frivolity is an act of joy and joy is an act of resistance
hi, I missed u <3
I want to write about fashion (again). I want to remember how it made me feel when I was 18 and I was interning for the first time, eyes wide open and unmarred by practicality, and I want to forget some of the things IRL that I wish I could un-know; I want to believe in runways again. I want to feel the hot, bright lights beating down on me like the sun itself, feel the music rattle inside my head, scrambling for a view and pretending I don’t want to pull my iPhone out to record it like everyone else. I want the petals of the fabric to whisk past my face, the jewellery jangles to be audible 5ft away, and the stomp of the models to be palpable. I want to see the intricacies of the clothes and the faces, feel that feeling that you can’t get from the static shot or the headline relentlessly lamenting “X shuts down runway at Y.” I want to see clothes, on a model, set to some kind of sound, in some kind of location, moving, and I want to transcend. I want to fucking TRANSCEND. I wanna be both agent and observer, protagonist and spectating. I wanna be in nouns and verbs, present and past, I wanna be free. FREE ME. This season (it’s just been fashion season) (sort of) has made me think that this: is possible again.
I wrote a poem for my friend Marie recently; she died a few months ago. I’ll tell you more about that and I’ll tell you the poem in a minute. But I wrote a line in that poem - ‘free from freedom’ - that reminds me of my thoughts, just up there, on transcendence. Even being free, in this fucked up and beautiful world (mine? or the actual world? it’s so hard to tell), feels like a pressure; free yourself from your hang-ups, leave your work at work, travel, let go, forgive - what is left out of the pseudo-feminist self help books is that to do this, to be free, is actually a lot of effort. You have to take control; you have to action those thoughts, those feelings. To be free from freedom - to free yourself from the effort of achieving that freedom - is what religions, cultures, civilisations have been chasing for eternity. It’s meditation, it’s nirvana. It’s transcendence. David Lynch knows. It is being; existing in the moment. Free from freedom is when nothing else exists outside of that exact juncture - you are there and there only. That is how a (really fucking good) fashion show can feel and that is how I felt that summer all them years ago that I had my first fashion job and my first bit of London, 18 and dancing with Marie and Rachel.
deep fried brie with cranberry sauce and a pint of Carling in the sun, the staff exit me and Marie would come in through even when we got told off breakfast on the Holloway road with that random guy from the party the night before all of us too young to tell him to leave, not that it mattered the three of us caught up in our headiness free from freedom indelibly marked by the radiation of your love. I'd sleep on the floor next to you two in the bed, t-shirts covering our eyes to block the sun out, at your one bed ground floor flat in Stepney Green that we shared I think it had parquet floors nothing would be the same without that summer. we must have listened to Knee Socks a thousand times, each wearing ours. your smile could knock over a vase of roses your hands tangled together like your hearts and your hair a glimpse into paradise (lost)
Despite my thoughts on the dynamism (yep, dynamism) of a catwalk show, even just a collection can make you feel this way at times (or make me feel this way, rather). It’s easy to forget, amidst the fast fashion epidemic, amidst modern slavery, amidst the ever-accelerating trend cycle, amidst influencers being styled in inexorably expensive whole-look lends from brands, amidst the endless crises the world is embroiled in, amidst fucking TRUMP, amidst everything that is bigger than (>) fashion itself, that fashion - design - is expression. I wish more brands published their press releases from their shows; not actually press releases but little stories, insights into the designer’s ideas, capsules of their inspiration. What they’re watching, reading, seeing, reacting to. You can understand the collection from another angle; not just your perspective but theirs too. I’m currently reading Poor Artists by The White Pube and they’re talking about the feeling of art - not necessarily the intention, or the reaction, or the vision, but how it makes you feel. “‘Isn’t it funny that often it is language that makes us anxious in art. It’s when we have to write about it that we go all, oh my God, and glaze over as we do when someone starts telling us the rules of a card game. Once we disentangle language from art and see language as a parallel, rather than something that pins art down or locks it up, then it becomes much easier to talk in relation to art, rather than at it; rather than have it be a head-on confrontation. Art doesn't operate in the same way language does. Art opens up new perspectives, new spaces, new ways of seeing. It allows us to say things we cannot say through any other means.’” That is to say: the description, the PR release, isn’t defining the collection - it’s offering up an extra bit of insight, a side of fries to your cheeseburger, all part of your meal deal but not the same food product. The collection itself defines the collection; the clothes express ideas that words on their own cannot. It allows us to say things we cannot say through any other means. “The film is the thing,” as David Lynch so wisely and frustratedly said. The Art in this instance is the fashion - and to understand that all you have to do is watch any McQueen show from when Lee McQueen was creative director. I still get choked up watching the robots from his SS99 show contort, seemingly in pain, seemingly screaming, spewing paint onto the fawn-like model who is stuck to the spot in fear, rotating like a wind-up ballerina in a music box - the whole debacle creating something not horrifying as it should be but enchanting. Turning pain into beauty. “We want our pain illuminated, and if it’s illuminated maybe it isn’t quite so bad.” Metamorphosis, sublimation. Transcendence.
Have you watched Lady Gaga’s Coachella show? Coachella, the Vapid Nation, is transformed by her beauty, her pain into the highest and most contemporary form of art. And the fashion is fucking central to the show - each look carefully curated to reference the past, the present and the future simultaneously. That’s an easy one; what do you get when you combine the past, present and future? Transcendence, of course. Achieving a state of being. Pop music, when done right, does this so well - frees you from freedom. There’s something in the uncomplicatedness of it - and I don’t mean to say that it’s simple musically, but more spiritually uncomplicated - that acts as a release, that transforms the pain or the mundane or the inhumane into something beautiful, and but for a moment lets us dance. Free and happy and dancing. In this state of what we might societally consider frivolity, we find joy. Or - in this joy, we find frivolity. Or through this frivolity we find joy? Or all of the above. Joy, as we know, is the greatest act of resistance. Acts of resistance? Punk. Don’t ever let anyone tell you frivolity isn’t punk because it fucking is. Dancing to pop music with your friends is the most punk thing you could do in this life. Have you ever thrown ur hands in the air while Dancing Queen is playing and your friends are all around you, stood on shaking chairs and opening their arms n hearts? I could write a fucking anthology on that feeling. Resist relentlessly, be joyful endlessly. In the wake of today’s moronic decision to label gender based on biological sex from the UK government (ta, guys, smashing it there. Fucking arseholes), this idea of frivolity being seditious makes me think of Conner Ives’ Protect The Dolls t-shirt. You’ll have seen it recently on Troye Sivan and Pedro Pascal: a white tee with PROTECT THE DOLLS (a reference to 80s ballroom culture, an affectionate name for trans women) emblazoned on the front in simple serif text. All proceeds go to Trans Lifeline and it’s raised $70,000 so far. $70,000!!! It’s cute and fun and by all intents frivolous - except it’s exactly this frivolity that has raised such a big amount that directly helps a marginalised community when they really need it. Fucking pop girlies raising money for trans led charities when our governments are consistently letting them down. “When they go low, we go high.” THAT’s punk. Joy as an act of resistance. Fashion freeing us from freedom. Pop music initiating our transcendence. Subvert me, transform me, wake me up.
I don't like to do it but there isn't much I wouldn't do for you in your tiara. babe, I love you the soap scum makes me sick and you make me better, again and again
<3