click click – 04-02-12
Welcome to click click, the sporadic review of what I find worth clicking on the internet.
Details of an 1874 Levi’s denim 3 pleat blouse, via Loomstate and Just Goods.
- Interview Translation: Coco Chanel on fame, trousers, creativity and the moon – this wonderful post reveals a lot. I had watched the 1969 footage and was intrigued by the designer’s body language. I searched and couldn’t find a translation, so I’m grateful that brilliant Lucie provided.
- The Beheld – what Final Fashion is to clothes, The Beheld is to beauty. I’ve enjoyed digging into Autumn’s archives. Two recent posts riffing on ideas of intimacy and appearance – The Privacy Settings of Pyjamas and My Love of Slips.
- Six Theses on Pinkification – talking about symbolism and significance of my other favourite colour.
- The Blind Hem – a new collective my-kind-of-fashion blog with a great set of contributers.
- “Brand Me” – this article was making the rounds amongst the Toronto twitter contingent this week. I don’t think any of these subjects just “happen to be blonde”, and to be honest, I would consider myself one of them. The implication that self-creation is somehow insincere doesn’t reflect my experiences at all. I also think that the word “branding” is more accurately applied to inanimate products than people.
- How Maggie Thatcher was Remade - a closer look at the history of a very deliberate aesthetic strategy. See also - Costuming in The Iron Lady.
- waiter, there’s a hair in my satire – A great collection of caricatures mocking the excesses of Ancient Regime hairdos.
Old-school karma for new-school friends -
- Yes, Jessica? - “My name is Jessica. I live in Chicago with my two dogs.”
- Dressful – “exploring fashion beyond its surface: trend interpretation, fashion blogging, visual inspiration, fashion industry analysis and commentary.”
- Anytime Yoga – “I’m a longtime yoga student and an amazingly busy person.”
- Be Fabulous Daily – “icons and inspirations, as well as active strategies for frugality and wardrobe-editing that I’m pursuing in my own life.”
5 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Thank you for the links to The Beheld! But more important, thank you for this whole collection–wonderful stuff.
I do see the phenomenon addressed in the piece you linked to as branding. Social media is curation of the self–it’s selective, it presents a certain face to the world, which, I’d argue, is branding. That said, that doesn’t mean we should automatically dismiss it as inherently insincere, and certainly we shouldn’t dismiss it as something we need to automatically denigrate. Successful personal branding does stem from a degree of authenticity (which is a whole other concept in and of itself, as I’m learning through “The Authenticity Hoax” by Andrew Potter); when it doesn’t, it generally doesn’t work. I do a certain amount of “branding” of myself, and while I express myself sincerely in that branded self (or hope I do), it’s also not the totality of my self-expression. I don’t like the word “branding” because it does seem to connote a cold calculation, but I also don’t think it’s necessarily inaccurate. Perhaps there’s a new word that will emerge. I do think of it as personal curation–hell, I’ll start it! It’s personal curation!
This is probably really inarticulate. As I was arguing in the pajamas/privacy piece, I think that “digital natives” have a keen sense of private/public life that I, at age 35, don’t necessarily have. That leaves them open to grave missteps on occasion, but it also presents plenty of room for creativity and for new notions of privacy.
Thanks for the shout out!
You’re welcome Jessica!
Autumn – great comment, thank you! I personally don’t have a problem with the word branding either, and I’ve used it myself in the past. When Final Fashion was going through a lost time (as a 6 year old blog will do occasionally) I found my way out of the woods once I’d identified what I described at the time as a “branding problem”.
However, I find that when other people use the word “branding” as in this article, the implication is more pejorative. I think the division is between people who understand the word and people who don’t. This author, I feel, didn’t have a great grasp on it.
I do think that part of the reason the word “branding” has a “branding problem” (ha) is that it is not often done well. And I totally agree with you that a successful brand is something that forms sincerely.
I’ve been using “self-creation” as a stand-in for the past few months.
Thanks for the link love. :)
On the interview with Coco Chanel: “…she proclaimed her hatred of knees, short skirts, gossip, Moon trips, trousers and rude people.” -She does know things. When you hear her words, you’d know she’s not from this generation of skimpy clothes, among other things.