Sunday 31st December, 2023
Corsets
Wouldn't it be nice if people dressed more vividly?
Like this:
Or this:
Ideally, one's dress would be determined by the colours and shapes — and other sensations, because touch and feeling are arts too — and by whatever need there is for protection. In one case, the latter is much more significant than the former. I'm thinking of masks, where too the protection applies to others as well as oneself. Because who wants a virus that has a good chance of giving you a stroke, eating your immune system, or causing dementia?
A concern for dress that focuses on colour and shape and other properties could be called Neoformalism. "-formal-" because it's about form rather than representation (there isn't much of the latter in clothing); "-ism" because it's "-on" for particles, and "-eme" for linguistic entities, and "-ome" for genomes and proteomes and the cellome (ugh), and "-ism" for art movements; and "Neo-" because I want to sound trendy. Anyway, any art movement is new to someone, if only its founder.
But then, when I was talking to ChatGPT4 about this, it told me I was dressing according to artistic form rather than social norm. So why, I thought, don't we call it Form-Not-Norm-alism?