Three o' clock blues

This post has nothing to do with B.B. King's song, except for the fact that the color spectrum for this post would be blue, because it is inspired by the blue sea and some other blueish antics. But before I jump headlong into the sapphire mess I'd like to share a revelation (or rather, a self-revelation, because more than half of humanity had probably already came to the conclusion during the Jurassic Ages, made a little post-it of it and moved on) that I have come to while reading the Americana series of Archie comics, "Best of the Sixties". As the blurb put it, the book encourages its readers to "encounter mod fashions fresh off the racks! Rev up your engines for drag racing fun and laugh again at the antics of America's #1 teenagers!"And I was doing just that, except that one disturbing thought remained plastered in my head- in fact its been circling it like a housefly for quite some time and wouldn't go away. I was bothered by the conflict between time -or compartments of time as we like to label them "past", "present", "future" or the decades and centuries, whichever- and fashion, as well as more broadly, personal identity or identity of teenagers as a whole. (Teenagers, because as much as I'd used to persevere in my belief of what one might call the "ageless youth" and the everlasting adaptability and l'overture d'esprit of the older generation, I've come to believe that teenagers have in fact been the ambassadors and societal catalysts for things good and bad throughout history, and are the cornerstones of the age they live in. Like in a certain Bob Dylan song.) 


I realize I did up a reflection on the fashion aspect a month back, and I wrote: 

Somehow in fashion there's an especial stigma that clings onto anything too old and too new; if one wishes to pay tribute to the past, present or future one must be aware of the inter-relationship it shares with the other two and just about everything in between. And anything done in a vacuum or out of a continuum is perceived to have been off-tangent, and one gets the sense that something is wrong. Also, there seems to be some inexplicable code of rule in fashion which says that the works and its medium of presentation has to reflect what goes on in contemporary times, whether the world at large or within oneself, an agent of modern times (Anna Wintour stressed in the David Letterman show that fashion does its part as a documentation and commentary of contemporary times, referring to how the runway was dominated by military themes when wars were raging on in the world.)

And because I am an avid Rookie fan (as you may have already begun to gather from how I always give it permission to sneak into my posts), and because the tone of Rookie echoes the past, and at the same time is tailored to teenage girls and speaks about seemingly universal qualities of girlhood experience, below that wonderful fuzzy feeling of being identified with and being inspired (which I think is a very important thing, and applaud Tavi and her gang for making so many beautiful connections to girls around the world), I begun to feel dismayed, just a little bit, at how there is a cap to the human condition and experience. No matter how history books have managed to characterize each era there is a cyclical pattern to all of them, even among the teen-led revolutions, which always seem to bring in gusts of freshness to whenever and wherever they were held. Suddenly that ... human nature? (O boring Shakespearean term)... which interprets humanity's experience seemed to me to have limited the color of the human experience, and led people like Aaron Rose to declare with fervor that:

The early 21st Century has not been allowed to develop a unique aesthetic because we are too busy bowing down to eras past. I think it’s time to kill our idols and change that.

And then I realized that I was being as stupid as the fashion critics, and fallen prey to that "stigma" I talked about in my earlier reflection -where every time-related reference had to be singled out and accounted for and not being 24/7 conscious of the interplay between the time compartments (for lack of a better term) was a terrible sin, an artistic crime. There may be the same intangible guidelines which are wired into humans' psyche and drive the course of history as we know it but art, that thing which somehow always leads back to a beauty of some sort, the additional layer of interpretation which so often yields so varied and diverse modes of expression, is what I should celebrate. My literature teacher told me that in every generation, the teenagers always assert that their's would be the first to remain as teenagers forever or the last to grow old -but they found different ways to express that. And that natural outgrowth of emotion we call art should be what I'm concerned about. 


But this isn't the point of my post today, and I feel the conclusion doesn't hold much potential for discussion and had probably been exhausted by many other confused teenagers long ago. So without further ado here's my list of blue inspirations: 


1. A shakespearean introduction

Artwork by John William Waterhouse

The excerpt is from Shakespeare's The Tempest- and this is probably one of the only instances where I have found his work interesting, and have bothered to poke and turn around in my head during dinner time. I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what kind of font would do justice to the piece of poetry, and I think I've made the picture look like it popped out of some illustrated series of Shakespearean tales for children, which I guess isn't exactly that bad but it didn't fulfill my aesthetic vision of it. 

2. Let them eat Chanel, let them swim in Chanel

Images courtesy of style.com, vogue.co.uk

For Spring/Summer 2012, Karl married the visual concepts of two universes -the ocean and the galaxy- and the union, I felt, achieved the same sort of effect as when one admires coral reefs, supernovas or the Milky Way, stuff about Nature which behold such an inconceivable degree of perfection that we feel the beauty has in some way been engineered. This is the man-made equivalent -and response- to those magic tricks of Nature; not because the collection aimed to emulate them, but because like les oeuvres de Nature it was a seamless outgrowth of something bigger than itself -what they like to call "the handiwork of God" in the case of Nature and in the case of Karl, the sea and outer space. It wasn't entirely "sleek chic", neither did it only carry the intricacy of the corals -one sees the creation of a parallel universe, with motifs such as the seashell and the pearl establishing another connection with the extraterrestrial on top of their relationship with the ocean.

Images courtesy of vogue.co.uk

A fellow tumblr-er expressed her thoughts on Chanel Cruise 2013 in a single statement, "victorian anime mermaid army". Add Marie Antoinette, Alice in Wonderland, Enid Blyton and Meadham Kirchhoff to the list and you'd more or less have my take on the collection. But it wasn't entirely Meadham Kirchhoff, where the pair had always given themselves free rein with their creations. Though there was a significant expansion to that sense of freedom and nowness the voice of the Original Coco still reverberated through -at times, such as the camellia jewelry corsages, the merger worked out; at others, especially edging towards the end of the show the mosaic between the Chanel tradition and the inspiration which is supposed to be rooted in the very present and in every next moment produces an odd chimera. As Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kichhoff say, "we do not to have a signature but rather a handwriting. We like to tell stories in different ways", the House of Chanel has to let loose of the signature that has kept her identity an immaculately-mowed lawn and allow the camellias to envelope it freely. As we have seen in so many of the collections Karl has presented to us, and especially so in Cruise 2013, the seeds are already there.


3. 'Washed up' exhibit at Selfridges

Image the courtesy of stopdropandvogue.tumblr

The exhibit "celebrates fashion's creative debt to the ocean". Though I'm always happy to see art being mobilized as instruments of commentary and introspection of very real and pressing issues, in this case the sustainability of the ocean, sometimes I find the combination between a primarily self-centered form of creation (art) and an objective cause inclusive of the whole of humanity ironic. And as Homer of the Simpsons said in Season nine of the series, "singing is the lowest form of communication" -I haven't quite figured out what it means, because I believe it refers to more than just, say, the lyrics/melody/visual elements glossing over the gravity of the subject matter. I think the interaction between the audience and a piece of art which carries a message of such a nature is much more complex, because I believe the medium itself is fundamentally rooted in the concept of beauty, and that in itself is a dangerous thing. 

4. Chalayan Fall/Winter 2012

Images the courtesy of style.com

Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises 

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, 

That if I then had waked after long sleep, 

Will make me sleep again; then in dreaming, 

The clouds methought would open, and show riches 

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again

Shakespeare, The Tempest

5. Sea of sargasso

Unknown source; a picture that reminds me of the Sea of Sargasso

Since we are on the topic of seas I figure I shall give everyone a little bit of background on the name of my blog (should have come earlier, sorry for being rude). I first came cross the Sea of Sargasso while reading 'Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them' by Donovan Hohn. A little bit of geography: the Sea of Sargasso is the only 'sea' on Earth that does not possess shores, being located in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean and 4 major current systems. Its romantic name, is derived from the seaweed Sargassum that floats en masse at the water's surface -in fact, because it is at the "eye" of all these current systems it is the calmest part of the ocean, and as a result the seaweed all end up being deposited here. 

Like all other kinds of natural landscapes with magical elements, in this case a fascinating ton of seaweed in the centre of a huge ocean, it has crept into popular culture and public imagination -depicted in literature and films as a place of mystery (the Bermudas are located on the western margin of the Sea of Sargasso, and they are another set of mysteries altogether). And I remember saying to myself "so Sargasso is where it all ends up" and it all made sense and seemed so terrifyingly beautiful to me at that time, that I made up my mind to name this blog after the sea. Like the Sargassum, this is where I hope to channel creative energy.

Bisous,

Rachel Wu