photo by anja, cross-stitching by amelia (who both have awesome blogs you should read)
march has been a whirlwind and i've been trying to think up ways to update this blog on a more regular basis without getting caught up in not having the time to edit my 3,000 word essays every time i try to write about something. so here is a new little feature that i'll try to do from time to time, sort of like feministing's weekly feminist reader where i suggest some links and you can comment with your own favourite things you've read as of late. i'll start with some quotes that have really caught my attention lately.
The theme of rescue through benevolence underpins power relations and gives expression to those relations in a way that "makes sense." Thus difference, which is threatening, can similarly be recuperated through its conversion into exotica, or its neutralization through containment. In speaking of the exotic, it is apparent that imperial literature was replete with representations constructing women from the East and other parts of the wolrd as exotic Others who need to be unveiled so that their hidden natures could be consumed by the colonizers.
- Mapping Race in the Media by Yasmin Jiwani in Discourses of Denial, entire book available for download in pdf form here.
Sympathy or even empathy that is not coupled with power-sharing is meaningless. Any story that purports to show solidarity or uplift marginalised groups, but is not willing to let us tell our own stories in our own way, is not a friend.
I am a woman, and present myself as such. This does not mean I am anybody else’s expectation of what a woman is, but my own. I’m always reinventing the meaning of womanhood by just being myself, and knowing that whatever the result of being myself is, it is being a woman. I think that goes for everybody and any gender identity they may have.
...When we appeal to some notion of an unmodified or undecorated body, we participate in the adoption of a false neutrality. We pretend, in those moments, that there is a natural body or fashion, a way of dressing or wearing yourself that is not a product of culture. Norms always masquerade as non-choices, and when we suggest that for example, resisting sexism means everyone should look androgynous, or resisting racism means no one should modify the texture of their hair, we foreclose people’s abilities to expose the workings of fucked up systems on their bodies as they see fit.
and last but not least, a little less about fashion and more about decor (which has been on my mind a lot these days), a quote from the Globe and Mail: Russell Smith's A lament for the bookshelf:
Bric-a-brac is generally unfashionable now. Designers see apartments full of amusing memorabilia – the matchboxes from Berlin, the Soweto tin car, all the stuff that children love – as dust-gathering and space-consuming. We no longer respect the Cabinet of Wonders as a guiding principle of decoration. So we lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves. Gone will be the guilty joy of spending a rainy afternoon at a cottage with the remnants of someone else’s childhood: their Nancy Drews, their 1970s National Geographics. Without bookshelves, you will never know the warning signs contained in the e-reader of your handsome date – you will not know for months that he is reading The Secret and Feng Shui for Dummies, even if you stay over. You will never be able to ask, as casually as you can, “Did you like this?” as you pull down, as if fascinated, Patrick Swayze’s autobiography.
hopefully that gives you some food for thought! share any great quotes you've stumbled upon lately in the comments.
to end off, a lot of people ask me how i find all of these awesome things on the internet, and wonder if i spend every waking minute of the day online simply googling "awesome things." sadly, it is not that simple and i really don't spend that much time in front of my computer. thanks to people i know both in real life and online, we share our favourite things with each other via emails, our livejournals, our tumblrs and our blogs. (unimportant sidenote: i know lots of people would argue that lj, tumblr and blogs are all "blogs" but i always feel the need to differentiate) and since most of these quotes came to my attention via some of these wonderful people i will give you some links so you can cut out the middle (wo)man! i'm posting their tumblrs because those are their most public places and where they most often share awesome quotes like the aforementioned ones.
today is the first in what i hope will become a regular feature here: my favourite thrifts. i've been posting my finds for years on thriftwhore but here i will highlight one item per post and tell you where i found it, what i paid for it, and why i think it's awesome. pretty straightforward. so here is the innaugural post of my favourite thrifts.
found: march 2010 where: emmaus how much: 3$
why it's awesome:
i promised myself years ago i would stop thrifting things for other people; i would only purchase things that i could fit into and that i would wear. i wouldn't simply take anything that i thought was beautiful or interesting or cool home with me just to have it, or to give to a friend, or to maybe one day sell. this, of course, has failed miserably, namely since i started my etsy store in november 2008 and when i stumble upon things like... this dress.
this dress. this dress is made for a child, but it is by and large one of the world's most wonderful dresses i have ever found. i'm sure you're looking at said dress, thinking, "why, yes, julia that is a cute dress, but one of the world's most wonderful dresses? that's quite a statement to make about a simple little 1970s children's garment."
sure, there's no fancy embroidery, or embellishment, or designer tags. it, by all accounts, looks like any old dress a young girl in the 1970s would scamper around the yard in, spill ice cream on, get dirty in. but let us look a little bit closer.
upon inspecting the perfectly sweet peter pan collar, the awesomeness of this garment should become apparent. no? need more convincing? look closer still...
look at the print of the sleeves! there are little children holding placards; they are all protesting for women's liberation, a permissive society and worker's rights! how amazing is that! i can't stop using exclamation marks!
and to top it off, they are the most stylish adorable freckled little protestors you've ever seen.
this one, who holds the sign saying "up with permissive society," reminds me of a turn of the century suffragette. think of the mother in mary poppins.
and there you have it. one of the world's most wonderful dresses i have ever seen.
check out my flickr for a few more photos and for higher resolution versions.
for the past few months (oh who am i kidding, years) i've been trying to flesh out my ideas about self-portraits. why i take them, why they are interesting, why i find them so thought-provoking. but since every time i sit down to write about them, i end up writing a novel, i decided to simply share some self-portraits with you guys while i work out some actually writing. i realized i still had yet to share my favourite self-portraits i took while i was in mexico back in december. it's about time i shared them with you.
this one, i love because it's all about the mistakes; i had no idea there would be the shadows of the clothesline and powerlines cast on me. i didn't know i would hear a noise crashing in the kitchen that distracted me so that i wasn't looking (posing) at the camera. my favourite self-portraits are always the mistakes, the surprises.
also, in these photos, we see my uniform from my time in mexico. i bought that dress the first time i went to a tiny thrift store in ste. foy for a whole dollar, and only get to wear it when it's really really hot. so far it was worn for one day in québec city, three days in brooklyn in august, and five days in mexico.
(i tried to recreate the mistakes from the first photo i took in that spot but to no avail)
i might share a few more later, but these are my absolute favourites. to see more or comment on them, you can see them on my flickr.
a friend of mine shared this with me and i am simply blown away. it is incredibly beautiful and i thought my readers might enjoy it as well.
aside from the staggering beauty of this short film, i'm very intrigued by the marriage of mediums going on here. think about it: a filmmaker makes a short film to promote a book, and uses a song as the soundtrack. if it works well, you want to know more about all three at the end of the three minutes and thirteen seconds.
after watching this (three times now) i want to read the book, listen to the album, and see what other work the filmmaker has done. i wouldn't be surprised to see more people doing these sorts of things, a very creative promoting machine.
the olympics are almost wrapping up, thank goodness, because they are grating on my nerves more than ever. i've talked about it elsewhere how i really need to take a break from facebook because as much connection as it can offer me with faraway loved ones, it also fills me with violent urges thanks to the newsfeed. lately the status updates have been getting to me: everyone congratulating olympic athletes as if they are on a first name basis with them, as if another gold medal really means anything for "canada" or whichever country you belong to and are proud of because it produced good athletes. is that what people want to believe the olympics are really about? athletic performance, point finale? don't think so.
part of my reluctance to write about this is that i know the common reaction is that i'm an uppity lefty who just likes to tear down anything fun. "it's just sports! don't take it so seriously!" but then i realized that that is the main reason why i started this blog; in reaction to those who constantly say "it's just clothing! don't take it so seriously!" so read on at your own risk: i am going to try and make you hate the olympics.
okay, i'm sorry, i'm grumpy. let me begin by saying that there are many, many reasons why the olympics piss me off, but namely what has really been aggravating me these days is what is getting talked about and what isn't. i normally listen to cbc radio quite often, but my radio's been turned off almost constantly for the past week and a half. the only decent mainstream news reporting i heard was on the current when anna maria tremonti talked about what a post-olympics vancouver might look like. click the link to listen for yourself.
i tried to find a way to write about the olympics that i felt would suit the feminist fashion stance of this blog way back in october, but never ended up finishing it. today, triggered by a great article entitled "an indigenous olympics" by toban black my friend iris showed me, i'll just put it out there for you. it originally felt unfinished and disjointed, more of a rant than a cohesive essay of sorts, but i think if you read black's article first, it will put you in the right mindset to see where i am coming from. without further ado,
an "aboriginal friendly" canadian winter olympics: inclusion, tokenism and cultural appropriation
The first time I wrote about cultural appropriation and fashion was in 2005, when mocassin-style boots were appearing as a major trend for winter footwear. I wish I could dig up that article, but it seems to be lost somewhere in the archives of the newspaper I wrote it for. I wish I could find it since it would be a good starting point for what I think will be a recurring topic on this blog, as it is something of a touchy subject within the fashion community.
Unveiled earlier this month (October 2009), the Hudson Bay Company's 2010 Olympic clothing line is coming under criticism from Cowichan tribes who accuse them of producing "knock-offs" of the genuine Cowichan sweater.
According to Coast Salish artist Joe Jack, the Cowichan sweater emerged thousands of years ago as a way to battle the harshness of the North American coastal winters. The Coast Salish women had established a strong tradition of weaving woolen and cedar clothing for their families.
"Pre-European, and primarily before the easy access to domestic sheep wool, the Salish women wove clothing and blankets using the hair of a now extinct breed of small wool dog, mixed with mainland mountain goat wool, and goose down."
Over time, starting largely in the 1860s due to the extinction of the small wool dog, the style evolved into what we commonly know today as the Cowichan sweater. Practical and beautiful, the garment itself shows an incredible amount of skill and talent. Today, however, the Hudson's Bay Company is attempting to appropriate this rich cultural history of this garment and make a profit of it, with none of the proceeds going to the Coast Salish people it is appropriated from.
This is a perfect example of one of Black's points in his article; Black argues that the image that the Olympics present of the Native community is one that is muddled and watered-down. Yes, it is including native people in its clothing wear by borrowing from the cultural history and traditions, but it needs to do more than that. Who will be making these sweaters? Who will profit from them? And who will be able to afford to buy them and wear them?
Passing theatrical gestures to native peoples during the open ceremonies could be considered to be more respectful, but Olympics marketers otherwise have been mixing up North American native traditions into a soup-like caricature.
Theatrical gestures is right. Like Black says, by simply addressing the fact that the logo of the Vancouver Winter Olympics is from northern, Inuit communities while the games take place in a temperate climate where those people never lived shows us that this is tokenism. And let's not even touch the fact that most of the designs for the games that are "native inspired" weren't even done by First Nations artists!
It seems more and more like the "inclusion" of Native communities and organizations in the Vancouver Winter Olympics is nothing more than tokenism or branding. In this case the situation is pretty clear: Yes, we want to sell sweaters that look as though they were made by Native people, but we won't get Native people to make them or let them profit from them.
Often, people dismiss claims of cultural appropriation as trivial and unimportant; "there are bigger problems to address here" or "relax, it's just clothing" are the most common responses I've encountered. However, the cultural appropriation in and of itself does not exist in a vacuum. In this situation, I would argue that the attempted cultural appropriation of the Cowichan sweaters is indicative of larger, more important systems of oppression that are at work. The fact that the Vancouver Olympics Committee thinks it would be okay to take something that is specific to the Coast Salish people, find people who could make it cheaper, and sell it for more money illustrates very clearly that VANOC has very little respect for the host nations it claims to be working with.
WHY THE OLYMPICS ALREADY SUCK
For most people, it is not surprising that the style choices made by HBC and the VanOc comittee are controversial ones; ever since Vancouver won the games in 2002, nearly every decision that has been made (various censorship issues, the debate around female skiers, the Sea to Sky highway, development that displaces the homeless, the Native communities who are against hosting the Olympics on stolen land, the increasing corporate sponsorship, to name a few) has resulted in public outcry.
In my post-colonial theory class two years ago, we discussed the problematic nature of the mascots which are awkward mishmashes of various traditional Native mythological creatures: a half-whale half-bear hybrid (Miga), a whale-thunderbird-bear hybrid (Sumi), and a sasquatch (Quatchi). None of these characters are taken directly from First Nations people. Rather, a designer just threw a bunch together and this is what we are left with.
But back to the Cowichan sweaters. At this point, it almost seems like they are trying to piss off as many people as possible in as many different ways they can think up. Of course, even the clothing they chose for the Olympics would have to be controversial as well. (For more information about why so many people are opposed to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, check out No2010.ca)
How ironic that it is the Hudson Bay Company who is responsible for the appropriation of the Cowichan sweater. A brief brief primer for those of you who aren't Canadian: the Hudson Bay Company was established in the 1600s, when French and English colonizers/settlers arrived in Canada, or what was soon to be established as Upper and Lower Canada (today, the provinces of Ontario and Québec, with a little bit of power in the Maritime provinces). The Hudson Bay Company established formal fur trade between the trappers, who were often Métis (French and Native American mixed-blood) who hunted animals in difficult to access areas and sold the pelts back to the HBC who would use them to keep the colonizers warm in the harsh climate. There is a much longer history but that's just a brief bit of context for you.
For some more good 'ol fashioned racism courtesy of the Hudson's Bay Company, watch (and cringe) at this commercial.
It is so easy to deconstruct as this idea that white people arrived to this uninhabited land and worked hard and conquered it. We see a glimpse for maybe two seconds at the beginning of the commercial of native people with the Cowichan sweaters hanging; it seems as thought it was shown more for product placement than an acknowledgement of the fact that Native people were here first. All we see are these white pioneer men conquering the empty land and "thriving" in the elements... but that's a whole blog post to itself if I go on.
To end, then, my point is namely that like with any international event that puts a country's history on stage, we have to be critical of what we are being presented with. We have to ask questions that dig deeper. Who is being talked about, and who isn't? What happens before and after said event?
In response to the public outcry around the Cowichan sweaters, the HBC released a statement saying that the hand-knit sweater is a "nod towards this icon of Canadian fashion, while adding our own contemporary twists including type of wool, colour, pattern complexity and logos." Basically, to me, this reads as "We like the look and style of your sweater, so we are going to steal the basic idea of it, get white people to make it even though your ancestors are the ones who created this style of sweater, get them to make it for cheaper and sell it for more money. Oh yeah, and you won't get any money out of it either."
This is my main point of contention with a lot of fashion items, accessories and styles that have a deep cultural history. The idea that one culture can potentially claim "ownership" and can then be stolen from is a very large debate and one that cannot be fully taken up here. But, in this case, I feel like the official Olympic line of clothing is indicative of much larger problems that unfortunately aren't being talked about.
If you're interested in more writing on the topic of cultural appropriation in the Vancouver Winter Olympics, i highly recommend checking out the Urban Native Girl's blog as well as Racialicious.com. for more discussions about feminism and the olympics, check out the pursuit of harpyness. Thanks for reading.
there are so many things i have been trying to find the time to write about, but for now they are relegated to point form scrawls in my dilapidated moleskin. but the things that are most relevant to you, my dear readers, is the fact that i recently attended some conferences at la musée des beaux arts de québec about the connections between art and fashion. there are two more conferences in the next month and i am quite excited for them and will share pictures, thoughts and quotes when it is all said and done.
also, i recently starting working at a used bookstore and have been finding treasure after treasure. we often have to throw out old tattered books that are more often than not out of print and i have been taking the precious ones home with me. i will share the best ones with you soon!
but for now you can keep up with the images i love on tumblr.
currently reading: the language of fashion by roland barthes camera lucida by roland barthes the fashion book, published by phaidon souffrir pour être belle edited by jean yves collette and pauline hamel debut: yves saint laurent 1962by laurence benaim lorsque j'étais une oeuvre d'art by erik-emmanuel schmitt
currently listening to: ebony bones the breeders - last splash (1993) justin hinds and the dominoes miriam makeba & the skylarks tuneyards jeffrey lewis cbc radio's wachtel on the arts
"Did I ever tell ya that this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom?"
currently watching: wild at heart (david lynch, 1990) a serious man (coen brothers, 2009) fargo (coen brothers, 1996) volver (almodovar, 2008) whip it (barrymore, 2009) tabou: zohre & manouchehr (mitra farahani, 2003)
Instead of just bitching and complaining about the prevalence of pretty and lack of savvy substance, I decided to borrow the idea from activist communities: if you want something to exist or change and it doesn't, do it yourself. I want this blog to be a place where I can explore political notions of fashion (without using too much inaccessible jargon) and have other people give me feedback, and maybe even encourage other feminists interested in fashion to start their own blogs to start even more conversations.
Contact me at juliacaron AT gmail DOT com.
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