1/15/23

Hello ladies, gentlemen, and bunny/bunnyselves, my name is Christian Reid, and I have run out of ideas. 

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times; school kills artists. I am in school for fashion design, and designing clothing feels like the last thing any of my professors want me to do. On one hand, yes giving us small assignments to teach us different methods of construction is important, and I don't want to claim that I already know how to do everything I'm doing. However, I feel like at 20 years old, almost halfway through college, I have achieved practically none of the objectives I set out to achieve. I had a realization the other day, and I know I've said this previously but it really hit me now, I am exponentially more creative when I'm not actively in classes. I posted on my blog every week, I would spend hours on projects even if I had no intention of finishing them. When I wanted to make something, I made it. In school, I'm constantly required to denote hours upon hours of my day towards stuff I have zero interest in, yet it's required for my degree. So every day I sit in classes and get lectured on retail management, marketing, merchandising, and creating swabs of different sewing methods that are everything but new to me, and I feel like I'm wasting both my time and money. I'm going to graduate at 22 years old, granted I will have done a lot more by then, my capstone requires an entire collection, yet I almost feel as though my success could come faster if I was able to just really hone in on what it is exactly I want to do. I want to make clothes and school has killed that desire so much that I chose a minor and began heading in a new direction. At first, I thought it was realistic, it's very hard to become a successful designer on your own, but I almost feel like if I had the power to just make what I wanted to make when I wanted to make it, I never would have lost interest. 

What's intriguing to me, however, is how much I really don't know what I want when it really comes down to it. Fashion as a subject is incredibly enthralling, and I do have a desire and passion for writing about it and writing in general. I know that if I follow through and pursue a career in fashion journalism I will be satisfied. My concern, however, is that I'm cutting myself short simply because I contribute so much energy to what I'm doing in school, that I feel like it's a better option to have a goal that the school isn't contributing to. Yes, I love to make clothing and write about fashion, but do I actually want that to be my career, or am I just trying to pick something that I know I can have full creative control over? I don't write a lot for classes, so when I get to do this, it's still my own thing, rather than something I have to constantly be thinking about everything I've learned about to make it look good. When it comes down to it, I simply don't care. I don't care if my seams aren't finished, I don't care if my hand stitching is a little uneven, I just want to make things. 

I was talking to my roommate, Katie, about this the other day. Up until I went to the university I'm enrolled in now, I was going to be a studio art major. I love to paint, I love to sculpt, and I love printmaking and installations. Yes I love fashion,  yes I love making clothes, and of course, I love talking about it. But I wish there was more of a creative process involved in the construction. When you get an art assignment, it's effectively a subject on which to focus, a recommended medium, and maybe some constraints to get creative juices flowing, and the final result is an art piece that you made and has your artistic twist on it. A fashion assignment is to spend three hours fabric-taping every raw edge on half of a half-sized vest that you will never look at again once it's graded. Does that make sense? This guy I know read my blog the other day and told me I talk about myself too much but I feel like I talk about topics for my niche group of people that will relate to the turmoil I face in my degree. Maybe I am just self-involved, my goal is to be a relatable source for other college students to read and feel like we're all going through the same thing, specifically if said students are also art students with no idea who they are or what they want. 

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I have also been trying to make this blog somewhat more professional. Not in the sense of my sentence structure, but I haven't been saying naughty words as much, I type out laugh out loud instead of "lol", I'm trying to make this more of an actual blog than a replacement for both therapy and my private Snapchat story. This is because, as I've said, I am moving in the direction of fashion journalism, and I want this to be my cool little art hub that potential employers can look through and get a sense of my identity and passions. I still have yet to apply for an internship, though I have been looking. My point is that as time goes on, I would like to see an evolution of this page. Think of it as the Emma Chamberlain pipeline. We start, goofy and doing whatever, but as we age and grow into ourselves, now we're posting at Paris Fashion Week and the MET Gala, do you see what I'm saying? So, with that being said, there are topics of discussion I wanted to...discuss. The main one is Dsquared2 and the potential scandal that I've already begun seeing discourse on. For starters, Dsquared2 is a co-owned brand by the Caten twins, two Toronto natives that have since made a name for themselves in the fashion world. The collection was inspired by the culture of college youth, Vogue stating that everything from the inspiration to the set design of the runway was meant to embody the ambiance of a college dorm room. The collection itself was a mishmash of the different energies you find in the diversity of teenagers and their cliques. I love it, I love seeing specific aesthetics honed in on in fashion and seeing designers' interpretations of what a college goth kid or prep or femme looks like, especially when it's done in an overtly exaggerated manner such as Dsquared2 very easily accomplishes. The issue that I have seen arise, however, is something I think the fashion industry has been experiencing a lot of in recent years; lack of originality. On one hand, someone called out the art they used on Look 2 (if you go to Vogue Runway it shows which look is which, I will attach a link in my references page) for being stolen from a smaller tattoo artist, @ihatesally on Instagram. The claim I've heard is that the art is stolen, though I'm not sure how trustworthy a random Tiktoker sharing their opinion on a collection via greenscreen video is, I will take it with a grain of salt. The other point of discourse is, in the sense of unoriginality, this collection is very in a lot of ways to a lot of collections, more specifically, a lot of John Galliano's collections. I can see some similarity in terms of inspiration, Galliano has almost always done collections surrounding the ideas of freedom in one's own body and the idea of individual expression, however, if there were a brand that this collection does feel eerily similar to its Mexican brand Barragan. Most recently known for their "canceled twice" shirt, Barragan, and Dsquared2 have a lot of similarities in the way they choose to represent certain artistic interpretations of different cultures. Though similarities they have, I think what a lot of people are failing to recognize is that fashion is at a kind of standstill, and though I talked about the progression of fashion that I'm seeing come back and how were kind of starting to verge away from the hyper fixation on 2000's vintage clothes, Dsquared2 released a collection that, had it been released a few months ago, would have fit right in. I think what's happened is that after the pre-fall collections came out, and after the hype died down over Fashion Week, that particular style feels more in the past circa Winter 2022, and now when we see new collections have similar vibes, it gives us a frame of reference for what it looks and feels like, rather than what it is currently. Is this a bad take? It's very possible, but at this point, fashion is so overexposed, and trends are so quick to come and go, brands are going to overlap sometimes, and messages and overall vibes are going to overlap creative tension in who did it first and if someone else is copying them. The reality is that there is a finite amount of expression one can do without doing what's already been done. My dad says it all the time, the cynical man that he is, nothing is new anymore. Every thought and word and sentence and art piece someone makes has been made before, and it's just up to us to decide who we think does it best. Dsquared2 created a beautiful collection inspired by the freedom and creativity of the average college teenager, Barragan made a collection inspired by American consumerism. If you think long and hard enough, those two subjects are going to overlap, especially when the designers have similar ways of expressing their ideas. 

The final paragraph before I turn myself in: media! Also, I want to emphasize I am purposely copying Emergency Intercom when I do this, I just want to do it. I've been getting back into Deftones a lot more recently, and by "getting back into" I mean almost exclusively listening to Deftones. In fact, I have a really good playlist on my Spotify for all that kinds of music; Deftones, Nirvana, Flyleaf, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. that I listen to the entire way through probably at least once a day. Around the Fur by Deftones specifically has been on repeat, though 7 Words is a close second. Their music makes my pussy throb in a way I can't really explain, it just speaks to my internal organs. Does that make sense? For TV, I'm ashamed to admit, I'm currently at a "watch nothing new" point in my life. I go through phases where I have like five shows I watch at a time, and then as soon as they're over I revert to Family Guy and Rick and Morty and watch the same 5 episodes on repeat for like three months. However Bad Batch (Star Wars show) did just release their second season which I am trying to watch, I simply cannot stay awake long enough to finish even the first episode. But I will. The closest thing I have to a show I've watched is fucking Ginny and Georgia because Abby watches it. Never have I experienced a more brain-numbing form of media in my entire life. Ginny is so annoying I can't physically handle it, I don't understand why her mom is practically a serial killer and yet somehow hasn't killed Ginny yet. The artist recommendation for this week is JUNDI, their designs are actually insane. I think they use 3D printing similar to Iris Van Herpen, either way, she's just actually insane and needs to be recognized. 

That's all I have for this week, I hope you enjoyed my tangents and little tidbits of fashion-oriented information. I hope everyone has an amazing week and I will update you on my life next Sunday. :)

~Christian Reid <3