The Thread Magazine Fall/Winter 2017

THREAD

ISSUE NO.11

THE ESCAPE ISSUE

FALL/WINTER 2017

Thread is an independent student publication and the only fashion, lifestyle and art magazine at Cornell. Thread is a conglomeration of student writing, art, photography, styling, and design. Published once per semester, Thread showcases the talents of Cornellians from all disciplines.

Web thethreadmagazine.com Email thethreadmagazine@gmail.com Facebook facebook.com/thethreadmagazine Instagram @threadmag

The Thread Magazine, an independent student organization located at Cornell University, produced and is responsible for the content of this publication. This publication was not reviewed or approved by, nor does it necessarily express or reflect the policies or opinions of, Cornell University or its designated representatives. Importantly, Thread does not express or endorse any given idea.

We hope to initiate thought and civil discourse.

Editorial Associate Editor Gaby Leung Olivia Friedman Catherine Giese Maya Kamaeva Chi Kyu Lee Andrea Orduna Gunner Park Tori Pietsch Kristina Linares President Brenna Louie Vice President Avidan Grossman Editor-in-Chief Nadine Fuller Creative Director Anna Kambhampaty Technical Director Creative Alex Basler Caroline Brown Caley Drooff Joyce Jin Anna Kambhampaty Erika Kane Georgia Manning

Sophia O’Neill Cornelius Tulloch Yvonne Schitchtel Sophie Wang Chi Yamakawa Amelia Zohore

Photography Director Madison Chalfant Lily Croskey-Englert Anika Exum Auri Ford Jessie Harthun Maya Jacks Erika Kane Emily Keenan Sahil Khoja

Omar Abdul-Rahim Savanna Lim Rory McDermott Maggie O’Keefe Julian Ohta Cameron Pollack Elias Sabbagh Emma Scheinbaum Marah Selim Kate Williams

Art Director Tina He Cedric Castillo Erin Chen Michael Choe Lily Englert Priya Govil

Kevin Jiang Cornelius Tulloch Jill Wu Christine Yang Adrian Zheng

Styling Director Ravenna Stafford Grace Anderson Victoria Fibig Daniel Bromberg Akua Kwakwa Caroline Brown Justin Parratt

Eliana Rozinov Elaine Sagalchik Emma Seymour Jacob Swaim Teagan Todd Christine Yang

Web Director Karson Daecher Developer Julian Ohta Maggie Canfield Ann Li Cedric Castillo Abigail Macaluso Jenny Chang Louise Xie Kelly Fam Beauty Director Hebani Duggal Hee Jin Kim Isabella Yang Grace Mehler Julia Zeng Cherree Shin Marketing Dee Dee Brown Aylin Cakar Amy Chen Michele Chen Tiffany Chen Lily D’Ariano Helen Fan Victoria Fibig Sophia Fischbein

Debbie Lee Tatiana Lieberman Cindy Liu Sophie Meyers Andie Orduna Ryan Platt Victoria Shin Jacob Swaim Marlee Weill

Business Director Mauricio Quispe David Batista Anna Malinowski Gianna Duda Seoin Park Alexa Eskenazi Kendra Sober Jackie Han Models Grace Anderson Ariane Bowers Sukanya Dayal Leah Eshelman Madeleine Galvin Peter Haddad Ori Huang Molly Karr

Johnny Ley Ke Ma Jai Malhotra Gabriella Naggar Nandini Nayar Dhaaruni Sreenivas Tessa Yu

Advisor Prof. Denise Green dng22@cornell.edu Special thanks to Cornell Store, Hintd, Unemployed Denim, Five Guys, Printing Center USA, KHOUSE, and Bridal Showcase of Ithaca.

Letter From the Editor I always wanted a treehouse when I was young — that was my thing. Maybe I had some type of idealized image of myself frolicking with wood nymphs or dancing with fairies while I explored this hidden abode. I was 5 years old or so, debatably too old to be dreaming of a magical realm of being. But I give my young self credit for figuring out that eventually, we all crave a way to escape reality. I think as I grew older, my treehouse took the form of different things.

The treehouse was built up when I turned away from toxic relationships. I entered the treehouse when I ran away from my problems. The hardest thing was when I wanted to escape from myself — detach myself from memories and emotions — that even my treehouse couldn’t be a source of comfort.

Maybe that’s why we end up abusing sex and drugs — to make ourselves feel better, to find a way out of what we don’t want to be thinking or feeling. We hurt our bodies to forget the pain.

We desire a way we can escape this place, this person, this time, hoping to be pulled back into the past or brought into the future — all so that we don’t have to deal with “now.” When I’m driving through cornfields at hour three, with no real end goal or intentionality, CD blasting (without an aux cord, it’s amazing how much use you can get out of an Andrea Bocelli CD), I find myself wondering what it is I’m leaving, or what it is I’m hoping to find. Maybe it’s the process of escaping that’s so alluring, because suddenly we can give ourselves up to something that seems out of our control; it’s a way to be released from the responsibility of the decisions we’ve made.

My treehouse had little to do with nymphs and fairies. It didn’t matter that it would be in my backyard, a few feet away from my house,

or that my parents could easily peer into the window and see a small child doing nothing other than reveling in the fact that she had found a way to escape her household. Even in my naivety, when I thought I could escape by moving from one place to the next — when I thought escape itself was just leaving one location — I was discovering what it meant to release myself from responsibility and enter a space in which I thought I could be free.

These writers give life to the different modes of escape — their voices hint at the danger of such a power, but also the innovation and progress that can come from straying from the conventional boundaries laid out for us. Their writing sheds light on how people navigate this world, seeking refuge in fashion, material objects and social media. In the meantime, when I find myself back on the road with the cornfields stretching on until they become a golden haze, I know I’m a human being just like everyone else, looking for something to release me.

10. 31. 17 Gaby Leung

Letter From the Creative Director To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to be at Cornell right now. For a plethora of personal and academic reasons, I’m frankly over this place. Ithaca was pleasant enough for the summer, but now that the seasons have legitimately changed, I really can’t find a compelling reason to stay. Unfortunately, due to entrenched commitments (i.e. tuition), I am tightly tethered to this university for the time being. That being said, working on this publication has been a way to create a handy guide for anyone else feeling stuck in a similar rut.

Much like selecting proper self-care mechanisms, what you are attempting to escape will influence how to best go about doing that.

My desire to escape can be broken down into a multifold and overlapping series of complaints: restlessness and an inability to focus, wanderlust, and actively attempting to run from my mistakes and shortcomings. Escapism, for me, is an attempt to rid myself of the burden that is the building of anxieties until it turns into a tower so unstable and great that you know you cannot run out from under its shadow or avoid the path of impending collapse, but while you foolishly try anyway, you are inevitably flattened by your own fear of failure and societal expectations and whatever other lofty guilts you’ve been piling high. #Relatable, perhaps?

Since I’m not one to conceal my emotions or have self-respect, I’ve taken this opportunity, through the use of my most public platform, to broadcast my dissatisfaction with the current state of my life. The following pages are a glorified scream into the existential abyss in which I continually yell “Why?” and probably cry.

For the sake of giving good advice, I have tried most of the methods represented here. I won’t specify which, because I don’t need any legal trouble at this time, but I’ll do Kristina the favor of saying Thread doesn’t promote or suggest the use of illegal or controlled substances, in case anyone reading this feels like being a little bitch about things. During our planning, we discussed escapism through indulgence, the construction of safe spaces and communities, blacking out, self-destructive behaviors, and living in the past. I will be the first to confess that I am a terribly nostalgic person. The second to concede this fact would be my therapist, who is eternally trying to convince me I cannot attempt to stylize my life according to my grossly rose-tinted distortions.

That’s not to say it’s working, though. One of my worst habits for my mental health is almost certainly my excitement in romanticizing the past and incessantly insisting I could never be as happy as I was in that one, previous, mediocre moment. Thankfully, you can’t sentimentalize moments you weren’t mentally present enough to remember. Yay, progress!

My point here is that there’s probably something for everyone, and if there isn’t a solution for you in these pages, then maybe we can at least create some new problems.

Or maybe you’ll conclude that escapism is an empty excuse for not making actual changes in your life and toss this whole thing out. I can’t guarantee any of these outcomes, and you can’t follow up with me because I’m going abroad. So good luck — probably.

10.31.17 Nadine Fuller

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index — 7 12 14 20 22 26 30 34 44

A Portrait with Chairs Who Cares about the Past? Choose Your Own Adventure How many thongs is it gonna take for you to love yourself?

Can You Escape? The Falsification of Appearances Through Social Media Food Tithes The Modern Blog The Absolute Authenticity of 1980’s Avant-Garde and Minimalism The Art of Androgyny and Anonymity

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A Portrait with Chairs Chi Kyu Lee

My father still withholds many of his years from me and the rest of the family. His repertoire consists of his impoverished childhood, his three years in a Korean countryside as a soldier, and his life that I’ve seen as his eldest. Outside of those moments, I perhaps choose not to inquire deeper. But there is one outlet so decadent with physicality and materiality that he is unable to hide it from us.

The first chair he let me bring into my room was the Aeron chair by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, which has hotdog-shaped knobs on its sides and makes a springy noise whenever you sit down or stand up. The surface that supports my body is entirely mesh-like. I see the chair everywhere I go now, and it bothers me a little because I want it to exist only in my memories.

It is immature and delusional but also embarrassingly human. The chair is still in my room after it was in my father’s office for a few years; it came back to me. I believe, for some reason, that it will stay with me forever.

When he got it, his Eames lounge chair with its ottoman became my father’s favorite, always placed in the master bedroom no matter where we are. If there are plastic files and documents with his flowy handwriting (I’m realizing my handwriting is evolving to be more similar to his) on the ottoman, it means the designer in him longs for the unobtainable solitude that an artist feeds on—the rest of the family constantly interrupts his flow, his thoughts. If his feet are on the ottoman, however, he is most likely to be shopping online for furniture. Or working on part of his life that I don’t look into.

He is with me, with us, through his chairs: I spend hours of my elementary years in a bright orange Eames Fiberglass Armchair—with a rocker base— calming myself with its movement while I read.

My giant French teacher breaks one of my father’s

Eames Shell chairs, and disappears a couple of weeks later.

The Chaise by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand tickles me with its calf hide, and I endure it because the hide feels like my father’s beard.

My family eats and chats and fights in Jean Prouvé’s Standard Chairs—the wine-colored one is my favorite.

Every time my mother tells me her favorite is the Eames Lounge Chair Wood, I nod and agree because it always pulls me toward itself only with gravity.

My heart breaks when I see holes on the Barcelona by van der Rohe.

Looking at Grcic’s red Chair_One, I wonder how my mother moves the stone base whenever she drops her makeup.

Though most of the chairs vanish into an undisclosed warehouse (I imagine shelves filled with chairs), George Nelson’s wooden platform bench has stayed with us forever. There are fashion magazines on it usually. To be frank, I don’t like sitting on it. Rather, I trace its emptiness framed by smooth wood, and I wonder if the wooden frame could give me papercut.

Whenever I go to Klarman Hall for a sandwich at Temple of Zeus, I gaze at the benches. They are replicas to me but, still, I feel at home. I see my little brother in his infant form (though he’s in elementary school now) trying to get on top of the bench. I see my aunts and uncles reaching for fruits on the bench. I see my father locking eyes with the bench, as if he were a Romantic poet.

From the bench, he designs.

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Who Cares about the Past?

Choose Your Own Adventure Christine Yang

Actress Amandla Sternberg said it best in her video “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows.” Cultural appropriation is “when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated but is deemed as high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves… when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in.” We’ve all seen it. When the likes of Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber, and Marc Jacobs popularized dreadlocks as a fashion statement, they didn’t receive the same patchouli oil and weed comments Zendaya did when she attended the Oscars. Instead, they were praised and called innovators and trendsetters, while she dealt with racist backlash.

Appropriation amplifies the double standard that exists within society; how one group can receive infinite applause while the other is condemned for the same actions. Culture is more than a fashion statement. It’s a lifestyle, and appropriation reduces it down into a onedimensional entity when in reality, culture is multifaceted. Appropriation allows people to pick and choose the parts of culture they like and ignore the parts that don’t fit their archetype. At the end of the day, they take off their wigs, clothes, and jewelry and return back to their normal lifestyles, leaving behind those who cannot do the same. Celebrities sporting grills and cornrows don’t need to worry about the historical oppression and struggle African-Americans face daily because their encounter with black culture is just a fleeting imitation.

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When Miley Cyrus reinvented her image with the help of urban culture and the rise of twerk, the media painted her as a strategic genius after she successfully shed her good-girl Disney past and catapulted her career to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 Charts. Years later, she too grew tired of playing hip-hop after it wasn’t profitable anymore and molded her style back into country, simultaneously giving a big middle finger to the culture she had pretended to be a part of not long ago. Her actions told her worldwide fan base that pretending to be urban gave her an edge and a reputation. But five years later, she separates from her Disney past, and moves on. The real black experience is different— the permanency of one’s minority status is a burden that comes with hurt and discrimination which cultural appropriation mocks and belittles. Miley Cyrus’s fluidity in and out of cultures transformed a statement into an insult the minute she degraded black culture into a trend.

In the fashion world, designers who conceive entire collections off their “African-tribal” or “Chinese Geisha” inspirations while only featuring one or two people of color to walk down their runways continue to be applauded for their creativity and progressive expressions. But they’ve debased African or Chinese culture down into an aesthetic or glamourized image, undermining the members of those communities as well.

Proponents of appropriation call it a necessity, required for fashion to move forward, for potential to be pushed. But

Keno La Collection Memento Spring/Summer 2018 Paris

are the ideas in the fashion industry really so dried up that the next best alternative is to romanticize another culture? Designers are ultimately telling their audiences that whatever African-Americans or Asians have created for themselves and invented to turn their struggle and pain into a comfort is now for everyone to take. What was once forced to be muted and forgotten is now at the top of every trending page, inflated to cost thousands of dollars and worn by every person on the street, stripping minority culture of its uniqueness and individuality.

and then thrown away when it is no longer advantageous; it takes the things that the underprivileged created for themselves in response to the tribulations they face and devalues it. I’m not saying there is no safe space for creativity. Boundaries must be pushed for ideas to prosper, but cultural mixing must be controlled when it turns into exploitation and no longer comes from a place of respect and appreciation.

Cultural appropriation is controversial, polarized, and at times, hypersensitive, but it is certainly not justified or progressive, and the fashion world can do better.

It’s not just a matter of race. Earlier this year, Kim Kardashian made media headlines once again for changing her Instagram feed into something that can be categorized as none other than the “poverty aesthetic.” If one didn’t already know Kardashian’s luxurious lifestyle, one might believe that she was truly living within the 50%, but Kim Kardashian, like many others, stripped low-income culture of its struggle and reduced it to an Instagram theme that idealizes the experience. She’s at liberty to control her own narrative, fabricate a false identity with which she can be reborn and escape her own reality’s trauma. But what does that say to those who can’t forget the hardships of their life by simply changing what they wear? There lies the blurry, vague line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange. Appropriation only amplifies the systemic power difference between two groups of people. It tells the weaker group that their cultural inventions can be taken and used by the privileged

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How many thongs is it gonna take for you to love yourself?

Teagan Todd

When I was sixteen, I stopped losing weight. Having spent the majority of my youth as either chubby or borderline obese, I viewed thinness as a revelation, an opportunity to start anew. I believed Thin Me would become everything Fat Me wasn’t, simply by the virtue of being thin: that all it would take to become confident, outgoing, and most importantly, attractive, was a couple dozen pounds and a whole lot of grit.

You can imagine my surprise when, at sixteen, I discovered that weight loss wasn’t going to solve the varied and complex gamut of my problems. While I was treated differently by the world around me, and by the medical profession in particular, I wasn’t treated all that differently by myself.

I still struggled with my confidence and with engaging new people; my love life continued to not continue, with a grand total of absolutely zero people expressing interest in me prior to my time in college.

That axis around which I’d expected the virtual entirety of my life to pivot, the idea that I’d clung to for years—that being thin would make everything okay—had turned out to be somewhat of a bust.

So what did I do, when I realized that being thin wouldn’t change things? Did I take a second to step back and reexamine my life, to explore the reasons underlying my problems that thinness couldn’t fix?

Of course not; I learned to buy things instead. Prior to my weight loss, I’d banned

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myself from buying clothing as a sort of self-inflicted punishment for being fat. Now that I was thin, I had access to the glory of commercial fashion, access to a world which never stopped promising me that if I bought this eyelash curler or that crop top, everything would change. I ate its promises up: I figured that since being thin hadn’t solved my problems, something else about my appearance needed alteration. Though it took me awhile to realize, over time I understood that I could only feel worthy of taking up space—could only feel worthy of existing—when I also felt as though I was physically attractive.

And so Alice fell down the rabbit hole.

What started out as a justifiable acquisition of a new, thin wardrobe over time became a self-medicative compulsion. Confidence lower than its already abysmally low standard? Social interaction producing real or imagined blunders? Love life (still) either non-existent or shockingly disastrous? My solution was to buy, buy, buy; and when the things I liked to buy started losing their temporary “medicative” properties, I moved onto buying things that I liked considerably less, but somehow still believed would change my life. Floral dresses and skater skirts turned into camisoles and jeans, which eventually turned into socks and bras and yes, even to underwear. And as much as I’d love to pretend that I’ve moved past this mindset, a few days ago I dropped nearly forty dollars on a “thickening” hairspray, a purchase which I justified to myself under

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“My greatest responsibility in all of this is learning to love myself in that same manner I’ve spent my entire life loving everyone else: wholly, enthusiastically, and without desire for escape. “

the guise of it being an “investment.” “If you buy this hairspray,” I told myself, “You are never gonna have to worry about buying another volumizing product again. This is the hairspray to end all hairsprays; it is volume unparalleled. What seems like an egregious waste of money now will prove its worth within a matter of weeks.” I did not stop to ask myself, however, why I have spent so many years convinced that flat hair will be my social undoing, or why I think having a wide face and fine locks will prevent anyone from ever loving me. Instead, I continued to make the environmentally, economically, and spiritually unsustainable decision: I bought the spray.

Fashion is so often marketed to us as the truest expression of self—as a perfect avenue by which to make one’s internal identity visible to the outside world—that we forget fashion can also be a method of rejecting ourselves. Underneath my belief that being thin would validate my existence was always the belief that no other part of me possessed that capability: not my love of writing, nor my sense of humor, or even the less positive, but ultimately humanizing aspects of my person, such as my paranoia or impulsivity.

Likewise, underneath my inappropriately large collection of volumizing hair products is the belief that no other part of me will make me worthy of love, except the way I look. Fashion for me has become a way of escaping the things I don’t like about myself, of never actually dealing with my problems and instead wasting my time, money, and energy on things I don’t really need or want.

It has taken me nineteen long years, has taken finding myself in an outfit I love with the haircut I’ve always wanted and a newly emaciated body (thanks, endometriosis!) to realize what little fucking difference the way I look makes in my overall capacity to conclude myself lovable.

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Recently, I’ve started trying to pursue my adoration of fashion through less commercial means. If I’m bored while I’m in class, I take a second to look around the room and write down any outfits that stick out to me or otherwise catch my eye. I note combinations of texture, color, and fabric, describe whether or not I think the outfit is cohesive or “working” as a whole, or what I think it says about the wearer. I find my love of fashion in my love of art, in the pictures and playbills I use to decorate my dorm room, in the quick sketches that line the side of my notes. I do my best to stop myself before buying something new, particularly if that “something” is related to beauty, asking myself, “What aspect of your life do you believe buying this will transform? What part of your self-hatred do you think this item will diminish? Just how many thongs is it gonna to take for you to love yourself?”

More often than not, I find myself canceling my order or turning away from the cashier.

I think that maybe, just maybe, I’m starting to realize what an unrealistic standard of beauty—what an unrealistic standard of existence—I’ve spent almost two decades demanding from no one but myself. When I consider how much I love my friends and family regardless of their looks, and often regardless of their actions, I can’t help but wonder if my greatest responsibility in all of this has never been to change, but to learn to love myself in the same manner I’ve spent my entire life loving everyone else: wholly, enthusiastically, and without desire for escape.

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Can You Escape?

The Falsification of Appearances Through Social Media

Inspired by Felicity Marshall

Eliana Rozinov

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On January 17, 2014, University of Pennsylvania student-athlete, Madison Holleran uploaded a photo to Instagram of a glowing Rittenhouse Square at sunset. An hour later, she was pronounced dead after jumping from the roof of a Philadelphia parking garage. She was 19 years old.

Post after post, she used social media as a medium to conceal her depression. In today’s tech savvy society, we use media platforms as a vehicle to temporarily escape our realities.

But in doing so, the extent to which we falsify our lives raises the question of whether this photo-sharing is cathartic, or responsible for pushing us deeper into the places we so desperately seek to hide.

Our attempts to modify what is authentic hinder us from truly understanding the people around us, and leave us unaware of what lies beneath the surface. The number of likes on a post or views on a video become a measure of validation. Nonetheless, when the response falls short of what we wish to attain, we feel even more compelled to misrepresent ourselves. We eliminate the negatives and overemphasize the positives in order to make our lives seem better than they actually are, simultaneously making ourselves more appealing in the process. Our tendency to portray unrealistically positive self-portraits causes viewers to forget that we are all vulnerable. The Instagram model with half a million followers could be the victim of an abusive relationship, and the overnight Snapchat sensation could be in the midst of an enormous financial predicament. Yet we don’t know that, and most likely never will.

Social media has the capability to become psychologically addictive. When she was 15 years old, Australian native, Essena O’Neill, began to build a modeling empire through Instagram and YouTube. Yet her cheerful posts were not a true indication of how miserable she felt within. She recounts, “I was severely addicted…I didn’t even see it happening, but social media had become my sole identity.” What Essena had initially created as a means to escape reality became her worst nightmare. In an attempt to make others better understand how she felt, and disprove misconceptions about photo sharing, O’Neill went on to modify the captions of her Instagram posts. She disclosed that every snapshot she shared was plagued by artificiality, and today, urges individuals to take time to detach from social media, to prevent them from experiencing a similar struggle.

Unfortunately, disconnecting for a brief period may not be enough to combat social media addiction. The time we do not spend on our phones is time spent thinking about what we are missing. Though we don’t always see it as such, social media can be filled with opportunity. If used to portray an accurate self-image, it can serve as a profound vehicle for self-expression. However, the only way to truly get away is to log off and look within.

Fabricating our true desires, we only achieve a false sense of belonging and an incomplete sense of self. In order to overcome addiction of any kind, we need to acknowledge our shortcomings. In recognizing this, we can inspire others to do the same.

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Jacob Swaim

Look at this! What a sight to be held. He had never seen such a beautiful spread: glossy and ample, tainted with the fresh scent of pine and lathered with a reddish mahogany. Like a pool of mercury, the reflective surface of the table mirrored the fiery chandeliers dangling from the vaulted ceiling above.

The flames from the silver candlesticks danced jovially about intricate china and doilies.

Ring ring!

With eerie synchronicity, tall gentlemen in topcoats and ascots removed the coats from their blindfolded guests who were dressed head to toe in lavish gowns that shimmered in the moonlight. At this, he began to develop a nagging, detached feeling.

Like the others, he’d assumed a very particular role: an observer caught between the within and the without — experiencing for the first time an ancient ritual; simultaneously participating in and witnessing from afar something he could feel but not yet comprehend.

Ring ring!

Tall suited shadows seeped out from behind two flanking partitions and hastily served each participant with large chrome cloches. Out of curiosity, he tried looking at one of these enigmatic figures in the face but, like dust, they evaporated and swiftly disappeared behind the wall. “Dinner has been served.” The man at the head of the table stood, and with a snap of his finger, the cloches and the guests’ blindfolds withered away to reveal a grand meal.

Food.

Food touched every corner of the infinite table: fluffy biscuits nestled comfortably against blood red ribeye, golden brown rotisserie chickens stuffed with maze and seared asparagus, an array of perfectly cooked vegetables, a smoked ham that made his mouth water and fine wine and cheeses imported

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from Burgundy. And then there was a cornucopia overflowing with exotic fruits he’d never seen before, a spread of ten types of sauces — one of them a deep blue. And the piece de résistance: a cake. Buttercream. Four tiers.

Silence.

And then all at once, the ladies and gentlemen dug in without mapping out their meal; they ate as if they’d seen more — more food, more luxurious seating, more delicate silverware and china. Every portion was calculated and every mannerism articulated, and yet the biscuits vanished within an instant. The ribeye was cut up and distributed evenly without hesitation. The gentlemen fed their lady friends with a surreal nonchalance. The ladies imbibed with a flat affect. He felt uncomfortable, and wanted to leave, but the banquet held him in a trance of insatiable desire. All at once, he forgot about his purpose as a journalist, his presence, and his morals. All at once, he’d been reduced to a primal being, neither here nor there, surviving on the moment, and, like a starved coyote, he ate.

Like a stream, the juice from the meat flowed down his neck and chest. He shoved a large drumstick into his mouth, and then another, and then potatoes, asparagus, carrots, and biscuits. Nothing was safe from his blind hedonism. By this time, the ladies and gentlemen had stopped eating. They observed him, and with satisfied grins, egged him on with their eyes. He didn’t notice. Involuntarily, he continued to inhale the food placed in front of him. The wine went down as if it were poured by Dionysus himself. The experience felt religious. The man at the head of the table stood up and applauded as did the others, but he continued to eat and eat and eat.

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Catherine Giese

tithes

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Every day, I try to lie in the bed I have made, and every day, I run to the water.

There are whispers in a house that is now haunted.

Distress clings to the walls like asbestos. With a brush of the door swinging inside comes a rush of liquid nitrogen to the head. It moves into my chest and sinks into my stomach like a rock. If I fall, I will sink.

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There are things I know that will eat me out alive. I light matches to pull worms from my throat. I wash myself with acid. I burn incense and throw lotus petals on the floor. I promise, I pray, and still, they stick to my skin.

I should hang my walls with the lies buried in my belly. I should wear them chained together as a necklace and dip my nails in their poison. Instead, I pull out my heart. I hold it in my palms like an offering. I break bread.

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When my hands become ice and the bread turns black, I know that the hourglass has cracked open. As I turn to leave, the ghosts in the hallways tell me to stay. That this could be a nice place. If only I sank back under the ground. If only I closed my eyes and remembered what it was like to sleep.

For a moment, my lips curve. My lashes flutter. But I’ve been to the place where everything glitters.

By the lake there is a fire whose smoke smells of roses. Soon enough I will find myself counting ducks.

Soon enough I will be able to breathe without choking.

The water melts away the burns on my body. Flowers blossom. A lily pad for a bed.

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The Mod e rn B lo g

Tori Pietsch

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When I was sixteen years old, I once spent nearly twenty minutes trying to perfectly drape the bottom of the lace shower curtain in my bathroom over the window, so I could use my iPhone 4S to snap a photo of how delicately the sunlight streamed through.

Photos like these weren’t uncommon for me. While my friends in high school had just begun using Instagram to post casual photos of various ongoings and social events, I mixed photos of my social life with ones like these, which I began to mentally refer to as my ‘little set-ups.’ It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college that I discovered the community of my peers on Instagram posting similar photos to the ones I had posted privately for the last four years. I carried a lump in my throat for several months, upset by how far I’d been left behind and how blind I’d been to a community that used the same virtual platform.

Distraught but not defeated, I endeavored to join this insular community of the fashion world. Now, with a year and a half of blogging experience, I’ve learned a considerable amount about this activity, which I now regard as a lifestyle: If there’s anything I’ve learned in particular, it’s that it’s harder than it looks. While I carry a considerable amount of respect for those making the most of their opportunities as bloggers, I also have come to recognize the false pretenses that come with the title. While blogging can be profitable, and is often perceived as the perfect way to get a foot in the door of the industry, we also risk losing fashion and ourselves in the process. Far from being liberating, the contrived nature of modern fashion blogging leaves bloggers more constrained than ever.

The opportunity for posting financially sponsored content confuses bloggers’ streamlined feeds and styles and compromises their integrities as content creators. Currently, the blogging lifestyle is more defined by Instagram photos and captions than by written content on a website. To support a blogger’s ability to post photos of new items and stay relevant to the broader fashion community, he or she may accept monetary compensation for publishing positive content about a particular brand or product. In her September

2016 reflection on fashion week in Milan, Vogue’s Creative Digital Director, Sally Singer, scathingly called out the blogging community. “Note to bloggers who change head-to-toe, paid-to-wear outfits every hour: Please stop. Find another business. You are heralding the death of style.” Singer isn’t alone in this opinion; many people who follow fashion bloggers and value their advice feel betrayed when a sponsored post isn’t clearly advertised. To maintain transparency, many bloggers will finalize captions on their photos with “#ad” when it’s sponsored, so their audience understands they’re being paid for the promotion.

While many bloggers now do make an effort to promote brands they truthfully support and use, many others give in for the sake of earning money, and it confuses their streamlined identity and style. Pressured on either side by the need to remain genuine and the desire to fund their fashion interests, modern content creators are trapped somewhere in the middle, unable to remember whose side they are on to begin with.

Similarly, it seems as though originality has become a sparse quality among the congested online fashion community. Pages with similar feeds often blur together, offering no distinction from one another.

Copycat pages of the feeds of well-known bloggers are a commonality on their own, and for some reason still manage to harbor strong followings, despite their identical natures. Jane Aldridge, of Sea of Shoes, describes blogging as “ultra-competitive” in an interview with Amelia Diamond for Man Repeller. To that end, it seems as though the paradox bloggers face lies in trying to express their unique style in an industry now heavily oversaturated. The goal of uniqueness, as a result, looks bleaker than a modern, minimalist, black-and-white feed. Personally, in trying to gain inspiration from other bloggers and accounts, I find myself naturally losing sight of my identity as a blogger and replacing my voice with an amalgamation of theirs.

There’s no guide to this; there’s no right or wrong. As a blogger, you go with your gut and hope it hasn’t been done before. Often, it has. Perhaps the most unique aspect of modern blogging, however, are the

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“Somewhere, between reality and the digital side of the fashion industry, it exists simultaneously as a documentation of your history and a reflection of the future self you are working to become.�

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limitations, disguised as freedoms, various social media platforms provide. Instagram has become the preferred medium for fashion bloggers because visuals are far more effective in translating the nature of a look than a written description; but maybe, at the same time, it’s because the social platforms we sustain ourselves on have given rise to our downfall at the same time. The instant gratification provided by such highly functioning digital modes of communication has fueled short attention spans and the unwillingness to read. While it seems as though the widespread reach of popular modes for publishing content offer more opportunities for creative expression than ever before, bloggers face a minimum of two obstacles: trying to remain different from the millions of others using them for the same purpose, and trying to keep up with the pressure to post original, current, and compelling content at a faster pace than ever before.

Perhaps the biggest regret the public expresses when asked to comment on the rise of modern fashion blogging is its lack of realism and multidimensionality.

Apparently, it all seems fake. Maybe it is. I’ve experienced this firsthand through some of my favorite Instagram bloggers. Bri of @burtsbrisplease recently posted a photo on which the caption celebrated the ease with which she captured the shot – for once, her house was clean, she said. Spending minutes or hours planning a photoshoot of still life objects wasn’t necessary, for a change. On a second look, however, the photo had been deleted.

Maybe the lack of preparation for the photo caused her to feel it wasn’t of a high enough quality, or maybe the tone of her caption didn’t feel right – there’s no time for complaints or undertones of stress in the blogging world; negativity isn’t overly inspiring, even if it is very real.

Another fashion influencer and college student, Christie Tyler of @nycbambi, recently posted an Instagram story of “what I don’t show you” – a photo of her studying in bed with food from Shake Shack. Her outfit, bed sheets, and photo filter, however, still perfectly matched her overall feed. This post in particular resonated with me. As a blogger, I’ll probably never gain a considerable following.

I prioritize academics and extracurricular commitments over my blog, and when necessary, go several days or weeks without posting – the equivalent of blogger suicide. As a student, I’m frustrated with the necessity of posting interesting, high-quality content habitually, when I truly feel I don’t have the time or means to do so. My life just isn’t interesting enough: photos of a textbook in the library aren’t going to cut it, especially when the backdrop is myself in sweatpants. I pride myself on eccentric captions that express my actual mood or stress level as an undergraduate student. Above all, I want to be real; that’s why I’ll probably never make it, although I can’t say I plan to stop trying.

Beyond the necessity of time and interesting content lies the compulsion to curate an outward appearance

of normal life. I particularly become frustrated with the need to live my life in a way that only accommodates certain color schemes. Personally, I try to post photos of design and outfits that reflect warm tones, as I feel these best capture my personality and sense of style.

My style varies, however, and I struggle to incorporate the range of color apparent in my wardrobe; blue skies and greenery are unwelcome on my page, despite my love for spending time outdoors. Launy Hedaya of Haute Inhabit feels similarly: “In some ways, social media can dehumanize a person,” she says. “People think what they see on my Instagram is really my life. To some extent it might be, but I’m not going to post a picture of me... with food poisoning.” Perhaps, this is a frustration all bloggers have become familiar with. The struggle lies in deciding whether you truly want your audience to accept this as real life or not. According to Diamond, once again writing on Man Repeller, “Camille Charriere describes herself as a filter” who uses the items and trends she finds interesting in order to simplify the constant mass of visuals out there for her followers. Modern fashion is overwhelming. It’s a bit ironic she describes herself as a simplifying force, while other onlookers, like Allesandra Codinha, Fashion News Editor of Vogue.com, finds it “funny...that we even still call them ‘bloggers,’ as so few of them even do that anymore. Rather than a celebration of any actual style,” she criticizes, “it seems to be all about turning up, looking ridiculous, posing, twitching in your seat as you check your social media feeds, fleeing, changing, repeating…” The idea of blogging as a creative escape, then, is clearly flawed. At its worst, it’s a handcuff link to a smartphone, a planner packed with deadlines for content shares, a price tag on a highresolution camera, a struggle to remember your identity, a forced peppy caption while your day has left you with tears in your eyes, and harsh words of criticism by senior members at Vogue at the end of it all.

From an outside perspective, the blogging world of the fashion industry can seem like a covetable creative outlet that presents the opportunity to capitalize on posting only the parts of life you want to see; the forgotten element, however, lies in the accompanying restrictions.

Chained back down to earth. The struggle of retaining a true identity amid financial offers, competitive peers, and outside obligations convolute bloggers’ abilities to establish themselves as legitimate, hard workers in the industry, as they face criticism along the way. Despite the restrictions they face, however, bloggers persevere: One blog page can promote the best parts of one’s life, offer inspiration, track progress over time, and provide comfort that, despite the stress of everyday life, there is a side of you that exists in that beauty. Somewhere, between reality and the digital side of the fashion industry, it exists simultaneously as a documentation of your history and a reflection of the future self you are working to become. A grueling investment – and an escape.

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Gunner Park

The Absolute Authenticity of 1980’s Avant-Garde and Minimalism

Fashion moves in twenty-year cycles. Any cursory research into its history will show you as much.

It’s why for the last few seasons, the nineties have felt so relevant and archival designers are being featured in the limelight. The arrival of many of these designers came at a similar time. The glitz and glam of the ‘80s were waning. Giana Versace’s gold-sequined corsets were becoming gaudy.

Dolce & Gabbana’s rhinestones too opulent. Jean Paul Gautier and Christian Lacroix had more tutus between them than a ballet. Amidst this rejection, designers like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto quietly infiltrated the Parisian fashion scene. Dark, deconstructionist fashion was having a moment. The arrival of their “anti-fashion” attitude set the scene for a generation of designers who focused their efforts on escaping the traditional boundaries of the fashion industry.

Even in the context of the popularization of “fast fashion” and the proliferation of commercial fashion houses in 2017, there have still been a handful of designers who have sought to detach themselves from an industry polluted by mass media and trends. To call the grouping of these designers a collective would be false. These are designers who refuse to adhere to the traditional notions of fashion design, and thus, can never truly be part of a collective. Whether it be in an attempt to offer commentary on the industry, express their artistic vision, or simply refuse the spotlight, the late 1980s saw the rise of three inscrutable and intriguing figures who sought to explore some means of escapism to change the typical conventions of high-fashion.

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Helmut Lang Helmut Lang was, and still very much is, an enigma. With the brand experiencing a revitalization under the helm of Hood By Air’s creative director, Shayne Oliver, we need to ask ourselves who Helmut Lang is and why his namesake brand is reverting back to its storied past. To say the least, Lang was a man that came from rural obscurity and rose to international acclaim.

He was a man who never sought to design, but wished to share his artistic vision. He dared to ask what is fashion, why is it defined as such, and, most importantly, how could he change it?

After his parents divorced, Lang was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in the Austrian Alps.

Lang’s childhood was entirely removed from outside influences. As a child, he played in the shadows of towering mountains without a care for trivial concerns. His only relationship to clothing at the time was assisting his grandfather in cobbling and layering for the harsh winters. Fond memories of helping to re-sole leather mountains boots in anticipation of the brutal conditions of the Alps would go on to be a fundamental component of his oeuvre.

When Lang’s mother passed away, he moved to Vienna to live with his father and stepmother. Coming from rural conditions, this was quite a culture shock. To make it worse, Lang’s stepmother forced him to wear her late father’s ill-fitting suits. While army surplus and leather jacket flooded the streets of Vienna, with the ‘60s in full swing, Lang anxiously watched from

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the sidelines, tugging on his too-large polyester trousers, both metaphorically and literally wanting to rip free.

After finishing school in 1974, an anxious Lang left home searching for direction. While working as a bartender in Vienna, he became focused on the varying uniforms of individuals from each end of the social spectrum, from the working class to the aristocracy.

While Lang wasn’t concerned about fashion, he began designing his own pants and t-shirts which instantly drew interest. Demand quickly rose and Lang established a small studio in Vienna where he would quietly hone his unique aesthetic over the next decade.

Lang’s design approach always felt more like an artistic exploration rather than a conventional design process.

He never attended school for design.

Instead, he developed his skills as a child. Lang learned to sew in order to mend his clothes and survive the winter.

Upon discovering the art in Vienna, it became his immediate infatuation.

While Lang eventually became a topclass tailor and cited various uniforms from police to military as reference points, it’s important to note that he never strove to become a designer.

Over the course of his career, Lang’s authenticity as a designer became more and more prevalent. In the years following his exhibition at GeorgesPompidou, Lang introduced a variety of collections that showcased the notion of the “uniform.” Lang’s first menswear collection, presented in the F/W of ‘87, consisted of slim tailored looks with straight leg pants and made-tomeasure footwear. After establishing

a Parisian presence, Lang introduced the concept of “Séance de Travail,” or “working session,” which 10 years later would define arguably his most famous collection. Lang viewed each session as a further rumination on his core philosophy. While he continued to pull inspiration from completely disparate themes, from Couture to Techno Jungle, each presentation felt quintessentially Lang.

Lang clearly came from humble beginnings. Until the age of ten, his wardrobe was defined by temperature, hot or cold, his only alternative being traditional festive clothing for holidays: deerskin lederhosen festooned with piping, patches and added trinkets specifically for the purposes of ornamentation. This duality between utilitarian and celebratory— the juxtaposition of ornamental elements with basic functional necessities— is at the core of Lang’s work. His seminal S/S 1998 collection is a perfect example.

What was once functional, like velcro, bulletproof vests and cummerbunds, became strictly ornamental. Then, for F/W 1999, he showed exactly the opposite, with bondage straps on the inside of parkas—fetish gear that provided additional support and wearability. This is precisely why his clothes were, and still are, as conceptual and outrageous as they were street-savvy. Lang kept his designs minimal, but his palette was expansive. Every detail deserved, and still deserves, a second glance.

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Martin Margiela Unlike Lang, relatively little is known about Martin Margiela’s private life.

He is notoriously press shy and hasn’t even released a definitive public photo.

However Margiela’s timeline is one populated with successful feats and an unwavering modesty that separated him from his counterparts.

Martin Margiela began his career in fashion design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the same school that later birthed the Antwerp Six—a collective of designers that included the likes of Ann Demeuelemeester and Dries Van Noten. After graduating, Margiela served as a design assistant for Gaultier from 1984-1987. He later established Maison Martin Margiela (MMM) in 1988. His initial collection featured only women’s ready to wear and was instantly met with critical acclaim. Over the remainder of his career, Margiela would work at Hermes as the artistic director of their women’s collection and even introduce a menswear line with

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MMM in 1998. In 2006, MMM showed its’ first haute couture collection under it’s “Artisanal” Line, a practice that continues to this day.

However, in 2006, MMM faced a significant turning point when a majority stake in the company was acquired by Diesel founder and President Renzo Rosso.

The acquisition proved to be a defining moment in the label’s history, as it would set the stage for Margiela’s eventual departure from the company he founded, in 2009. Since his departure, MMM has been renamed as Martin Margiela and the designer has maintained his press silence, showing absolutely no interest in returning to the world of fashion.

This surely doesn’t come as a surprise.

Historically, MMM pieces have lacked any external branding elements. The only clearly branded feature is a removable tag, which features a sequence of numbers. While the numbers seem to resemble a calendar, each number is actually an indication of what MM line

the piece belongs to. Many of Margiela’s design hallmarks revolve around blending in, meaning a rejection of some of the traditional branding and marketing techniques employed by most fashion companies. What most people consider as a de facto logo—the four white stitches on the back of a white, numerical label—had, in fact, the opposite purpose: Stitches were meant to be cut off so the garment would be without a label and logo.

Considering Margiela’s ironically clever marketing tactics, it is also no surprise that he did not just avoid the spotlight, but outright rejected it. This idea of anonymity served as the fundamental basis for MMM’s presentations, shows, and collections. Unlike other designers who spotlight their individual achievements, Margiela always made use of collective and plural terms when discussing his work.

This idea even extends to the minimalism of MMM and how the brand has historically wished to present itself - using anonymity to express a deep infatuation for minimalism and escapism.

Carol Christian Poell While both Margiela and Lang demonstrate a penchant for minimalism, Carol Christian Poell operates on a separate frontier. In classic Margiela fashion, the avant-garde designer has only conducted a handful of interviews in his life, opting to keep himself hidden from media attention. Few people know where he lives or what he looks like and nobody can confirm Poell is, in fact, the man in the photographs that have been made available in the past. Currently, he is holed up in a studio in Milan’s Naviglio district, only producing garments and showing them to the public when he feels necessary.

The eccentric Austrian designer’s cult following is a direct result of his uncompromisingly designed garments, chock full of experimental fabrics and so rigid in construction that suits resemble an ensemble of elegant armor. He has exclusively occupied the intersection between bespoke menswear silhouettes and experimental design techniques.

However, while his designs are in a league of their own, Poell has remained fiercely protective of his independence from commercial and stylistic trends in fashion.

His belief that fashion has fallen subject to mass propaganda and is no longer about the personal significance of a garment

powers his ambition to redefine the landscape of fashion. Such can be seen when using human hair as an alternative to wool, dying his shoes after assembly, treating leather after making it up and even inserting individual zipper teeth oneby-one into his infamous leather gloves.

Poell’s legacy has become cemented in the fashion industry not only for his unorthodox ideas but because he refuses to shy away from even the most timeconsuming and arduous tasks.

Perhaps one of the most notable ways in which Poell excludes himself from the mainstream is through his contentious design philosophy. Poell perceives dress not as a compliment to the body, but as an annulment of the body. He only considers the human body in the context of a three-dimensional form that serves as a canvas to project his vision. Many of his lookbooks feature models with erased mouth and eyes as to remove their personality from his presentation, emphasizing his reasoning that “there is not a single type of woman or man that I refer to: I am interested in the body as a volume.” Poell believes the body should not be beautified. In fact, he often questions his work and the usefulness of his career. Still, his influence in fashion continues to reign supreme, motivating him to create clothing that serves as a means for self-expression.

In accordance with his nonconformist design ethos Poell’s presentations have also become storied in the fashion industry as some of the most groundbreaking feats ever attempted by a designer. For instance, Poell’s Spring/ Summer 2002 show, “Traditional Escape,” sought to explore the idea of breaking the clutches of the “fashion dictate” by showcasing blindfolded men climbing out of a CCP office window. His most spectacular coup, however, took place in Spring/Summer 2004 when Poell invited the public to the Milan Naviglio Grande for his show entitled “MainstreamDownstream,” a title that speaks for itself.

Poell’s presentation served as a metaphor for the state of fashion as he saw it, where mainstream fashion uniformly flows in one direction unconsciously. Models were sent floating down the channel, dressed in outfits made up of premium fabrics and hardware that were almost immediately ruined once submerged. “There was no catwalk anywhere, no black dressed assistants, no security staff speaking into headsets, no seating,” he said. Reactions ranged from euphoric to disgust, as many in the industry took this to be an insult to their own work. There was no assigned seating, so any passerby would be able to stop and marvel. In one momentous swoop, Poell obliterated a climate of elitism and conformity.

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The Art of Androgyny and Anonymity Andrea Orduña

Two months ago, Vogue released its August 2017 issue featuring the “it couple” of millennial pop culture – supermodel Gigi Hadid and singer Zayn Malik. The cover was a playful mix of vibrant colors and patterns, displaying Gigi in a structured, plaid coat and Zayn in a watercolor jacket with pearl embroideries. However, the flamboyant clothing chosen for the shoot was more than just a strategic decision in color and contrast – it was a commentary on the ongoing discussion surrounding androgynous, gender-neutral fashion. The title of the accompanying article says it all: “Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik Are Part of a New Generation Who Don’t See Fashion as Gendered.”

Androgynous fashion has been at the center of a counter-culture debate throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, interweaving itself with movements associated with gender fluidity and self-expression.

Although fashion today sees both men and women pushing back against the bounds of traditional gender norms, androgynous fashion started as a trend primarily in women’s clothing during the early 20th century.

In 1913, Coco Chanel noticed that women were both culturally and physically moving away from the standards imposed upon them by traditional Victorian clothing, which featured full skirts and petticoats. In response, Chanel began releasing tailored, workwearinspired clothing for women that had their roots in traditional, structured menswear. Women left behind their full skirts and petticoats in favor of shirts with clean collars and fitted trousers. Chanel’s thought process was simple: “I gave women a sense of freedom. I gave them back their bodies: Bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion’s finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding.”

Over five decades later, in 1966, French designer Yves Saint Laurent released the first tuxedo marketed toward women, effectively establishing androgynous fashion as a long-lasting art form instead of a passing trend. As Bustle reports, the female tuxedo “started a revolution, whereby something so aggressively male and black-tie

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bourgeois became a symbol of female emancipation.”

However, androgynous fashion was still strictly limited to women until the late 1960’s. Dubbed “The Peacock Revolution,” the late ‘60s became known as the period when men began to push back against the boundaries of gendered dressing. Rock legends like Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger were suddenly sporting paisley jackets, velvet flared pants, and loose blouses.

This era saw not only cultural, but political reform as well – homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain and second-wave feminism was beginning to take hold around the world. Women and men everywhere began to question and redefine what it meant to live in a gendered society that drew a distinct line between the two groups.

Androgynous fashion today has taken a completely different shape. Instead of making menswear more accessible to women and vice versa, gender-neutral fashion strives to completely merge the two into a universally inclusive form of clothing. Although the progress that has been made in terms of integrating gender-fluidity into fashion has been tremendous, the strong dichotomy that persists between men’s clothing and women’s clothing remains an issue. Our generation understands gender as a non-binary spectrum that is always changing and evolving.

This poses an important question to fashion designers everywhere: How do we represent something that is fluid and shifting using something that is tangible and permanent?

Gender-neutral fashion answers this question by providing clothing that is neither strongly feminine nor masculine, but rather a neutral middle-ground between the two. Just this year, H&M released Denim United, their new unisex denim campaign. The collection features oversized cuts and a variety of pieces such as jackets, overalls, shorts, and jeans. Similarly, pop icon Zendaya recently released her clothing line, Daya by Zendaya. She was adamant about including unisex

options as well, saying, “Why would I alienate an entire group of people and make them feel like they can’t access my clothes?”

not see the immediate appeal of gender-neutral fashion, which is perhaps why it has taken so long for it to take hold in our culture.

Although gender-neutral fashion strives to be inclusive of all genders, its ambiguity and lack of identity may actually be excluding certain groups of people from its narrative. Fashion, to many, is the strongest visual representation of one’s identity. It’s the ability to walk into a room and to immediately command attention, or to blend in seamlessly among the crowd. This is exacerbated by the influence of social media on our generation.

Millennials have established themselves as the generation of “likes” and “followers” – often, we let arbitrary numbers dictate how we view ourselves and how we present ourselves to others. Maya Singer, reporting for Vogue, writing on this very topic, argues that “For a demographic so keenly attuned to being looked at, style serves as a convenient means of liberation.” Those who see our clothing as our loudest form of self-expression may

In order to understand why neutrality is a powerful and legitimate form of self-expression, we must empathize with and strive to understand the people who identify as neither male nor female, but rather as something in-between or completely separate from the two. Androgynous fashion should be seen as an important addition to the world of fashion, not as an attempt to subvert it. The ongoing discourse of gender inclusivity and fluidity in fashion has not yet been resolved, and perhaps it never will be. However, gender-neutral fashion has been an important step to shift us, and the industry, in the right direction.

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“If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.”

- André Breton

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