You Can Be an Artist-Philosopher
almost meeting patti smith, swashbuckling fashion tales, and how to be more creative
I came closest to death that night.
Starfished on the street in Bonne Nouvelle, I watched the back wheel of the malfunctioning electric bike tick and spin out, my fingers arched and twitching on the pavement like spiders riding a dembow beat. Dawn was coming. The twinkle of a car light jolted me into action, and I hoisted my body out of the car lane, onto my feet.
I walked home cold and wooden like a chunk dredged from a swamp bed, a thick ribbon of flesh sheared from one thigh and an elbow, and fuck—a rip in my favorite coat.
The next day, I perched at the kitchen table and cut a piece of thread with my teeth. Stitching carefully, I studied the heirloom that I’d worn for the past six years. Oh gray Marni coat with bell sleeves! You always made me feel delphic but solid, just myself in the simplest sense. My old friend had a fresh wound; and after a tender but imperfect stitching job, the lips of the wool seam bubbled up, like a flourish of sooty heather from a crack in the Yellowstone caldera.
Five months later, I thumbed that rough seam in the presence of Patti Smith. She told our small crowd in the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House about her lost black coat. In her eyes, it was “like a first love or something.”
“Every time I put it on I felt like myself. The moths liked it well and it was riddled with small holes along the hem, but I didn't mind. The pockets had come unstitched at the seam and I lost everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves…I loved the coat and the cafe and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.”
A coat can be a comrade, a mirror, an extension of your way of life. Smith read from M Train, and like a prayer, she invoked the funerary dirge for one tattered Comme de Garçon overcoat lost years ago. She frames her understanding of the loss through a story she heard in the lyrics of Pavrotti’s aria “Vecchia Zimarra” from La Bohème. In it, an impoverished philosopher pawns his cherished coat and imagines it “ascending the pious mountain, while he remains behind walking the bitter earth.”
It's a wonder that garments can depart with such a throaty crescendo, but thinking harder, I feel that this happens all the time.
These are the same pieces that carried you up that mountain and away from the bitter earth for a few moments, while you rested your head in their “holy caves.” Try to recall the dress you always wear on first dates, the sweatshirt hood you used as a tissue after that one breakup, the pair of leather boots that are so glorious they nearly compel your feet to kick down all the doors in the world as you caterwaul like an old brass trumpet!
Virginia Woolf said, “my love of clothes interests me profoundly: only it is not love, and what it is I must discover.”
But how do we distinguish that love from impulses that lead us to pile up more and more stuff in a world of excess? Sometimes, it feels like my love for fashion is peppered with shame, the base notes of a florid perfume. Preparing to work in corporate retail next September, I have set off to discover what I truly desire from fashion.
There’s the lustre, the thin glamor of the idea itself; the reality of a business where I will be focusing on sell-through data; and potentially something more slippery, semiotic in nature. For you, my dear friend, I’ll parse through some thoughts. They are simply the natural byproduct of twenty-one years not being a nudist.
“Fashion is the ultimate Trojan horse. It allows you to explore questions of identity, politics, culture, and news,” said Vanessa Friedman in Cultured Mag, speaking of the sartorial “prism” that allows a culture critic to interpret the world.
Take Rachel Tashjian’s reporting at the Washington Post, charting the tides of style and the way it ricochets off everything else in the world like a moonbeam revealing edges in the darkness. She shows us how Melania Trump’s inauguration hat can be a powerful tell, a glimpse into a woman’s interior life and a sartorial portent of what’s to come in her husband’s second administration.
Insights naturally surface when we pause and pay attention to the way people dress. Even if you don’t assume an analytic perspective, most people just feel the power of clothing in some way or another. It is a language that animates our way of being, both as our solitary selves and in the context of others. It’s everyday magic in the sense that a mellifluous jazz lick can excite someone who knows nothing about music theory.
At times, I sense an impulse within, an urge to justify my interest in fashion as something more serious, with an intellectual underbelly or a hidden meaning written in the sand as the mean vortex of bags, brands, and pink glitter whirls by. I remind myself that not everything has to be intellectualised to have meaning.
It seems that somewhere in the throes of my fashion journey, I’ve discovered two diametrically opposed fears: being shallow and being a snob (though I guess they’re not mutually exclusive). There, I’ve caught myself shadow-boxing.
I have my suspicions about where that tension comes from—being a woman who takes pleasure in clothing is another Trojan horse. Through the decades, we have been sold a vision of acceptability through the preening of our bodies to sculpturesque ideals, once upon a time from magazines, and now on our screens.
When ready-to-wear was made available to exclusively men for the first half of the 19th century, precious hours were freed up for Brooks Brothers suit-wearers, while made-to-order dresses required more time, money, and consideration from the female consumer. Dressing as a woman has always required extra effort.
We are sold a vision of acceptance through clothing, but this can be a tragic conceit. The emphasis on altering every last visual detail of ourselves to fit in is a clever snare that never truly makes things better. It’s the whole flawed mentality of “if I just buy one more it-item, people will finally see my worth.” The advent of department stores in the 1850s brought ready-to-wear to women and children, but even in the modern world where a pair of Temu jeans can be delivered overnight, the gendered burden of the image persists and is fraught with the consequences of consumerism, body policing, and the male gaze.
Meanwhile, the concept of “fashion” in popular culture is often discounted for its associations with femininity. In the film “Legally Blonde,” Elle Woods’s passion for clothing is initially viewed by her peers as shallow and an obstacle to her career goals in law school. It renders her an unserious figure, allowing other characters to cast doubts about her intelligence and competence. More often than not, the face of fashion in our mainstream collective consciousness is female, white, and somewhat vain.
We see this in other blockbuster hits featuring the fashion-connoisseur-heroine, like “Clueless,” or “Sex and the City.” They depict women who emerge strong and intelligent by the end of the film, but they have to prove themselves worthy of respect, mostly in spite of their love for garments.
Of course, these are surface-level pulls. Other narratives echo through the labyrinth of history, and it’s evident that this is not all that there is to say about fashion. When at its most powerful, style can offer moments of solidarity with a community, sincerity, or the promise of fresh political imaginaries. There was the revolutionary impact of style in 20th century ballroom culture for queer folks, the “Ametora” subculture in 60s Japan that employed American Ivy Style as a move against rigid authority, and the stories of so many fashion designers who used sartorial means to creatively reimagine the world, often from an outsider’s perspective.
In the eighties, a boosting crew called the Lo-Lifes in Brownsville, Brooklyn began stealing garments specifically by Polo Ralph Lauren. As kids living in a tough, often violent neighbourhood, they sought imaginative change through the language of style. Their fanaticism for the preppy brand has heavily influenced a tradition of American streetwear that continues to remix high-end fashion and hip-hop culture.
One member recalls:
“How I felt having them on and how everybody else looked at me. These were items of respect and gave you social status in your neighborhood…There was a resonance in nice things. The feeling of worth from a high price tag was the same emotional trigger that luxury brands used to attract consumers since time immemorial. And the fact that they were wearing Polo out in the open—and not getting it stolen off their backs—was an added badge of honor and status.”
Through fashion, we are all philosophers. We collect rags and fix them in new contexts, birthing utility and symbolism from bits of fabric. In the book Bring No Clothes, Charlie Porter investigates this personal quality of clothing through the story of a group of 20th century British intellectuals:
“While we’ve been talking about Bloomsbury, clothes, philosophy, what we’ve really been talking about is the tension within humans and between humans, and the primal role that clothing plays in navigating that tension. That ‘tension’ could also be called love.
Clothes are at the heart of how we experience ourselves; they provide the subconscious messaging that gives us knowledge of another human before they speak, if we ever even hear them speak. This tension is often considered a mystery because it happens without words, be we can know it”
How does the way you dress impact the way you navigate love?
Each member of the Bloomsbury Group—which included artists like Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Kenes, and E.M Forster—had a complex relationship with clothing. It was something to rebel against, celebrate, and use to transgress binaries of gender and sexuality.
Bell, haunted by an upbringing where clothing was used as a device of abusive control, was compelled to make her own garments, fastening them with safety pins. I smile because decades later, I use the same technique to make things my own.
Woolf had a disdain for trends but was obsessed with clothing and its significations. Although she was described as terribly dressed from the perspective of her contemporaries, I am fascinated by her style, refreshing for her time and almost Prada-esque in its smart dowdiness.
Fashion speaks in an academic sense, but also as a personal meditation. Pieces come and go, like little flecks of ourselves falling onto exposed skin and eventually melting post-contact. Porter mentions Plato’s allegory of the cave and wonders aloud if we have confused the archetypes of clothing for meaning itself. On Tiktok, we talk about trends as if they are shadows on the wall—indie sleaze, quiet luxury. Some things can be worked out through dialogue and labels, but in other ways, we can only truly understand our clothes by wearing them and seeing for ourselves.
Woolf and Smith treat their clothing as part of a practice, that of being themselves. It seems obvious that what you wear contributes to how you see yourself, but having this special relationship with fashion is something that can unfold over a lifetime, like a story. Smith had such a personal attachment to each piece that she named them, like her “Mayakovsky cap.” The two writers, in their examination of theirselves, operated as artist-philosophers.
Some contemporary designers really take an interest in this process, the small beautiful moments of gathering oneself up in a way that feels precious. A few that come to mind are Miuccia Prada, Jun Takahashi, Rei Kawakubo, and Francesco Risso.
I mention Risso particularly because thinking about my coat has led me down a rabbit hole and into the phantasmagoric centre of his Marni story. Fitting, as the SS25 show was described as “chasing rabbits,” a search for the sublime in daily life. The models weaved through a maze of chairs and pianos.
Risso thinks of beauty as an act of resistance and muses on the emotive nature of fabric. Reminiscent of Caroline Evan’s metaphor of “ragpicking”—work that fashions bits of the past into a transmogrified cultural object—in Fashion at the Edge, Risso looks back at history to inform his practice:
“He flicks through his phone, looking for a quote from Walter Gropius’ 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto that sums this up. He reads, ‘Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all return to the crafts. For art is not a profession. There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman.’ A recent show at London’s National Portrait Gallery, ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’, spoke deeply to him. He also loves Van Gogh. ‘They were both, in different periods, really beyond [what was happening in] society. They were capable of portraying real emotions and the shifting passages of time.”
Since he was a child observing his sisters put on outfits, real lives have been the inspiration for his designs. The best creators explore the tensions between lived experience and the fantastical.
This is also true for my new fixation this week: London-based Welsh designer Paolo Carzana, who uses organic and repurposed materials to create presentations that are at once emotive, transcendent, and humble. His latest 15-look collection “Dragons Unwinged at the Butcher’s Block” was tiny but powerful in its poetry. Vogue’s Sarah Mower compared him to Lee McQueen: brilliant and somewhat at odds with the traditional fashion establishment because he refuses to fit a commercial mold.
He calls the show his manifesto, and Mower wonders if the show is about “young people facing the dystopian state of the world.”
Carzana provides an explanation that gets at something like this, but there is a limit to words. When I saw the photographs, I resonated in a way I couldn’t perfectly place. What is art if not playing tag with a feeling we all share?
How can you be an artist-philosopher?
By living. As time goes on, the people we meet, the ideas we encounter, and all that we have absorbed with our senses is sublimated into the things we create. There is a reason your handwriting slants in that direction, why you gravitated towards that hairstyle, and why the tchotchkes on your desk are arranged in that way. Everyone has their references.
Patti Smith borrows from the opera, just like Hodakova’s latest show looks to imbibe a model wearing a cello with the spirit of punk rock. In the documentary Dior and I, Raf Simons says, “There is no day that I am not looking at art. I can’t really explain it because it’s so in my system.” Going to the museum helps him connect to what he does, in the same way I am certain that Dior’s passion for flowers, inherited from his mom, influenced his process somehow.
I recently experienced a creative block, so I gave myself homework. I’ll write about it another time because this is getting long, but this is your sign to be curious, to read that book you’ve been wondering about, to go to the gallery, watch a movie, or make something with your hands. It’s not wasted time.
These days, it can feel like we should always be productive, but consider slowing down and doing research into what peaks your curiosity. Look into the world of interior design, research the birds outside, sew up the sleeve that ripped on a tree branch last week. Everything is connected, and maybe that new paella recipe you try tomorrow will be the start of a sonata.
These days, I dream of Elsa Peretti’s gorgeous Spanish home of stone, copper, and cobalt Venetian glass plates that she used for halved eggs and persimmons; deep blue with yellow-orange, a treat for the eyes. I’ve been thinking a lot about seals, Miles Davis, leather jackets, and Alaïa Creative Director—and all around darling—Pieter Mulier’s house tour, which screams this is someone who has been gathering himself up and deliberating life through kooky, alluring objects for the past few decades!!!
In the Vogue video, Mulier shows us his “favourite piece ever,” a camo bomber from the Raf Simons 2001 Manic Street Preachers collection. He still wears it every winter, and now it has been twenty-four years since the show.
The zipper has broken, and although I am not a fashion designer, 45 years old, or a Belgian man, he looks at the coat with a fondness I understand. I like to think that he imagines the pockets as holy caves to rest his hands.
