Studio reflections is a monthly dispatch of observations from the fitting room of barostudio___. It is highly indicative of my evolving impressions of being a creator, a facilitator of embodied emotion, a writer and a receiver of unending information around me. It’s a log of my learnings as a young maker of things, where I resist the optimised pull of algorithms and document my process in long form. I choose this space to unpack the politics of visual communication via relevant texts, theory, imagery and conversation. I consider dialogue to be my social currency with this project so if you find yourself having opinions about what you read here, I would like to engage with you in the comments or email. This particular letter is a part 2 of my previous post on the value of details and the power of lingering. Here, I attempt to apply that framework of enchantment, towards the lens of fashioning our sartorial experiences.
The formula laid out in part 1 of this essay was:
strategic attention + lingering = enchantment
While this was initially a recipe to resist sensorial overdrive in high stimulus environments (museums), I have been using this framework to digest and experience fashion on and around me. To explain better, a few things as preamble:
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I argue here that instead of viewing the ‘success’ of our outfits as a whole, it might be better to cultivate intimacy with parts of our outfit
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I attempt to reimagine a system that we seem to be just a pawn in; something about the pressure of being the perfect represenations of our style/oersonality etc
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The practice of lingering on our favourite parts of about our outfits, is an embodied act of resistance to the forces of hyperstylised expression that surrounds us
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By romancing the details of what we are wearing, we become a testament of our presence—which gives us the emotional and later, analytical cache to understand the world around us
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There is no ‘output’ that is expected from this exercise. Challenging notions of optimisation is central to this practice, the objective is purely to approach our everyday/night dressing through an embodied lens of reception, experience and expression