A.m.
The synchronicity has not escaped me.
I’m in Silicon valley mentally gearing up for an intensive that, if it had been available to me 22 years ago, would’ve possibly kept me a practicing Fashist, with a capital F.
I’d designed this impossible collection, see? The culmination of years of design throes, totally outside of the confines of what was becoming grievechronic in my gut, utilizing materials in blasphemous ways that I’d have had to convince someone to teach me to use sacrilegiously to get what I wanted.
My friend knew nothing of this.
She didn’t even know I’d be around. But something told her on a cosmic level that I would be present to tag along.
Now, the course isn’t even the point.
I am laying here realizing I could miss it. The intensive.
The primary point was to re-introduce me to a concept & desire that 20-something me didn’t fully comprehend the bringing to fruition of was wholly in my hands.
The stop for me that I had thought was production never was that. I could’ve produced it then, at least prototypes.
What these 20+ years being a bona fide arthead on my own terms and answering to no one have given me is an understanding that it was manufacture and permeability that was stringing me up.
I was already in japanese trading company head. My brain’s design aesthetic & m.o. was already operating in that bring to market capacity. What Issey Miyake was doing with a piece of cloth was revolutionary but it wasn’t the same call.
I was a campy, black goth middle class kid from Cleveland, two hairs shy of being buppie offspring. I made a lot of sense in Japan that I get in a completely different way now. My entire generation of Japanese fashist comrades were also the first ones in their families given free license to go DO whatsoever and get up To the crazy shit we were wilding out to, calling it “work.”
But making something that could be manufactured exponentially in all that wilding out was like a pragmatic undercurrent chastising me ….and it was this idea that had made me yowl “enough!”
It set three tenets in place that’d have to align if I were ever to return to the mothership, once I left. DesigneR wise.
I couldn’t just…
wanna make this so I’d cheese at myself in the mirror for having made it…
which is saying a lot because I’m as notoriously grateful & gratitude-filled as I am dementedly gratuitous …and that’s like baseline programming.
…But I dreamt of a day I could.
Do that. With no interior pushback.
When I would be able to make sense of doing it.
This year I’ve been silently watching that geist mature in me.
Started making things for me.
To rock.
Pointedly.
Because I missed that leg.
I was imagining Amazons & designing battle gear for them to seductively beat dudes into distress in (flicked with blood) as my womenswear & getting holy hell for it…and designing vividly printed unisex gear on internships in High school before heading off to major in Menswear.
I’d alter my stuff, rock my pants from my line all louche-like… but making things FOR me? Nah.
When I got serious about costuming for grievechronic in 2014, a directed at self selection of illustrations did arise but they were in tandem with gear for Exile(an upcoming book). Another “self-directed collection of illustrations bloomed in the afterglow of the costumes for the dance company in Flagstaff. 2016 & 2017 brought me home to fiber art for the [RAW] Eurythmy & Ritu.alist shows(&costumes) in Taos & Sedona. But those pieces sold, got donated to dance companies…but , tho made on me fit model macrame-wise , were not For me.
But 2023 has been wild.
p.m.
Just got home.
Had to lay down. My actual heart …hurts.
I know how to make baskets now.
… which means my Warrior Queen rhapsodies can come true.
Everyone else was making baskets.
My hands kept shaping…protective gear. Armour.
For a moment it shifted into a fencing faceguard of its own accord and I almost lost my fn…job-
Somewhere out in the grievechronic wilds, Aleph was appeased as Babylon purred insanely. & I kept sheepishly lagging behind to not have to make mine’s look like everyone else’s.
See… from time immemorial, I think I may have costumed Angels. For war. The one. Up there.
Vulcan’d out like a motherfuck.
It’s fucking canon.
Now I can make it.
ALL OF IT.