day challenge for myself--to post a different iconic photo of an inspirational woman everyday for 30 days. The idea, for me, was that the image would somehow be iconic and it would point us to a woman whose story inspired us to see how we could choose what lives we want for ourselves, doing so could mean surpassing both our own and others expectations for us, and in so doing we could possibly create something uniquely our own, and so then also new.

There are, of course, innumerable women in the world that could be taken as inspiring, and innumerable others that are, of course, iconic--they stand in the midst of the mundane everyday as someone that we would wish to be, or that we recognize as importantly human, or that shine as a reminder of how brilliantly simple human elements can come into concert and so become a symphony.

The trouble, for me at least, is that approaching the end of the 30-day iconic photo challenge I'd set for myself I suddenly froze. There I was with only one day left and I suddenly couldn't come up with any clear sense of what photo, or what woman I'd want to feature on the 30th day. In that final day I unexpectedly faced a kind of meaning to the 30th day, the final day, I hadn't anticipated--the woman featured on the 30th day would provide a kind of frame to the rest of the women featured in the challenge. Her image and brief biography would offer a way of interpreting all the women that had been chosen before her. In the pressure of such high demand I didn't know who to choose and so on the 30th day I ended up posting no one. I failed my own challenge.

Honestly, right this minute, having now picked someone to post for the 30th day, I could just back-date this very message and act as though nothing had been missed at all. I'd just casually insert the final image on the day that would have been day 30 and go on as though I'd missed nothing. But, instead, maybe because I'm a pain in the ass, maybe because I want to offer an explanation, maybe because I need to come to terms with just my self, or maybe because I ate too many beans and didn't drink enough coffee--FOR SOME REASON instead here I am typing away in a semi-non-sequiter rambling that will all eventually come around to the woman I've chosen for the last day, Daphne Guinness.

Daphne Guinness
buy life campaign

Continuing in this moment of seeming non-sequiter I have to make a confession. Without any advanced warning that this would happen, my 30 days of iconic photos of inspirational women happened to overlap with a profound personal event. It turns out near the beginning of the month I met someone I liked an awful lot and over the course of the month I actually fell in love. There's a saying that comes from somewhere all insightful and wise that says Love is a spontaneous grass, not a garden plant. That is, it comes up in fresh ground, almost unexpected, without being intentionally cultivated, and truth be told, without your input or control. The thing is, I've resisted those kinds of views about love. I have long thought of it as a more determined thing, and even if I was willing to grant that perhaps the feelings could not be directly controlled part of me tried to maintain that I could somehow sculpt the channel through which they'd flow, there by shaping how the feelings would go. There's a sense in which this has "worked" for me, in as much as controlling our feelings can ever work for anyone--it's a little like pouring freshly shaken soda pop down a fountain--even if the liquid more or less follows the predetermined path it's gonna bubble and blow all over other stuff too.

Somehow before this last month my own attempts to control such things had waned. I can't exactly say how I managed this except that I know I have spent the last year very intentionally simplifying my own life and I believe that through this process I opened my self up to greater intimacy with my own feelings--living in a kind of communion with them, rather than needing to try and direct them as objects separate from me.

Let me say I tried, when I met this person I liked a lot, not to fall in love. First I called and told him we couldn't see each other. He responded so well to that though I realized I wanted to see him and relented. So we visited together and I liked it a lot and then I freaked out again and said again we couldn't see each other. Then I was walking through town and somehow ended up in the same general area that he was so I tried to cross the street before bumping into him and without realizing it put myself right on the edge of a SIDEWALK CLOSED CROSS BACK TO OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET situation. Really. The avoidance route wasn't open to me anymore. So I crossed back over to the original side of the street, and then a few minutes later there he was beside me calm and smiling. After that we started spending more regular time together. (Honestly, I actually freaked out again more and everytime there he'd be beside me calm and smiling. The truth is I've never had anyone capable of doing that with me. In the past I've had to be the one that stays calm and smiling while someone else freaks out, and if it was my turn to freak out there wasn't really someone there to stay calm next to me. I'd end up in a room on my own talking myself through it.)

Anyway, the point of all this is it's been a struggle for me. In the midst of falling in love I've faught myself outside my own heart quite a lot, while inside my own heart I've softened and come to understand myself in an entirely new way. It isn't that I've gone without feelings for others in the past. It's that this time I've gotten to be more fully myself in the midst of them, and be more fully recognized by him than anyone has before. Still, it's been hard.

What the hell does any of this have to do with Daphne Guinness?

Here's part of the tension I'm dealing with--my heart is open and in a sense has already given itself to someone. In that level of simple connection I feel as though we are two hands calm and holding each other. In that I feel a kind of constancy I want, a constancy that inspires me to think better of myself, to see life as more fully full of possibility, to recognize that I can passionately choose the life I want. At the same time, the future of this situation is fully indeterminate. It is of course indeterminate in that existentialist sense of life is wide open and we can't predict where it will take us. But, the future of this particular circumstance is also indeterminate in the literal sense--we've only recently met and started spending time together and our everyday life plans right now appear to take us in significantly different directions. (I choose here not to get into details out of respect for both our privacy, but let me just say it's all more about geography than any more green and gobbly relationship eating monsters in case you're out there projecting all kinds of panic and worry into all this for my sake.)

It would be easy in such a situation to decide in advance that things can't work and to close down to all the feeling I've had. Or, it could be easy (for a time) to naively give myself away to just the feeling and dwell in the fantasy of what I imagine is possible hoping everyday life will eventually match up. The bigger challenge, and the one I'm recognizing is essential for me to live out here, is the risky maneuever of honestly facing both truths of this relationship--my heart is open and has given itself to someone, and what that will mean in literal terms of the relationship it will continue to develop is entirely unclear. I cannot predetermine what the meaning of all this will be, nor can I decide before its time what form of relationship all this will get to take. Instead, I can only know that I've gotten to know my own heart more fully than ever before, even when the truth is it's only been a month. As fluffy as that sounds, as my friend Matt pointed out when I talked to him about all of this -- we really love a marshmallow. That is, we're both people that look really damned good in black leather, and black leather-like variants, like black polyeurethane, or black vinyl, or black latex, or other forms of black pleather, and black leather-like variants, and there is something fantastically tough about that and we really do both own clothing made out of all those things. But truth be told, we also really love a marshmallow--a soft and sometimes fluffy heart. There is no paradox in that. Or, at least, if there is a paradox, there is something important about living the the truth of BOTH irreconcilable positions honestly, and in recognizing that the apparent contradiction might be definitively who or what we as humans are.

Daphne Guinness
circa Spring 2008

This brings me, finally, back to the 30-day iconic photo challenge. I could easily just write up a bio with appropriately iconic accompanying photo of Daphne Guinness, back date it to appear on this blog on what would have been the 30th day of that challenge and leave it at that. Somehow, instead I'm writing up all of this.

When the idea of writing about Daphne Guinness here (and I've posted about her on this blog plenty before) occurred to me I resisted initially because I didn't want to have to explain why she should count as one of the 30 day women, nor why she was appropriately THE 30th woman that would frame our reading of all the rest, even though in many ways I shouldn't have to explain anything. How she counts seems to me just obvious.

Daphne Guinness is regularly touted as a fashion icon. She has an incredible ability to transform herself aesthetically and to direct her form through a wide range of appearances. But, to use the word "appearances" there is misleadingly simplistic. In her wielding of what we could call "style" or "fashion" -- her ability to just get dressed -- Daphne Guinness reveals how thoroughly our interactions with each other, or our responses to others, are dictated and trained by appearances. Her ability to transmogrify her very persona through what we often take as the simple notion of self presentation calls attention to how very used to our own social standards and norms of human appearance we really are. She has an incredible ability to pull on our standards of beauty, repulsion, glamor, discomfort, female form, and human body all at the same time. In so doing she often pushes us out of our own preferences for these norms (I'll admit I haven't posted some of the more vivid examples of her enacting this sense of "pushing us out of our own preferences" -- such images can readily be found online simply by searching her name). In this way, Guinness allows us to see how the reality of something as simple as getting dressed is actually a complex intersection of our profound ability to on the one hand choose exactly what we want to be, while on the other hand being fully incapable of escaping the pressures of how others are going to perceive us and therefore respond to and interact with us. That is, Daphne Guinness illustrates that the utterly simplistic act of putting on clothes in the morning is a lived paradox too--our accoutrement and presentation arises out of two irreconcilable truths--we can choose who and what we want to be, and we are constrained by our interactions with others. But even more importantly, Daphne Guinness shows us how fantastical, extravagant, and fulfilling it can be to take up the irreconcilable truths of this process and so live them both out honestly simultaneously. That is, Daphne Guinness is the woman fully alive, fully expressed through paradox.

Daphne Guinness
image from Harper's Bazaar
February 2011

It is often said in our culture that fashion, or worry about outward appearance as presented through the idea of clothing, is superficial. By extension, people that focus on such things, or take such things to be important are also claimed to be shallow. I read years ago in an article on fashion published in THE NEW YORK TIMES that this commonly held view is arguably just a hold over from our Enlightenment era view that the mind and body are separate or separable, and the mind is more important than the body. In such a view the body would just be a vehicle for our more powerful thoughts. In fact, the venerable Roger Ebert (whose blog I very much like to read) made exactly this claim just this last week.

What I'm claiming here is that Daphne Guinness shows how wrong such a view turns out to be. Of course there is some sense in which a person could live a shallow life focused too much on fashion. But that's not what we're talking about here. The commonly held view mentioned above assumes that the body itself is somehow less important than the mind, and by extension fashion simply is shallow because it doesn't dwell in the land of thoughts. I'm saying that Daphne Guinness is not only inspirational, but also iconic because she makes vivid how the body is precisely the land of thoughts, or, more accurately, the two are simply not separate--aesthetics is the dance through which the two marry and dwell.

What the hell, then, does Daphne Guinness have to do with love?

Daphne Guinness
2010 Nars Makeup Ad Campaign

The thing about my romantic situation is that there is no honest way for me to determine its future right now. If I was to try and demand it to be more than it is, I would have to be pushing it into a form of relationship that is not arising from the genuine interactions of he and I together, but instead is being grabbed from the grab-bag of social norms for romantic relationships--marriage, engagement, affair, friendship-only, etc. Any of these, are of course, wonderful forms for romantic relationships to take when they arise from the energy and commitment of the two people in the relationship. But, very often we instead grasp for security by trying to squeeze what we feel with someone into one of these shapes before the relationship has gotten to such a state all on its own. I could, of course, also just end it and walk away from the relationship as it stands telling myself things like it is too amorphous for me to feel right in it, or that it doesn't have enough to offer me to feel secure, or etc. The truth is, it is, perhaps a little amorphous right now, and it might not be offering me total security right now either, but it might also be too soon to know if the relationship will develop its own clearer shape, or what level of security it could have to offer. The point, I'm making is that right now it is still time, it seems, for me to dwell in the wealth of feeling I have found and to remain open to an indeterminate future too. What I'm pointing out is that much like how we are quick to assume a focus on fashion is superficial, we as people also seem quick to assume that having important romantic feeling for someone means we must move into a romantic relationship with a determined, or committed-to future, and short of that we're doing something wrong, or we're just having one-night stands. Importantly, this isn't to say that we should avoid those relationships where we want to and do commit to pre-determined futures. There are times when marriage, for example, is a wonderful thing to do. This also isn't to say that people that engage in either serial monogamy or so-called one-night stands are doing the better thing by refusing to commit--notice in either of these cases we might say there is a sense in which such people have precisely committed--that is to not having a continuing future with the person (or people) they engage in those activities with.

Daphne Guinness (in red dress)
Vogue Italia

Camus describes the human condition as a lived paradox. For him the way to live a genuine, or what I've been calling an honest life, is to accept that we live in conditions that simply are a paradox--that at a foundational level what it is to be human is to have to face two irreconcilable conditions of human existence and refuse to deny either one of them or attempt to reconcile them either. We must dwell in what seems like an impossible state of accepting an apparent contradiction. For Camus, this contradiction is found in relation to the simple reality that we do die. He states that to be fully alive in our human condition we must face the very real reality of our death and refuse to live it now. That is, we must accept that we will die and as a result here on earth we will also eventually be forgotten, but perhaps more importantly, each and every one of the projects we take up now while we are living will come to an end. Our investment in them will be as naught, even if someone else takes them up for us after we die--our own investment in them will be over. We will be gone. In a certain sense that makes everything we are invested in now meaningless--when we measure our lives against an infinite horizon it is as if we cannot even be seen to exist. Still, the truth is, here we are very much alive, panting and heart-beating our way through every moment of our lives right up until that very second in which both our breath and our heart stops. These moments of breath and heart belong to us and to us alone. That is NOT to say our lives are isolated to us alone and that our choices impact no one. That IS to say our lives are ours to choose what to do with and those projects we choose to invest in (including the people we have relationships with) are precisely what make our lives utterly meaningful. That is, we decide. We make our lives meaningful. It is not some pre-determined future we are working our way towards--it is us right now in our choosing. Camus describes this state as living in acceptance of our mortality without being resolved to it--that is, we face everyday the knowledge that we will die, without resolving ourselves to the limitations it might seem to imply. We accept that we will die precisely to demand we be alive now.

We make our lives meaningful. This is true whether we are my dear friend Kim that I featured part way through my 30-day iconic photo challenge--a woman who lives every day in faith, fully committed to raising two beautiful kids with a rambunctious adorable dog and a loving husband--or whether we are Marilyn Monroe, a woman whose persona was shaped in, in response to, and in a sense for the public spotlight, but whose life, nonetheless, was chosen and successfully expressed as a pinnacle of that Hollywood glamor. In both cases we find women that everyday wake up and re-choose their lives, determining in this sense for themselves the meaning it will have--both, strongly in relation to the effects of their own lives on other people, but the choice arises nonetheless precisely from themselves.

Similarly, Daphne Guinness everyday chooses a life that expresses another aspect of the human paradox--that we can reshape how we are taken by others, how we appear to ourselves, and thus too how we are expressing the way we feel about being in the world, that our insides and our outsides are continuously co-creating and in interaction with each other.

Daphne Guinness
Vogue Italia 2010

Right now I rest in my own sort of paradox. I am here carefully trying to navigate the reality between my open heart and how it leads me to imagine a possible future with a man while at exactly the same time the practical realities of the situation would seem to point in the direction of a different possible future. I know many people would tell me the practical realities tell me to stop being involved. While I know too many other people that would tell me the feelings mean to change everything for the sake of continuing in those feelings.

I am saying that Camus is right--to live this situation genuinely I need to accept that both things here right now are true without resolving to pre-determine the conclusion for this situation based on either one. That is, I can't claim this situation means there is no possible future just because our everyday lives bring us in different directions. But I also cannot claim there is the brightest possible future just because my heart can't help but love him. To claim either would be to deny the truth of the rest of the situation.

What I do know is that in the midst of this I have gotten to live in and recognize my own heart more fully than I ever have before, even as I also recognize I do not know where all this will bring me even just next week. This will be true even if the daily aspects of this relationship end tomorrow.

Honourable Daphne Suzannah Diana Joan Guinness
image by Rene Habermacher

I don't approach fashion. Fashion approaches me.
-Daphne Guinness

He is quite obviously the love of my life.
-Daphne Guinness, on her relationship with French philosopher Bernhard-Henri Levy

The heiress to the Guinness Beer fortune, Daphne Guinness married the son of a Greek shipping billionaire in her early 20's. Together they had three children. It is understood that though in merely financial terms Guinness had access to practically anything in the world, the marriage quickly became quite unhappy for her, resulting in her living a rather limited personal life. To cope with the unhappy situation Guinness dove into the world of fashion accumulating what was already at the time a greatly admired collection of haute couture, and other unique pieces from the fashion world. She became known not only for her impressive access to fashion designs, but also for her own impeccable talent for showing such pieces at their best on her. As a result, she was named to the International Best Dressed List in 1994.

Guinness divorced in 1999. Though she initially took time to live in comparable solitude, her unique style eventually connected her to work as a fashion journalist and stylist for some of the most interesting and prominant fashion magazines in the world. Several years after her divorce Guinness donated the entirety of her fashion collection from the period of her marriage to auction with all proceeds being given to charity. When asked about the choice she said that though she had loved the pieces dearly, they were also associated with incredible grief in her life so that she was ready to start fresh and allow her previous grief to be transformed into a financial difference for others.

Several years ago Guinness befriended the French philosopher Bernard-Henry Levi. She has described their relationship as including a strong connection that she resisted initially, both for being wary because of her romantic past and because Levi is married. She has never had an inclination to date married men, even if there have been numerous opportunities. Over the years the two continued to bump into each other at various social events, and also then to simply choose to develop their connection further. Guinness admits a kind of contradiction to her relationship with Levy. Of it she says the following.

He is quite obviously the love of my life. My greatest sorrow has been the unresolved question of the state of our relationship. ...when things are real, and when there is bound to be collateral damage, you have to look at what's most precious. And that's love.

A Visit with the Life of My Closet: Or, The Spy's Guidebook In Clothing and Accoutrement

Most recent costume: Maarf Vhan,
a half-Vulcan, half-human inter-galactic diplomat

Around the age of ten I used the money I'd earned from commercial fishing for salmon in the summers to buy myself THE SPY'S GUIDEBOOK. THE SPY'S GUIDEBOOK was an inch and a half thick book mixing intricately detailed text with cartoon like drawings. The book was full of words like "query", discussed using fingerprint powders in black or white, depending on the background to be tested, and also contained a thorough index of codes. I was enthralled.

One of the key elements of THE SPY'S GUIDEBOOK was the chapter discussing costumes designed to turn you into someone else, keep others from recognizing you, and also simply throw people off your trail by distracting their attention from you to what you were wearing. Soon after purchasing and reading THE SPY'S GUIDEBOOK I turned the storage sections of my desk at the time into a costume arsenal. I gathered any clothing and accoutrement I could find in my room that might serve to alter my appearance and organized them into the drawers and cubbyholes of the desk. My parents were unimpressed at this room change. Having odd sized dresses and small pillows with rope sewn into them (to tie about the waist, of course) hanging out of the teak cabinet above my desk didn't have the aesthetic appeal for my parents that it did for me. They didn't look at the piles and see other possible worlds and characters to be consumed by. They just saw a mess of fabric.

Years before I was old enough to buy myself the book, my sister and I used to ride our dirt bikes to the Rexall Drugs behind our house. Once a month we'd have gathered together and saved enough coins from around the yard or living room to manage the purchase of the new Vogue magazine and a pint of Haagen Daazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. We'd buy our two items and rush back to the house, descending into the basement, and leaning against the dark wood paneling to flip slowly through the fashion magazine while we ate the ice cream. We'd spit each chocolate chip back into the lid of the pint and at the very end, when we'd finished the magazine and the ice cream both, we'd split the chocolate pile and fill our mouths with our own half. I'd stare off out the window while I worked on the chocolate hoard slowly melting it down dreaming about what it must feel like to wear any of the dresses I'd just seen.

After my parents demolished my costume treasury, returning my desk to being just a desk, I dreamt of different ways I might be able to have a costume collection robust enough to transform me into whatever figure I might need to be for spying purposes. Somehow mixed into this imagery in my head was the idea that some of the costumes might resemble the high fashion extravaganza my sister and I saw each month. I had this idea that with a simple change of clothes, and a full commitment to whatever persona the clothing was meant to represent, I could completely alter my mood, who I felt myself to be, and the way others interacted with me too. It wasn't that I would literally be a different person. There would be some consistent self making such choices, but still I would be changed, having stepped into some other world for as long as the costume was worn.

One of the other things I understood from THE SPY'S GUIDEBOOK though too was that wearing costumes wasn't just about entering alternate worlds but also about study of the human psyche. Spying for me was about coming to understand what other people were really about. Changing costumes would change the way I felt, but it would also help me dream my way into understanding other people's worlds. Their daily lives. Such insight would be gained from developing my imagination as flexible enough to stretch into an empathy with other people's lives, but also through careful observation of other people's behavioral habits. That was the key to mastering costumery and the knowledge of what it was to be a person both, and both, from what I could tell, were what spying was all about.

It occurred to me this morning while I put wigs into one bin, leather bracers and harnesses into another, various clip-on animal ears, whiskers, and paws into still another, and then sorted oddly shaped wrap dresses in silk from ruched sided brightly colored dresses in the hanging closet, that I've somehow turned my entire adult life into a combination of these two childhood experiences. Here I am living out both the question of what it would feel like to wear any of those dresses I saw in the fashion magazine and the fantasy of inhabiting alternate worlds via how I dress, what costume I put on. My closet has become the costume treasury I dreamed of as a child. And somehow too, as a result, my daily life has become that same exploration of the human psyche in which I explore continuously not only what it is to be me, but what it might be to be the people I have committed to in my adult life, and the various people I interact with briefly on a more daily basis. So that somehow my closet represents a mix of the worlds of people I've loved and people I've simply met, and at other times only dreamt.

Imagining Our Way Out of Winter Realities

It's snowing outside. So, I thought I'd dream my way into warmer weather. Here's how it looks in my lovely imagination.

I'm wearing this:

Pavonine London Leaf Print Wrap Dress

with:


and they're busy running around in goopy lovely warm earth.




And then after walking about bare foot for a while it'll be time for a lovely, relaxing:

(notice the glass of wine).

Afterwards, it'll be evening and the temperature will have cooled. So, it'll be time to change into:

Lanvin A/W '10

which might seem a surprising choice. But it'll be time to first meet up with a couple of friends, and then have these:


Relaxed. Easy. Perfect. Amen.

Halloween Prelude

One of my favorite stories from the absurdity of my childhood actually originates with my sister Melanie. When she was very little (and likely before I was born) our mom was helping our oldest sister Paula get ready for trick or treating. Paula was donning her costume. Melanie was watching and starting to get animated, realizing that she didn't have a costume too, and what would she wear? I've learned from this story that, like my mom, when I get over stimulated by a super animated kid I do two things: (1) OHMYGODBEQUIETIAMDYING and (2) think quickly to solve whatever is working the kid up so that I can get some peace again.

The thing was, there was no costume for Melanie. My mom hadn't actually planned one, and Melanie being so little hadn't come up with her idea in advance either. But, clearly Melanie now needed SOMETHING to walk around trick or treating, so my mom did what she could. Being in Alaska it was already well into winter on Halloween (I actually have my own clear memory of literally crawling up a neighbor's driveway while wearing a genie costume on some other Halloween because we'd had a flash freeze the night before and their driveway had a slight tilt to it. But ice be damned, I was getting that candy.). So, my mom took the only reasonable option she had. She dressed Melanie in a head to toe snowsuit, then put Paula's swimsuit on Melanie over the outside of the snowsuit and told Melanie her costume was "swimmer."

I love the image of little Randy, the younger brother to Ralphie in A Christmas Story having been shoved into his full body snowsuit and now so surrounded by warm-clothinged puff he can't walk except by keeping all his limbs out stick straight. So, yes, he can now go outside but he might not be able to move enough to enjoy it. In imagining little-Melanie dressed up for Halloween as "swimmer" I imagine her as little Randy times two--surrounded by sausage encassing snow clothing now squeezed further by lycra water racing wear.

The 11-year old excitedly told me on Monday that she would get to wear her Halloween costume to school today. "Oh crap" is honestly the first thought I had because it meant we'd have to get up extra early to don her Rock and Roll Medusa hair, complete with tied in rubber snakes. As things are usually we wake up no more than 15 minutes prior to the school bell (I kid you not) and manage to get everything she needs ready and then to school on time. Getting up in time to braid hair, paint hair, tie in snakes, get dressed, deal with lunch, and put on Medusa makeup would surely count as more than 15 minutes. Still, this was clearly important. If her school was going to have Friday Halloween costumes, then the realities of social currency dictated she'd best go with very cool Medusa hair. So, this morning we got up early.

Voila! The results...





With the extra preparations she missed the bus, so I drove her to school. On the way I was thinking back to my elementary Halloween experiences that included a full school parade of costumes on the day Halloween was observed. All the kids would go to school thoroughly festooned and then mid-morning the entire school would stop and prepare itself for the parade of classes to go by. Somehow it would all be timed so that each classroom saw every other classroom, and the kids would cheer for each other wildly. I remember both the intimidation of walking through the ENTIRE SCHOOL as a first grade witch complete with green face, and then the total pride and condescending adoration of cheering as a fifth grade magician. Foggy from fatigue, I drove the little one to her Halloween school day dreaming about her costumery life on parade, figuring the advantage of driving her to school was I'd get to view a sea of cheap wigs and overdrawn face paint.

Oh! So not true.

The 11-year old had failed to inform me that in her entire school it was only her class (not even the other fifth grade classes) and the first graders that were getting dressed up today. As she just put it, "The other teachers are too strict." Mid-morning they would celebrate the first grader parade, but had been instructed not to cheer because last year it apparently scared some of the little ones. What?!! So, when we pulled up to her school I did see one over sized pastel blue hat, and that was it. My kid had on the most costumery anywhere. Ah well. Jeez.

So, the morning school drop off turned out to be an ultra-fast pep talk consisting basically of, "now remember, you've got on too much hair paint, make up, and STUFF to back out now. You're in costume, trying to remove anything just won't work. So you've got to commit. Just completely go with it, and love it. And also, if anyone laughs, it's because they're excited to see someone doing it."

"That's right!" She responded. "If anyone laughs it's cause they're jealous cause they wish they were doing it too." And off she slowly trotted. A horde of girls from her class ran up, none of them dressed any differently than they would be on some other day, but all in adoration surrounding my daughter (who also turns out to be taller than any of them, I now discover). I stayed for a bit to watch from a distance at how the little one was handling it. She was rocking around on her feet a bit, obviously a touch awkward from the attention, but standing there like a people loving modern day medusa bad ass just the same.

Wish her luck!

Revelrous Joyous Expressive Communication

I have NO idea what we're talking about with each other here. Whatever it is, it's clearly something we both enjoy very much. The thing is, under the right circumstances, when it comes to Shiloh and I talking with each other, that could be almost ANY topic. She and I simply have good conversations. Throw on top of that that we love costumery, and here you've got a picture that captures a moment of our friendship almost perfectly.

Party Portraits

Here are a few of my favorite portraits from the party.

Shiloh and Kid

The party hostess, Shiloh, wore a complicated costume. She was dressed as a Post-Humanist, after several rounds of inter-species reproduction have occurred, that studies inter-species sexuality. Here are some pictures of her festooned.




The 11-year old I live with chose to go to the party as herself but as if she'd been raised by Shiloh. Remarkably, with that persona in mind, the 11-year old and Shiloh both chose to wear orange bob-shaped wigs without any consultation on the matter. They were both incredibly pleased by the lucky commonality.

Pics of the 11-year old.

Donning the Raven

My friend Shiloh had a "Who's your doppleganger in an alternate universe?" costume party this weekend. The now-11 year old and I drove North to Montreal to be there for it. I figured, though, that if we were going to drive 3+ hours for one overnight to attend a costume party, I'd better fully commit to a costume of extravagant fantasy. So, I went dressed as a Shape Shifting Raven in the guise of a woman.

My friend and hair dresser Andrea Harrison did an AMAZING job with my hair. First, here are pics of the hair she designed for me after I described the feel, and character I was going for. She's wonderful!




The hair with feather collar to accent Andrea's great work...



Here's some pics of the costume and makeup. My friend Pam Wilkinson made the incredible cape. Unfortunately, there aren't any full length photos of the cape from the back, but you can see it in the outside pic, where I'm sitting down, and draped off the arms in the standing indoor picture.

Hair by Andrea Harrison
Rubber Dress Atsuko Kudo, Cape Pam Wilkinson, Feather Collar Love Child Boudoir, Skull Hell Angel Ring Alexander McQueen, Shoulder Chain Harness LitterSF, Violet and Sterling Gray Colored Contacts

Planning a Costume

I have various costuming events coming up in the next couple of weeks. One of them is a costume party at a friend's house this weekend. The other is, of course, Halloween. I've got concepts/characters figured out for both occasions. The trick now is thinking through the details and making choices about the primary pieces of a costume; that is, will I wear a dress? If so, what dress? Or, perhaps pants and a shirt? Once the main pieces are chosen, then the accessories, hair style, and makeup all get chosen as well. I'm still in the midst of this part of the process, though I have a lot of ideas.

Sometimes, admittedly, I don't start with the main pieces at all. Sometimes I just know I want to wear a particular color, or that the clothes I want to wear will express a particular way I want to feel, or occasionally there is even just one accessory I want to design the whole outfit around. The other thing I try to think about when designing a costume is avoiding the obvious. So, for example, sometimes one particular style of dress will easily call up an overall look--maybe a style of dressing from a particular time period, or a certain sort of iconic image. As much as is possible, I try and work against that obvious choice, while also seeing that there are times when you have to just accept the obvious, go with it, and simply play it a little different than others have before.

Below are pics of some of the various costumery items I'm currently choosing from.

Rubber Dress custom made for me by Atsuko Kudo

YSL TributeToo Black Patent Pumps

Leather Lacing Harness by AudraJean
(the entire front laces up to the neck, sorry this detail is obscured by the black t-shirt)

Taffeta cape custom made for me by Pam Wilkinson

I don't know that I'll wear all of these costume elements, and I have other accessories that will be worked into the ensemble as well. But these are pics of some of the basics I'm considering. Your thoughts are welcomed!

Costume Inspiration

As some of you know, I like costuming. I like the challenge of developing a detailed and cohesive presentation of an idea--of thinking through the abstract ideas behind the character, and then figuring out how that persona would appear in actual concrete details. Currently I'm working through what I might want to wear and be for an upcoming costume party, as well as for the classic October costume holiday, Halloween. Here's some pics from costumes I've had in the last couple of years.

A Philosopher's Dream: The Sense Datum

Communist Costume Party: Chairman Meow

A Dark Angel: Dark Doesn't Mean Bad

For the upcoming costumery all I've got sorted out so far is the following: a series of aesthetic images and feelings, as represented by the following pics.

feather wing machine, by rebecca horn
i like the combination of organic and mechanical; sculptural nature

legolas
androgynous bad ass; interesting other worldly effect

givenchy couture, a/w 2010
again, interesting combinations here--bad ass over the top couture chic