Leonardslee

I was on a train here in Denmark with my boyfriend at the time and we randomly got into a conversation with a very friendly young American guy. At some point he said he enjoyed how religion played a very small role here and mention growing up Christian and going to a mega church in the US.

We had no idea what he meant by mega church. He seemed equally surprised that we didn’t. When he explained it I remember feeling like he was explaining an alien culture to me. What do you mean it’s a church with room for thousands of people? Aren’t churches supposed to be close knit communities where people know each other? How can they hear the priest? Speakers? Yeah okay that makes sense. But can people even see the priest? Giant screens!? Okay that seems a bit much. What do you mean stage show!?

The difference between the two is one is a regulated term. Anyone can call themselves “couture”, all that typically (not always) means is that their pieces are hand-made and one-of-a-kind, though many brands just stick it at the end of their name to sound fancy. It’s a glorified marketing buzzword.

Haute couture, on the other hand, is determined by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (formerly the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture), which is a part of the French Ministry of Industry. They have somewhere around 100 members last time I checked, and only these brands can present at Paris couture week, though they don’t have to have a live show.  These are some of the criteria for selection:

Additionally, I’ve seen a lot of confusion about the point of couture, which is somewhat understandable. I think sometimes the fact that certain brands couture collections are worn on red carpets leads people to think that couture just means “extravagant, expensive evening wear collection”, but as I’ve stated above, that’s not at all what it means.

Plenty of couture is never really meant to be worn outside of exhibiting it at the runway show, which is why they only make one. I’ve seen a lot of comments either not understanding why anyone would design something that’s unwearable or saying there should be a separate “fashion as art” category. That’s what couture is. 

Specifically looking at this season’s Viktor & Rolf collection as an extreme example, it’s truly a walking art exhibit. Not only is the craftsmanship needed to make the dresses stand like that absolutely insane, they’re also using it as a critique of how the internet has warped our perception of reality. If this was framed in a museum, people would be all over it. And yet, because it’s labelled as “fashion”, about 75% percent of the comments on that post are “stupid fashion people have gone too far who the hell would ever wear this what’s the point” (almost a direct quote FYI) Most people still see fashion as something that needs to be pretty, functional, and wearable, not something that could just be for the sake of artistic value. 

This is not the case.

That’s 1972

29 years before AVEN was started online,

and 47 years before the present.

And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.

I say this as someone who sells pottery, and many people who see my art assume I am using art as an outlet to “express myself.”

I am not.

I use art to challenge myself. A lot of what I do is the equivalent of doing a hard sudoko or a half marathon, answering the question of “can I do this?”

I use art to question things and explore ideas. Finding physical synthesis between concepts and working out a design to its end state.

I use art to make money. I make some things just because I suspect they’ll sell well, and I keep making them when they do.

This idea that an artist is “putting themselves out there” every time they create is not only stupid, but harmful, and it kills critique and analysis.

Yes every creative work is influenced by its creator, but the most preliminary step of analysis is to define the purpose of a work of art (functional, narrative, entertainment, persuasive, decorative, ceremonial, etc.) and a vanishingly small percentage of that is self-expression. Even then, it’s generally tied to the self’s relationship with something else—perception, society, etc.

It’s very tiresome to have people assume they know you because they like (or dislike) your art, to make assumptions about who you are and how you approach the world. It’s nothing new— people called the Impressionists insane and the Fauvists degenerate. And now people are expected to hand out their identities and traumas to prove they have the right to explore certain subjects.