FASHION RULES

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY!

Although everything is structured, there are always convulsions that shake, audacities that ignore or confront the established order and make it expire.

Fashion, like a formulation of X –not as a form of expression nor of communication, but rather as a phenomenon itself, integrating and defining contemporary culture– finds in the convulsion its epistemology. Mutability is the essence of fashion in its search for and creation of identities, and the impossibility of capturing it in the narrative makes evident that it is in itself a "text/code/means/context".

The exhibition and the critic, contrary to what happens, for example, in the art institution, place themselves within fashion in an explicit context of market/consumption in which the narrative language also has a secondary or illustrative role, if not shamelessly faked, hypocritical or non-existent.

Fashion is economics –of the market, of the means, of the labour force– and image –of (re)search, creation, exhibition and assimilation of identities and transformations–. Its speed of transference and consensus when activating (and deactivating) objects is so vertiginous and voracious that whatever observation, arrangement and analysis beyond these parameters will be committed and overwhelmed by the facts.

Fashion, in contrast with language –as a basis of culture in a strict sense– shows the same processes as tribal consensus: repetition, the axiom, dogma, and the dialogue/confrontation with tradition; only highlights the ferocity with which the expiry demands sacrifices in the manner of oblivion or assimilation.

The intoxicating ecstasy of fashion –that a)makes us feel more “ourselves” with its anti depressant effect of social security; and b)makes us feel more intensely the life flow with its adrenergic speed– requires alternate its formula and continuously increase its dose so that the organisms do not develop the habit and the neurotransmitters establish solid synapses.

Tribes make the communion during the aesthetic ceremony of the obscene nuance of what distinguishes us, making us similar, disciples of an invisible shaman that activates the fragile auras of a banal and depressing world, far from the narrative meanings of language, that lives in the insinuation and not in the explicit and concrete expression.

Fashion is the fruit of verifying the inevitable decadence of the being, definitive renouncement of the complex identity in favour of the appearance –digestible, histrionic, sophisticated– and the connotation.

The information implacably over flows over us in an uninterrupted and undecipherable manner: there is neither the social possibility of escaping nor a safe refuge. The aberrations plague us at every corner and desensitize us within civilization.

The multiple transformations have configured a complex society made up of simple people, pseudo persons with multiple appearances and clichéd identities.

If during the nineteenth century humanity was made up of complex people integrated in simple societies, the dramatic move from the nineteenth to twenty first century has driven us to the inverse formula, and the lingua franca does not have words, it is fashion: the punk, MTV, Louis Vuitton, Kate Moss, Damien Hirst, hip-hop, the PlayStation, footballers and generation X.

The unstoppable escape to the sophistication of this language was initiated in the attitudes, devoid of meaning and memory with the impossible mission of searching for a time lost, that had never been, it was the preadolescent phase of a still inexpert and inhibited system.

But from ten years ago, fashion has configured a solid system of invoicing and metamorphosis of its own symbolism taking it far away from the romantic nostalgia.

There is neither frustration nor responsibility because we have accepted that there is no expectation: our society does not allow for hope and we know that already everything is lost. There is no possible siege towards the established cynicism and the antiaircraft refuge is the solid appearance of the docile difference.

Words don’t make sense –they are not symbols anymore, sinn-volls–, only bad references, bad metaphors.

To become the spine of the culture –meaning and transmitter– it has been a long, exciting and tortuous route from the frivolity in the design of clothes to the affirmation of a code of contemporary projections.

Fashion is the abstract narration in which uncertainty of current existence is expressed, in which exterior exploration does not make sense beyond the cathodic field or the limits of the media influence for prophylactic tourists; and spirituality, fear already abandoned, -faith, sin, penance and redemption, is one hobby more.

Once the trauma of the death of God was overcome and neither Freud nor Lacan have been valid to get to a concrete place beyond intellectual masturbation, fashion appears as a tool to clear a dense jungle of psychological projections.

Bernard Wilheim: stab with a knife; Bjork: stab with a knife; Chris Cunningham: stab with a knife; Aphex Twin: stab with a knife; Carles Congost: stab with a knife; Torrance Community: stab with a knife; and, why not, Miquel Bauçà: stab with a knife!

Every stab with a knife one step further, and each step, to confront a denser jungle, more unknown, darker and more dangerous.

Civilisation isolates us from people but we would not be people without civilization. Fashion is a product, a phenomenon, but basically it is a modus of civilization: the digestive and excretory system, fertiliser and pesticide, virus and bacteria.

It is a Catalyst of impulses and of wishes that never materialise. The fashion system has as a purpose the flow, the light of McLuhan: pure information devoid of meaning, photons that violently impact without meaning aggression, flashes that during infinitesimal fractions of a second illuminate with precision its target while blinding the impressed observer.

Fashion is not design of items of clothing, it is not AW/SS, nor Paris, Milan, Bread & Butter or Margiela. It is all of that and more, much more: Fashion is a manufacturer and a universal transmitter of universal emotions and sentiments that are born in the deep viscera and is manifested in the superficial manifestation of a canon or in its questioning, its epistemology is to confront the disturbing beauty of the wild sensitivities and to defeat it, becoming still more beautiful and disturbing.

Oriol Caba 2006

oriol@transportsciberians.net

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8Kb CAT Beam me up, Scotty! / Article published in Neo2 magazine / Oriol Caba 2006

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12Kb EN Beam me up, Scotty! / Article published in Neo2 magazine / Oriol Caba 2006

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8Kb SP Beam me up, Scotty! / Article published in Neo2 magazine / Oriol Caba 2006