good journalism

Ik vind het elke keer weer een feest als ik een journalist tref die met passie en precisie over zijn of haar vakgebied kan praten en het ook nog eens met een 'fijn pennetje' doet, zoals wij dat plachten te noemen.

Ik was een week of twee geleden al een keer blij verrast door een column van Cathy Horyn, fashion editor bij de New York Times. Daarin eindigde ze haar beschrijving van de show van Murcia Prada met een heldere conclusie die ze meteen in twijfel trok. Kom daar maar eens mee weg! Briljant gedaan.

Daarnet las ik weer een column van haar en ondanks dat ik geen diehard modefan ben las ik het stuk wel uit. Zo moet dat. Verleid je lezer, neem hem aan de hand en zet 'm aan het einde van je verhaal, verrijkt met nieuwe inzichten, weer buiten.

Hier de column:

Let’s Dig In
By CATHY HORYN

In the mid-1990s, when I still lived in Washington, I equated sanity with an old pair of paddock boots. I would put them on whenever I returned from covering the collections. They were part of a general cosmopolitan rumpledness I affected in order to stay in touch with the girl who once thought she wanted to marry a farmer (or a vet) and have five children and lots of dogs.

The fashion world was already a restrictive place — be thin but consummately devouring, be knowing but not necessarily well informed — and it only has become more of a prison with the shift to corporate-run houses and the flattening of values. I recognized that the boots were nothing more than a classic bit of voodoo to keep this strange world away from my door, and, of course, most of the time I ran to meet it. Nonetheless, I kept those boots until they wore out.

Since last weekend’s comments about modernity, Prada and Jil Sander, I’ve been thinking more about the subject, and after the Kubrickian Balenciaga show — Comme des Garςons is our plates today — it is certainly relevant.

For me, to be modern in fashion is to be conscious of the things unfolding before you, not behind you, and to express those ideas as clearly and directly as possible. Because fashion is fundamentally concerned with shapes and silhouette, a modernist uses shape more than in a problem-solving way, but also as a means for evoking physical or psychological realities. (A perfect example of this is Rei Kawakubo’s “lumps and bumps” collection in which growths of fabric on garments suggested our relatively recent attachment to objects like cellphones and fanny packs.) Alexander McQueen explored a host of terrors in his shows. He also responded to changes in technology, in particular the notion of one form morphing into another — a molded shape into a fluid one. I far prefer Saint Laurent’s modernity to Cardin’s spacey kind; the “smoking” and the safari dress truly reflected the exoticism and sexuality of the 60s. At the same time, they were real styles, not designs for an imagined future.

It’s possible, as Marko suggested, that I offered in the Jil post too narrow a definition of modernity. On the other hand, if you’re sensitive to changes around you — and are already used to creating new collections every four to six months — then you probably tend to narrow your focus to produce a precise visual statement. I think Marko liked this Sander collection less than others, in particular the fall 2009 show, but while I also loved the innovation in that collection, with its spirals, I felt that the new fall shapes — their energy — were genuinely connected to a feeling today. And who’s to say what Raf Simons will see in six month’s time or a year?

Although I very much enjoyed Marko’s references in the Prada posts to Jovanka Tito and his grandmother’s huge knits, I don’t share his enthusiasm for the “hideous/disarming” aspects of the clothes. I mean, no designer can give us a better slap of repulsiveness, and make us enjoy it, than Miuccia Prada. But I just don’t find that idea to be the most direct or interesting point nowadays.

However, I was very interested in Monica’s commentabout the post-socialist aspects of the Prada show, following something Marko had said earlier. Monica described the image of femininity as being not the defensive post-socialism of stilettos and hard sexiness but “the shields-down post-socialism of tea and brandy and the kitchen table.” She called it “an aesthetic of warmth and human pace and muscular comfort offering tea and brandy; and the forms of sociability and performances of self that milieu allows for.”

To me, this idea feels authentic, and I thank Monica for mentioning it. I felt something of the same “human pace” and sociability in Sophie Theallet’s collection this season. I kept seeing not so much the pretty clothes as the ordinary pleasures — food, friends around a table, spilled wine — that their unaffected stylishness embodied. Ms. Theallet doesn’t work on the same intellectual level as Ms. Prada, and I’m not suggesting that she does. But she certainly expressed the same feeling. In fact, it is really a longing.

I’m off to see what Ms. Kawakubo has cooked up.