Though I wear many hats, fashion writing is my main career. As such, it's often presumed by people who meet me that I am not very bright. Fashion has certain negative associations with shallow, vain vapidity and these associations can hurt my reputation. This typically causes me to set the bar higher when I engage in conversation with someone.
It is important to me to exercise my brain on a daily basis. My mornings start with a startling blast of Robert Siegel's voice on NPR. My alarm is set to the station, so I often awake in the middle of very confusing sentences ["...and lacking any available source of nutrition, the intrepid explorer chose to eat his own parachute..."]. From there, I check several online sources for information: the World News subreddit, the best science website ever, and Al Jazeera. I am never more thrilled than when I am learning something new, and being aware of the world around me is one of my highest priorities. I have a physical reaction to my own delight at learning, which is something akin to a flush that creeps from neck onto my face (I've dubbed this reaction "nerd fever"). The reason for my insatiable news/information hunger is two-fold: 1) Elevating the level of dialogue I have within my community, and 2) I am, at heart, a philosopher (a lover of wisdom/knowledge).
My educational background is in philosophy, and if I hadn't started this blog and then started writing about fashion professionally, I'd probably be a philosophy professor right now at some Midwestern university. When I embarked on this blog experiment nearly five years ago, I was finishing my final semester at OCU. When I told my philosophy advisor about my fashion blog, he was rightly confused, as fashion - taken only at its most popular defining parameters - is an endeavor that seems to fly in the face of higher learning.
However, I quickly realized how many philosophers, writers, intellectuals and thinkers have explored the arena of fashion. To name a few: Immanuel Kant, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soren Kierkegaard. Each saw significance in the way we choose to dress, in the symbology of garments themselves, in the ritual of adornment and in the aesthetic debate to be had concerning the nature of fashion (is it art?). For that reason, I can and will argue for the rest of my fashion writing career that fashion can be an intellectual pursuit when dissected in metaphysical terms.
As such, I have made a career by writing about fashion philosophically. Though the bulk of my writing each season centers around runway reviews, I take pride in looking at each collection through an intellectual lens. Because fashion is a form of non-verbal communication, my starting point is often "What is the latent message of this collection?"
There are few role models to turn to when employing a philosopical approach to fashion writing. While there are many great writers - Cathryn Horyn, Holly Brubach, Guy Trebay, Joyce Carter (RIP), Rachel Strugatz, Suzy Menkes, Derek Blasberg, Ruth Laferla and Nicole Phelps - there aren't many that speak on the subject with intellectual authority. Enter: Tim Blanks.
Tim Blanks is, bar-none, the best fashion writer. Period. Though so few in the circles I run in know his name, those in the fashion world hold him in the highest esteem. His prose is tinged with poetic tendencies, and his insight is philosophical in nature. His words send a thrilling tingle through me. He's a writer who so casually incorporates words like "matriculate", "cantilevering", "fulsomely" and "auratic" in among gorgeous phrases like "plangent allure" and "bynzantine complexity". There is no air of pretention to his writing, only authority. His vocabulary and knowledge of art, culture, history, current events and mythology remain unmatched in the field of fashion writing. His talent is of an immense scope that keeps me scrambling to keep up. In short, Tim Blanks is my hero.
For reasons I can't fully articulate, it is important to me to have a guide through the jungles of fashion. I guess I sometimes feel at odds with my career decision because fashion is my first love, but I also read comic books, read philosophy, play video games, and don't do much shopping (in short, I'm the opposite of what you'd expect from a fashion writer). Tim Blanks is the mentor I've chosen, though I remain an eager pupil from afar. I dare not compare my writing to his, but I can say with vigor that I hope to accomplish a similar feat in my own career.
It is because of Tim Blanks that I have not abandoned intelligent pursuits in order to write vapidly about pretty shoes and clothes. Instead, I take a rigorous tack when writing, and I often find myself on fantastic journeys of the mind when exploring the meaning and importance of a runway collection. It is because of Tim Blanks that I choose to elevate the level of discourse in my writing - he's why I take a dialectic approach to fashion, and why I choose autodidacticism over didacticism.
Unfortunately, Style.com has failed miserably at archiving his works properly. Instead of almagamating his writing, you just have to discover it at random (I always pray that the review I click on is a Tim Blanks review). However, the best tip is: he mostly covers Paris and Milan. So if you see a major designer who shows in one of those cities, chances are he wrote it (Chanel, McQeen, Prada, Jil Sander, etc.). He also writes about the more difficult, complex and avant-garde collections. So take some time to read his writing, and let waves of pleasure enfold you, as the texture, density and insightfulness of his language tickles your brain.
It is important to me to exercise my brain on a daily basis. My mornings start with a startling blast of Robert Siegel's voice on NPR. My alarm is set to the station, so I often awake in the middle of very confusing sentences ["...and lacking any available source of nutrition, the intrepid explorer chose to eat his own parachute..."]. From there, I check several online sources for information: the World News subreddit, the best science website ever, and Al Jazeera. I am never more thrilled than when I am learning something new, and being aware of the world around me is one of my highest priorities. I have a physical reaction to my own delight at learning, which is something akin to a flush that creeps from neck onto my face (I've dubbed this reaction "nerd fever"). The reason for my insatiable news/information hunger is two-fold: 1) Elevating the level of dialogue I have within my community, and 2) I am, at heart, a philosopher (a lover of wisdom/knowledge).
My educational background is in philosophy, and if I hadn't started this blog and then started writing about fashion professionally, I'd probably be a philosophy professor right now at some Midwestern university. When I embarked on this blog experiment nearly five years ago, I was finishing my final semester at OCU. When I told my philosophy advisor about my fashion blog, he was rightly confused, as fashion - taken only at its most popular defining parameters - is an endeavor that seems to fly in the face of higher learning.
However, I quickly realized how many philosophers, writers, intellectuals and thinkers have explored the arena of fashion. To name a few: Immanuel Kant, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soren Kierkegaard. Each saw significance in the way we choose to dress, in the symbology of garments themselves, in the ritual of adornment and in the aesthetic debate to be had concerning the nature of fashion (is it art?). For that reason, I can and will argue for the rest of my fashion writing career that fashion can be an intellectual pursuit when dissected in metaphysical terms.
As such, I have made a career by writing about fashion philosophically. Though the bulk of my writing each season centers around runway reviews, I take pride in looking at each collection through an intellectual lens. Because fashion is a form of non-verbal communication, my starting point is often "What is the latent message of this collection?"
There are few role models to turn to when employing a philosopical approach to fashion writing. While there are many great writers - Cathryn Horyn, Holly Brubach, Guy Trebay, Joyce Carter (RIP), Rachel Strugatz, Suzy Menkes, Derek Blasberg, Ruth Laferla and Nicole Phelps - there aren't many that speak on the subject with intellectual authority. Enter: Tim Blanks.
Tim Blanks is, bar-none, the best fashion writer. Period. Though so few in the circles I run in know his name, those in the fashion world hold him in the highest esteem. His prose is tinged with poetic tendencies, and his insight is philosophical in nature. His words send a thrilling tingle through me. He's a writer who so casually incorporates words like "matriculate", "cantilevering", "fulsomely" and "auratic" in among gorgeous phrases like "plangent allure" and "bynzantine complexity". There is no air of pretention to his writing, only authority. His vocabulary and knowledge of art, culture, history, current events and mythology remain unmatched in the field of fashion writing. His talent is of an immense scope that keeps me scrambling to keep up. In short, Tim Blanks is my hero.
For reasons I can't fully articulate, it is important to me to have a guide through the jungles of fashion. I guess I sometimes feel at odds with my career decision because fashion is my first love, but I also read comic books, read philosophy, play video games, and don't do much shopping (in short, I'm the opposite of what you'd expect from a fashion writer). Tim Blanks is the mentor I've chosen, though I remain an eager pupil from afar. I dare not compare my writing to his, but I can say with vigor that I hope to accomplish a similar feat in my own career.
It is because of Tim Blanks that I have not abandoned intelligent pursuits in order to write vapidly about pretty shoes and clothes. Instead, I take a rigorous tack when writing, and I often find myself on fantastic journeys of the mind when exploring the meaning and importance of a runway collection. It is because of Tim Blanks that I choose to elevate the level of discourse in my writing - he's why I take a dialectic approach to fashion, and why I choose autodidacticism over didacticism.
Unfortunately, Style.com has failed miserably at archiving his works properly. Instead of almagamating his writing, you just have to discover it at random (I always pray that the review I click on is a Tim Blanks review). However, the best tip is: he mostly covers Paris and Milan. So if you see a major designer who shows in one of those cities, chances are he wrote it (Chanel, McQeen, Prada, Jil Sander, etc.). He also writes about the more difficult, complex and avant-garde collections. So take some time to read his writing, and let waves of pleasure enfold you, as the texture, density and insightfulness of his language tickles your brain.
1 comments:
I also love Tim Blanks! Good luck with your career!
http://shesconstance.blogspot.com/
Post a Comment