Losing Their Clothes, Finding Themselves
This content was originally published by RUTH LA FERLA on 23 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
Source link
Their book, an outgrowth of interviews, many of them taped over that time, focuses on style mavericks like Fatima Robinson, a video music director and choreographer, who vamps for the camera in the jeweled and feathered headdress she wore for her visit to the Burning Man festival the year she turned 40. “Before that I would have been too stuffy,” Ms. Robinson said. “Now I’m at a place where I can allow myself to let go.”
And there is Gail Chovan, a designer and teacher in Austin, Tex., who after a double mastectomy rejected breast reconstruction and the padded brassiere her mother had urged her to wear. “I’m feminine, and I don’t have to wear a padded bra to show that,” Ms. Chovan said as she posed in a tank top and a series of embroidered vests.
Continue reading the main story
The former booking agent Bethann Hardison, a pioneering African-American model in the 1970s, posed gamely in a purple bra and boy-cut panties. “This isn’t senior citizen time for me,” she declared. “The revolution ain’t over.”
Photo
Ms. Mandelbaum said that she struggled with her weight as a teenager and that Ms. Goodkind “was less accepting of my body at the time.” But she said that changed when the two began their project.
Such accounts are especially resonant in a sociopolitical climate that can be unwelcoming, if not downright hostile, to difference. “This project goes so much deeper than talking about style,” said Ellen Nidy, managing editor at Rizzoli, the book’s publisher. “It went into the vulnerabilities and hangups of people who didn’t necessarily fit with societal norms of what’s beautiful, what’s fashionable. They were redefining all that for themselves.”
Continue reading the main story
That disruptive approach is reflected on the book’s cover. Together, its subjects — they include Cathy Cooper, a 60-something former heroin addict, now an artist in Los Angeles; Rachel Fleit, a filmmaker who flouts her baldness for the camera; and Alok Vaid-Menon, a transgender writer and performance artist garbed in a dress — form an eye-opening mosaic.
An exercise in extreme casting, the book underscores an inclusiveness in tune with the fall 2017 runway shows in New York that, however fitfully, showcased models of varying races, ethnicities, gender preferences and, in particular, size. No fewer than 26 plus-size models strode the catwalks in February.
Continue reading the main story
Yet a similar inclusiveness was not reflected in the fashion advertising campaigns shot during that period. A tally by the Fashion Spot website cited 24. Five percent of models cast were African-American, Hispanic or Asian, an increase of only one percentage point over the previous year. Plus-size models made up only 2.3 percent, and in only two prominent instances was a model over 50 selected for a major campaign, both with the 73-year-old Lauren Hutton.
In the light of such numbers, the book and the filmmakers’ open call seemed all the more timely — even urgent, they might argue. “We want to show what’s vulnerable, what’s honest in these people’s stories,” Ms. Mandelbaum said. “We’re hoping to subvert a culture that promotes a standard of perfection that most of us can never attain.”
Continue reading the main story
Their ultimate goal, Ms. Goodkind added, is to demystify fashion and to promote self-discovery through the not-so-simple ritual of getting dressed. “The process can be messy,” she allowed. “But there’s beauty in that.”
Continue reading the main story
The post Losing Their Clothes, Finding Themselves appeared first on Art of Conversation.
