Words: Eilidh Duffy

Many of us who have been besotted by fashion from a young age have no doubt worn, bought, begged someone for, or simply coveted, a counterfeit luxury good. My own relationship with fake stuff began in an alleyway behind Canal Street in New York’s Lower East Side when I was around 13. I think I had saved up (or begged my parents for…) just enough money – around $30? – to purchase a really shittily made Louis Vuitton Speedy.

These were, however, the (OG) days of Gossip Girl and Alexa Chung. So the next was a plasticky Mulberry Alexa ordered from a dodgy online store. An upgrade, even though the photo looked nothing like what arrived in the post. Little did I care. It fulfilled a fantasy of mine, albeit on a budget, and my poor mother had finally shut me up. We had both reached some kind of peace.

Silvia Bombardini, a researcher, educator, and writer, might say, however, that my acts of counterfeit consumption were some of my earliest rebellious acts against the Fashion System. My insufferable moaning and begging was not the vain lament of a teenage girl but a slight against the luxury industry; a jab at those very forces that made me desire these objects with such intensity. That’s because Silvia thinks that the counterfeit luxury object is a rupture in the systems that produce our desires for luxury goods.

This she argues in her 2019 article Luxury for the Many: Politics and Virtues of the Knockoff. In it she posits that the proliferation of counterfeit luxury objects might be a way to break the capitalist system itself, and positions the production of counterfeits as a postcolonial practice.1

This isn’t the only subversive act of shopping Silvia has looked at. We first met in 2022 after I’d encountered her research into Victorian shoplifting clothing. She also seemed to flit between academia and journalism, and wanted to explore different ways of communicating her research into the subversive sides of consumption – namely, thieving and looting. So we worked on a project for the last full issue of Bog released in 2023.

The premise behind much of her work is that people, usually women, can circumvent the restrictions of capital through unconventional methods of consumption. Silvia, like us, loves stuff. But she’s also inherently very radical. “I guess my whole career is a way to try and reconcile my love of things with my political views,” Silvia laughs.

Seven years on from her initial writing of the text, our collective societal relationship to the fake has shifted. Where the counterfeit used to be derided, it feels, more and more, as though buying fake (now often referred to as ‘replica’) luxury goods is an acceptable, even a consumer-savvy, thing to do.

Through the rise of dupe culture, the accessibility and normalisation of counterfeits through forums and platforms like AliExpress, the proliferation of the higher-quality ‘superfakes’, and the relatively recent proposition that to get back at Trump’s tariffs you could buy a fake bag from Chinese manufacturers, fake luxury goods are now shaking off some of the shame previously attached to them.

Silvia, contra to me, has not had a near-lifelong relationship with the fake (she claims she doesn’t own one counterfeit designer piece!) but she’s thought about them significantly more than I have. After discovering her article a couple of months ago, I begged her to sit down with me to discuss all the new developments in the world of the fake.

Is the dupe still revolutionary? What does it mean if there are fake-looking ‘authentic’ luxury goods? And what if there were no class distinctions in fashion at all? Find out the answer to all of these questions and more, below.

Eilidh Duffy: I thought it’d be nice to start by giving readers a quick overview of the text, and perhaps where these ideas came from.

Silvia Bombardini: I was thinking about why we feel disappointed when we buy something that we find out is a fake. I propose, in the text, that it is a way that capitalism imposes on our lives. I had recently read the chapter titled ‘Utopia as Replication’ in Valences of the Dialectic (2009) by Frederic Jameson and he discusses the American supermarket chain Walmart. He’s trying to see if this example of extreme capitalism could be conceived as self-destructive. I was considering what it is that fakes do, specifically our mass consumption of them. Could we perceive that as a kind of uprising of the masses against luxury?

Alongside that I was thinking about women and mimicry, and how both the consumption of fakes and the idea of pretence are habits and traits associated with the feminine. Then some of the telltales of fakes, and this idea that they might break down because they are perceived as ‘low’ quality, whether or not that’s true in most cases. Essentially, I was asking: can we reframe the whole idea of the fake?

I was doing my MRes at Goldsmiths at the time, and I think it’s quite important to relate this to some of the discussions that were happening. It was 2019, and everyone was talking about accelerationism.2 So, broadly, this idea that pushing back against capitalism was not working, and you have to fight it from within. I was somewhat seduced by the idea that there might be extreme expressions of consumer culture that could be a way through capitalism. That could expose how the system is fundamentally cracking. Later on, when I wrote about shoplifting for my PhD, I felt this was also an expression of that.

There’s a line that’s running throughout all of your research – this text, your work on shoplifting clothing, and in the past we’ve discussed your interest in shopping riots – which posits that consumption can be subversive in certain contexts. It’s a novel idea, as you point out in this text, considering that abstention from consumption is so often what is perceived as the ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ approach.

There’s this idea, which is very widespread on the left in general, that you should not consume. That you should be ‘better’ than the person who does. I find it very problematic. The idea that you should not consume, or abstain from desire, I find that repressive and misogynistic. It’s also a bit elitist. Fundamentally, though, it is not working.

If we consider shoplifting, for example, it is a form of consumption. Looting is a form of shoplifting, but it is more generally accepted as rebellious, or as a rebellion against consumption. I think buying fakes – or stealing fakes – should also be considered in that vein. I would like, if I find some funding at some point, to research riots as well. Riots within stores. I also wonder if, now that shopping occurs mostly online, there are similar strategies that are going on in the digital sphere.

Saying that stuff got lost in the post, but it didn’t.

Exactly. I actually met someone in New York who is an artist, who is ordering things from stores and then returning her own versions of them, but keeping the originals.

I’d really love to discuss this idea that fakes are part of the underbelly of consumption, and how you think consuming them can be dangerous in some way to the capitalist system itself. In this text in particular, you use these consistent metaphors for the fake object being a disease: ‘parasitical and clandestine’, emerging in ‘schismatic multitudes out of background haze’; an ‘out-of-sight parasite that subsists from and plagues [capitalism]’. I’d like you to tell me a bit about this framing, of the counterfeit as a life-draining parasite or disease.

Fakes have indeed proliferated but, to be honest, have not necessarily destroyed any luxury brands. The reason brands go after counterfeiters is that they harm the reputation of that brand. It could be because they’re sometimes not made as well, but I also think it’s about scarcity. We see a lot of Louis Vuitton bags, so we perceive them as ubiquitous and that harms the Louis Vuitton brand.

So, I think this is more a question of numbers than a question of quality, right? You sell something that’s supposed to be exclusive. Suddenly, a lot of people have it, and it becomes less desirable because of that. You find examples where this ubiquity is threatening. For example, with Burberry, when fake Burberry check was being worn in the UK by working-class people and football ‘hooligans’, it did really harm the reputation of the brand.

And maybe the type of person who owned that object with the Burberry check is a different kind of person from who they want to see it on.

Yeah, you price something at a certain amount in order to limit the number of people who can afford it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t mass-produced, but it keeps it exclusive in an economic sense. There’s very little materially that you can do to justify that price. The idea that it is scarce is the justification.

I keep returning to this idea, which is not what you discuss in the essay but I am interested to talk about it, which is that scarcity – post-streetwear – is now a really large part of what makes something a luxury object. The thing other people literally can’t have unless they have specific knowledge about fashion or dress, even if they have all the money in the world. It’s the thing they’ve made only 100 of, or there’s only one in the entire world. Or vintage pieces that are scarce. Like, you know, dudes who will pay thousands of dollars for a certain kind of T-shirt.

Yeah, so perhaps this justification of luxury being high quality is actually completely out of the window, and now it’s all about scarcity. At least it’s more transparently the thing that matters nowadays.

I also think it’s interesting to think about which period of time we were in when class distinction mattered. Someone like Dapper Dan, who in the 1980s and 1990s was, you know, screen printing his own fabrics with luxury logos. His business was destroyed by a cease and desist in 1992, because luxury brands basically did not want Black people wearing their logos. Burberry’s business was affected by counterfeiting in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Whereas what I feel is happening now is that luxury is somehow trying to appeal to the masses. And has subsumed the codes of these moments – Burberry with the check, Alessandro Michele and Gucci rehashing Dapper Dan’s work – back into their lexicon.

I don’t know if luxury is truly trying to appeal to the masses or it’s just an aesthetic turn. I still think that if everyone was able to wear real pieces from, let’s say, Balenciaga or Prada, it wouldn’t quite keep its appeal. The purpose of luxury is distinction.

But it’s nuanced, right? If we’re talking about, let’s say the mid-1990s versus now, there is a vibe shift in how people interact with brands. Luxury conglomerates have grown in size, they’re selling way more product and prices are crazy high. What I think is interesting right now is the appeal of the aesthetics of the fake, as demonstrated by Demna’s work more broadly, and particularly with his version of Gucci – the little bumbags – it’s almost trying to bring that back into the language of luxury. So what does this mean for the fake? Is a fake still subversive if it’s been subsumed into luxury?

Hmmm. To me, the aesthetic of the fake is not what is important, it’s the systems it exposes. The thing that matters is not the quality, it is not the make, it is the intention. Of course, there are very good fakes that are very expensive and close to the original and there are very cheaply made fakes. I consider them both equally subversive, but the ‘original’ that imitates the fake is not, because it’s authentic. The intention of the ‘original’ will always be distinction.

So when I say intention, I do not necessarily mean the intention of the maker or wearer of the fake, but of the fake itself. In terms of the actual production of these fakes, a lot of counterfeiters just want to make money, and people who buy fakes just want to look richer or more fashionable, right? But that doesn’t mean that the act itself isn’t rebellious in some way. This has also been an important part of my thinking around shoplifting as well, because I think that the act is subversive in itself even if the person who steals or wears the fake garment does not do it with a conscious political or subversive intention.

Thinking about why things that look ‘fake’ are appealing and being adopted by luxury brands now – well, if you can’t beat them, join them. And the idea of the cease and desist is fundamentally deeply uncool. Saying that, though, maybe more people are buying fakes because they are realising that the differences between what is ‘fake’ and what is ‘real’ are essentially made up.

Can you just explain that a little?

Occasionally fakes are made in the same factories by the same workers with leftover raw materials. So, exactly the same, but produced after hours. The distinction between fake and original comes down to when it was made.

I also remember reading an interview with a counterfeiter in Shenzhen, and she was saying that her system worked like this: people who were going to buy from her would pay in advance. She would then use this advance to buy the original to copy it. Sometimes she would improve on it. Sometimes it was not that good, a bit scratchy in places, for example, so she made it better and then she would sell it. She was definitely a high-end counterfeiter, and not everyone works like this.

I feel like luxury has actually started making the signifiers of luxury harder to copy. For example, forgoing the primacy of the logo in favour of a distinctive weave, a fabric, or a shape – the feeling of a luxury good. The quiet luxury thing, for example. And this has, in tandem, ushered in dupe culture. For example, The Row is one of the most duped brands, but there is no big logo or overt signal that The Row is The Row, aside from its shape or its texture. Interestingly, it’s also a smaller pool of people who would even be able to recognise that, versus the LV monogram or double C for Chanel. The dupe is not an overt display of luxury, but you’re displaying a certain level of taste.

Is quiet luxury a reaction against fakes? Probably not. But it would be interesting to think of it that way. This rise of extreme knowledge of details as a form of distinction, it’s perhaps a way to say: ‘It doesn’t matter to me that people recognise I’ve paid £5,000 for this coat, because I know that I have and the other people who recognise it are the only ones who matter.’ It’s not new though. Margiela’s labels were originally meant to be cut out, right? The idea was that you would buy the piece because it’s well made, and then own it for a long time.

Quiet luxury is perhaps more interesting than this Margiela example, though. There is this idea that knowledge is capital in the Bourdieu sense.3 It’s still based on distinction, but just a different type. Intellectual property is, for me, also a form of property. Property is theft, and if you’re against capital, you’re against property. I do think intellectual property should belong in that category as well. You get your ideas because you have the privilege of receiving an education, and you get this education because other people are working.

Just thinking about intellectual property in the UK, the current laws around it don’t protect concepts or ideas. But they do protect designs.

What would be the distinction between stealing ideas and stealing a design?

A design being a thing that is made and has sketches and toiles or prototypes – something to show there has been a concrete development process. But an idea, a concept, a vibe being something more ephemeral and hard to pin down. It’s why it’s so hard for young brands to prove that the Zaras, the H&Ms, or other luxury brands have ‘copied’ their work. Which is a whole other side to this conversation…

I still think you can be critical of this kind of copying when it happens. Not on the basis of ownership, but by understanding the power dynamics between the corporation, whether it be Gucci or H&M, and the independent individual. I do, however, think that ideas circulate, and I don’t think they should be owned – and by the way, saying this, my PhD was sponsored by the European Patent Office…

Well, this kind of brings me to my next question. You discuss the ‘counterfeit’ as a Western concept. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about that history, because I don’t know anything about it.

Well, I don’t know if I know enough about the history of the counterfeit, but there is a book by Byung-Chul Han called Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese and he discusses the idea of authenticity in both a Western and Eastern context. For example, a temple in Japan, Ise Jingu, is rebuilt every 20 years, and it is still considered an ‘original’.

In relation to luxury brands, however, I was more interested in the nature of the production and dissemination of their goods. Brands will often go somewhere where labour is cheaper to make their ‘originals’, but we only call them ‘originals’ because they are handled and sold in a particular way through a particular route, and then the label is attached in Europe. It’s a neocolonial process, the exploitation of people and places outside of the West, therefore the making of fakes in these places and by the same people making the ‘original’ authentic bags could be framed as a postcolonial practice.

When I was writing this essay, the predominant places producing fakes were Turkey, Shenzhen, and Bangladesh. If I had more funding and time, it would have been good to go to these places and do some fieldwork there, talk to people.

That would be super interesting.

You know, one of the criticisms I now have for this essay is that it’s just theory, right? Can you ever make an argument that intention doesn’t matter?

Well, what’s exciting about the text that you’ve written is that it’s a proposition. You’re giving people a chance to think through this type of object that has social and political value in a different way to what’s intended.

Sometimes I do feel there are so many counter-arguments to everything. When I talk about shoplifting as a feminist practice, I always get people saying, ‘Oh, but my dad has a little shop, and someone will come and steal and this will be a tragedy.’ When I talk about fakes, especially in fashion design schools, people always talk about when this happens to small brands, so I feel like there’s a distinction to be made about theoretical arguments, and real life situations. For example, when we say that ideas do not belong to people, but to society, it is still different if something is patented by a working-class woman in the 1800s, versus a company like Zara.

Right, and we are in a time during which algorithms are basically scouring the internet to find young designers’ work to reproduce it for Shein. Perhaps the ‘fake’ is a more contentious thing today, in terms of where the ethical lines lie within that argument.

If you were using Jameson’s utopian method to an extreme degree,4 perhaps you could go and see this algorithmic distribution of ideas as potentially threatening the system of distinction in itself, right? Could there be a radical potential in this distribution of ideas? Who knows.

Suspend reality for a moment: what would this look like, the complete disintegration of distinction?

I guess it’s a bit of a dream... But let’s just focus on fashion for now. I’d be interested to see whether we can separate taste from the exhibition of status. I would like to think so. I obviously think people would still wear different clothes, express style, in this new reality. Most people don’t wear clothes because we need to show how rich we are.

But everything we’ve talked about in relation to fashion – and I don’t just mean buying expensive things to show that you can, but also the ‘drop’ and having that one T-shirt that there’s only three of – is about status in some way. Getting that shirt, even if it was not expensive to begin with, shows you were able to get it first, so you are able to be there at the right time in the right place, you have the knowledge. That knowledge is another form of status because – going back to Bourdieu – you get knowledge in our society by having time and connections.

I actually think subcultures can give us kind of a glimpse of what fashion can be without economic or class status. Although it is another form of status-signalling. You know, subcultural knowledge is still a form of status…

I guess there is one last thing that I want to maybe tease out a bit more, related to this idea of the algorithmically-designed dupe. Does the dupe, something that kind of looks like a luxury piece but is not, have the same function as the fake – something counterfeited? Does an Amazon Chanel-style pump do the same thing as a counterfeit quilted flap bag complete with Chanel logo? Does it have the same potency?

Well, the dupe seems to be a way to avoid lawsuits, which I appreciate. Obviously, there’s something about the counterfeit which is particularly explicit in its subversiveness. It is a recognisable sign of distinction amongst a larger group of people. But I think the subtlety of the dupe can also be strategic in an interesting and productive way, as if to say: there’s nothing that special about this thing that costs £5,000. This idea that supposed quality is what distinguishes it, but we know that it’s not necessarily the case and, really, it’s crazy to spend that much money on purchasing it. So, let me just take it.

Silvia’s reading list: On copying (֊⎚-⎚)

Hines, Alice. ‘A Copy of A Copy’, Vestoj, March 8, 2018.

Lin, Ming and Alexandra Tatarsky. ‘The Shanzhai Lyric’, The New Inquiry, September 28, 2015.

Steyerl, Hito. ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal, no. 10, November 2009.

More bog?

Flattening the Archive

Twos Trends #1

The Never-Ending History of Disintegrating Clothes

What’s up?

These past weeks we have been thinking about research. What actually it is and what its inherent value might be – both cultural and financial.

Who is it actually for? And who gets to do it? Is research something that we should, without question, always share? Or should we demand that it has monetary value? Does research and the information/knowledge it generates actually have authorship? Are there other ways we should think about it? And are there structures we can build to share it as a commons? What the fuck even is it?

We have come to no conclusions – as of yet. But we are thinking that the way that we operate will be changing soon. Watch this space.

This thinking was sparked by going to a lot of publicly-accessible, free, presentation-based research stuff in the past couple of months that has been really good. For example, Esther Leslie’s lecture on chemical atmospheres at Chisenhale to accompany Racheal Crowther’s exhibition, Liquid Trust.

It was a generous and undulating hour and a half of theoretical threads that bound together early-to-mid 20th-century military research, the aerosol, social control via atmospheres, the droplet as lens, and Thatcherism, amongst other things.

Most recently, however, was Time Is Away, aka Elaine Tierney and Jack Rollo, and their event celebrating both their recently-opened exhibition as well as one of the researchers who influenced its inception: Jane Wildgoose of the Wildgoose Memorial Library. Wildgoose established her library-slash-archive in the early 2000s, which is also her home, and you can visit it and drink tea with her by making an appointment. She also did the iconic costumes for the 1987 film Hellraiser.

The entire event was about ‘invented institutions’, in relation to the fictional Department of Euterpe Jack and Elaine have concocted at the Warburg Institute. Posing as Warburg’s music studies wing, the department is a fictional one rendered potentially real until the beginning of October this year. Jack and Elaine described their practice as an ‘anti-institution’, which is deliberately messy and uncategorisable, which we vibed with hard. Particularly exciting and bog-like was this slide here:

It felt like the beginnings of what might turn into a thorough thinking-through of what an institution is and also what it can/could/should be. These thoughts were expanded at dinner with Jack and Elaine later in the week. Fuelled by too much wine, we won’t share all the thoughts in detail here, but (we think) we discussed the impossibility of changing culture from within, and the necessity of remaining within the edges, on the borders and occupying the spaces in between.

Something rather like the Horse Hospital Collective, whose George Lynch and Alex McKenzie were interviewed for Elephant by Hatty Nestor recently and spoke very well about what they are doing.

Sort of accidentally, all this thinking comes at a time when we have just had 500 custom pencils made that we are distributing in places (institutions?) we interact with research: libraries, shops, that kind of thing. It’s been a longtime dream to make a pencil, and now we have finally got round to doing it.

In a bid to beat (or circumvent) the algorithm, we thought we might find some people that want to read this by offering a tool that is so often required in archives and libraries. Think of them as little keys to the bog.

If you would like to find one, we’ve recently been to twos, the British Library, and the Central Saint Martins library. By next week, we will hopefully have some out at LCF, too. And if you want to distribute them around your own place(s) of research, please give us an email or dm telling us where you want to put them and we will send you a pack.

As a short addendum to this, we’d like to share an event our friend Thea has organised at Tramps bar next Thursday the 30th July for the launch of Calla Henkel’s new book – the artist-slash-writer who co-runs New Theatre Hollywood, LA, formerly of TV Bar, Berlin.

We haven’t been to Tramps bar yet and we’ve heard mixed reviews but we like the woman who runs it because she takes absolutely no shit from Zionists. We also think Thea is amazing and she believes that we would all love Calla’s new book – so here we are sharing it. Might not be in London next week, but possibly see you there x

Garm of the week

Speaking of the invented institution, we picked up this book at a really cool project space in Tokyo a few months ago, and have been circling around it, allowing things to pile up on top of it, waiting for the right moment to open it up and have a look inside.

Well, we finally did it this week and we are very glad that we did. It’s a book documenting some objects from the collection of Peter Merlin, a former NASA archivist and aviation archaeologist, the practice of identifying and documenting aeronautical crash sites.

There is an informal group who does this in the US that advocates for the cataloguing of these sites called AAIR, whose website is pretty fab. Peter Merlin, we assume, is a bit more cavalier, considering the collection of objects stored at his private archive-slash-office in the outskirts of Los Angeles county. You can read a bit about him on this perfectly designed website.

He has in his collection pieces of meteorite, a Soviet rocket ship key, fragments of trinitite, the glasslike material created from the explosion of the Trinity test, as well as wreckage from experimental warplanes, like the Lockheed A-12 spy plane and the XB-70 Valkyrie bomber. The most alluring things in his collection, at least in terms of their iconographic qualities, were the patches and commemorative coins he got his hands on, from various groups, task forces and teams operating within Area 51.

We’ve popped a more extensive selection of images plus the text written by Paglen about the collection in our paid subs folder here.

Upon encountering these images, we immediately searched for any work that’s been done on military insignia and recent-historical designs. The combination of esoteric imagery and popular culture references (e.g., Sauron’s eye and quotes from the X-Files) seem particularly ripe for interrogation. But sadly, there’s not been much done on these objects as of yet. Perhaps one of you guys wants to take up the mantle? We’d be very happy to publish your findings.

Trevor Paglin, the artist who put together the book has, however, dipped his toes a tiny bit. In this short blog post he considers these patches ‘outsider art’ which “can be rare glimpses into some of the niches of military culture” which is a pretty appealing way to frame it. He also highlights some terrible brainrot psyop patches and explains some of their meanings, which is both depressing and incredibly interesting (as most military-dress-related research is).

Most arresting, however, is the very casual fact that American fashion designer Bill Blass was, as a very young man, part of the first psyop group enlisted by the US Army during the Second World War called the Ghost Army. They were a secret force employed to create stuff like inflatable tanks or radio broadcasts to confuse the Axis powers:

They had their own (made up) patches featuring fictional insignia:

But their actual insignia looked like this. It is a symbol still used to this day for psyop guys in the US Armed Forces. It’s kinda cute, no? Which we obviously hate.

Bill Blass is the second American ‘sportswear’ designer (aka designer who made casual, comfortable clothes for women in the postwar period) we’ve discovered had intimate ties to the military during WWII. The other being Bonnie Cashin, who designed uniforms for women in the US Armed Forces and who received a Coty Award in 1950 for her designs that included aspects of ‘layering’, likely inspired from her time working as a uniform designer, for various reasons. We wrote a bit about her in the latest issue of Practice.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Found by Josh at the market

Apparently it smells very bad.

Rat Section new merch

Been wearing ours all week. No word of a lie. Get yours here.

Jean Patou loveliness circa 1920s

The geometric triangular forms and stripes feel very now, no? Or maybe where we are going.

And, well, some things never change

Want more?

News from the Bog #9

News from Cecile Tulkens

News from the Bog #8: (en)closure special

Words: Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura

Recently, while watching a 2019 lecture that Mark Leckey gave to students at Liverpool John Moores University, I was struck by a quiet admission: “I don’t know what art does now.” Seven years later, it’s a question that feels even more pressing. What can, or perhaps what should, art do?

The idea that art should be alive to the world, by having a transformative emotive impact through its formal autonomy, or being a more direct call to arms, is starting to feel like a thing of the past. Well into the 2020s, it feels like there are far too many exhibitions about art-making, in step with the bookshops full of novels about writing. This solipsistic turn, which seems to reflect the increasingly narrow strata of people who can actually afford to make art, is part of a wider failure to really engage with politics beyond virtue signalling.

There is, however, a little pocket universe that helps snap me out of my morose cynicism: Photodirect, the video archive of American artist Alex Harsley, whose wider practice spans photography, video art, and community building. The first Photodirect video was uploaded to YouTube in November 2006, just 18 months after the platform was founded, but the archive itself dates back to the beginning of Harsley’s video practice that started in the mid 1990s. Since 2006, Harsley has uploaded a video to the Photodirect channel continuously, sometimes daily, and in the time you’ve read this, he might even have added a few more. The archive now consists of approximately 1,500 videos, spanning nearly 20 years of uploads.

Read more

Intro: Eilidh Duffy

When we set out to relaunch this newsletter, we thought it would actually be Contemporary Fashion lite. But, as it was when Bog first started, there’s so much cool shit happening just below the surface of capital ‘F’ Fashion that it’s been necessary to dust off the Reporter cap and pop it on again. And you know what – it’s been quite fun.

Next in line (and the grand finale for this Fashion Season) is this lovely project called tokyo sense curated by Andreas Murkudis in Paris, a temporary store that’s brought together 29 Japanese projects and labels spanning publishing, beauty, fashion, and objects to the city over the month of June and the beginning of July. The idea has been to bring a bit of the Japanese shopping experience to Parisians and the hordes that have descended on Paris for men’s.

If you don’t know of him and his work already, Andreas has been the purveyor of a number of incredibly chic and exciting shop locations selling clothes, objects, furniture, and art in Berlin since 2002. Before this, he worked as the warehouse manager for his brother, the designer Kostas Murkudis, who was a Helmut Lang protégé before launching his own label in 1994. He still designs to this day and we are (of course) huge stans, just look at these sick drop-crotch pants.

This first AM store looked onto a run-down courtyard in Mitte. Located in a former apartment, its product selection was based on the gift shop he had opened while director at the Museum der Dinge, a little institution dedicated to the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of architects, artists, and industrial designers formed in 1907 (and a precursor to some of the ideas championed by the Bauhaus). The objects on sale in the shop were functional, beautiful and adaptable. “I wanted to expand on that concept – not just to make a living, but to show how these objects could be part of everyday life beyond the museum,” he explains.

Andreas opened his shop at a time when what European retail could look like was expanding. You’d had 10 Corso Como open in Milan in 1991, Colette in Paris in 1997, and the original Dover Street Market was to open its doors in London in 2004. Andreas Murkudis opened his store in Berlin during the decade that reshaped how we think about retail.

Why we were so keen to hear from Andreas isn’t simply because the tokyo sense logo feels so spiritually connected to our own, nor to introduce all of the brands he’s presenting (you can do that at your leisure on their Instagram, or at the showroom until the 7th of July), but to understand what happens when a particular shopping culture – and the products that come with it – travels from Tokyo to Paris.

Discerning readers of Bog will know we have a bit of a passion for the shop form (see here, here & here). Japan is a place that has acted as a bit of a North Star in terms of retail formats and experiences since the mid-20th century. And it seems Andreas shares our fascination. “Shopping in Japan is a singular experience,” he explains. “For me, it’s all about the joy of discovery – having no agenda and letting the city, district, or street guide you.”

After his initial visit to Japan in 2016, Andreas has returned regularly for showrooms, Tokyo Fashion Week, and a fair bit of fun. Every visit, he insists, “feels as exciting as the first.” So exciting, in fact, that he could “do without London, Milan, and Paris as long as I can keep travelling to Tokyo.” A grand statement indeed.

There are a number of reasons that buying stuff in Japan feels so liberated, one of which is the sense you’re getting let in on some big secret. Retail licensing doesn’t really exist in the same way it does here in the UK (and presumably in France, too) wherein particular places can only allow certain activities to happen in them by law. Thus a shop can pop up in a block of flats, or a tiny bar might open on the fifth floor of an old office building.

Case in point: Edoya. A brush shop in Nihonbashi originally opened in 1718, a selection of which you can browse at tokyo sense. It embodies the kind of retail experience that’s possible in a place like Tokyo. Drifting through the high-rises of Nihonbashi, you can happen upon a 1920s shopfront and, sliding open the thin cypress doors, find one of the most singular shops on the planet.

During the Edo period (1603-1868) Nihonbashi was home to many craftspeople and artisans. It’s now developed into a centre for finance and luxury shopping. Despite the rapid redevelopment of the area, the sinews of all this old beautiful stuff haven’t been transplanted elsewhere, but have remained, just between all those shiny glass and steel surfaces. To find these spots, you just have to know where to look.

Last time we were in Tokyo, we went on the recommendation of a friend (another very astute buyer) and managed to bag a pig-hair bottle brush as well as a toothbrush made from horsehair – for around £20 in total. You can also get horsehair hairbrushes (!) and a little teapot cleaning brush, plus the feather dusters that are currently stocked at tokyo sense.

It really got us thinking. Go to the most interesting select shops in Tokyo and you’re likely to find a couple of European heritage labels all but forgotten about over here, aside from intimate circles of menswear nerds and some older rich people. In London and Paris, though, a more widespread appreciation and circulation of East Asian design and craft is perhaps a little less developed.

As Western menswear markets (and podcasters) are once again putting Japanese design on a pedestal (the peculiar success of A.Presse, a rather bland brand that’s been touted as the hottest new thing, for example) perhaps this offering from Andreas, while still appealing to those with a penchant for ‘Made in Japan’, can act as a counterpoint; an opportunity for everyone to dig in a bit deeper to the myriad things Japanese design has to offer aside from well-made but over-hyped hoodies, T-shirts and jeans.

As we can’t actually be there (Paris is too hot = cancelled) we asked a couple of Bog correspondents to pop over and see what was going on. Here’s their review:

& because we had the rare chance to pin Andreas down, we also asked him for a few recommendations to help everyone survive this overheated Paris Fashion Week – two of which, thankfully, involve air conditioning.

Read on for Andreas Murkudis’s garm of the week (which you can see in the flesh for a limited time), as well as a song that perfectly sums up how we now all feel about 25°C+ heat. ✪

Garm of the week

Andreas: My garm of the week would be one of my favourite books from the exhibition at OGATA together with FRAGILE BOOKS in Paris: the “striped book” of only striped fabric samples from the shimacho collection, dating from the very beginning of the 20th century. Shimacho are fabric sample books, often made by individuals weaving at home. You can read more about the “striped book” here.

Other stuff Andreas liked on and off the internet

Paloma Varga Weisz wooden sculptures

Anohni’s I don’t love you anymore

The Henri Rousseau exhibition at The Musée de l’Orangerie

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News from Cecile Tulkens

News from the Bog #4: shopping special 🛍️ 🤑 👖

How to wear an Ancient Square

Words: Eilidh Duffy

“It’s the least finished word, and it kind of looks like stitching – you can have it go on and on and on and on.” I’m with Minna Bunting on the ground floor of a grand townhouse just off Soho Square on Wednesday morning and she is explaining the idea behind the name of her new label. Light and air stream in from two heavy sash windows, illuminating a zig-zag bunting of ecru, azure, chocolatey black, and terracotta silks. Except, actually, it’s not bunting, but large, languid pieces of draped, modular fabrics, some with sleeves and some without, others just big rectangles with a couple of slits.

These are the designs that make up Etc.’s first offering to the world, a tight set of nine shapes, all based upon rectangles and squares. There are tunics, vests, and wraparound dresses woven in West Bengal, dyed on a rooftop in Jaipur, then minimally cut and sewn before being shipped directly to the showroom. There are knitted pieces, too. Little tabards and skirts, made in Italy from lush Japanese silk yarn. Differences between one shape and another might be the addition of a half sleeve, or full sleeve, or the length of the front and back panels. The pieces are gloriously simple: it’s clothing that has been reduced to the fewest elements possible, with the distinct purpose of remaining infinitely changeable. Just like the term, et cetera.

For the past few weeks Minna has been at 60 Frith Street sharing the last two years of her work for the first time. The space itself, usually Frith Street Gallery, has been loaned to her for the month, with the addition of scenography by a friend, Sarah Bakarat of Also Associates. The intervention in the space is minimal. Transparent wires criss-cross across two rooms like clothing lines in Neapolitan alleyways. The only furniture on show are a couple of chairs and a few mirrors which, without backing, have slowly been hunching over into themselves, warping their fronts and gradually altering their reflective capacities.

I’d first visited Minna a week before and stayed for nearly three hours, unclipping pieces of silk lolling from the clothesline, wrapping them round my body and, due to the mirror situation – which, if Minna hadn’t apologised about, I’d have thought was very conceptual and deliberate – attempting to tune into how they actually felt to wear. They all felt insane, kind of like wearing liquid air, and I left with a butter yellow tunic I’ve been wearing almost every day since.

The only materials that give any aesthetic suggestions away, aside from the garments themselves, are a handmade book documenting the designs and their variations, and the block printed label on the garments themselves. “I really don’t want people to have a preconceived idea of how they should look,” Minna explains the lack of imagery to accompany the label’s debut. “A lot of this project is about intuitive dressing, and seeing the body as an instrument that knows what it wants – getting people to tap into that headspace rather than being given something and told how to wear it.”

Minna cut her teeth in fashion at an underwear label she co-founded with a friend in 2017 which she eventually left at the end of 2023. After a short break, during which she swore off the rag trade forever, she heard through a couple of friends about a course being hosted in Jaipur taught by Susan Cianciolo, artist and former designer of legendary New York label RUN. It changed Minna’s whole perspective on making, and sparked the initial idea for Etc. In homage, tomorrow she hosts a workshop with Cianciolo, co-organised with Wonderful Workshops, who’s flown to London specially for the event.

The showroom opened almost three weeks ago, but has still managed to stay a bit of an ‘if-you-know’ kind of affair, with only 490 followers at the time of writing. But that’s just how Minna has wanted it to go. “I hate the word launch, it just makes me feel like it will go up, then down – and really you want to go like that.” She draws a gradual line in the air with her finger. “It’s been very word of mouth,” she smiles, “but that just means it’s reaching the right people.”

Eilidh: So the first thing I wanted to ask you about was what kind of training you had. Did you go to fashion school?

Minna: I have no training at all. I used to have an underwear business, and I learned design on the job. I was working with incredibly talented pattern cutters, but I was sourcing the fabric and then we were translating in the shapes together. I was dealing with such intricate garments and such small pieces. A bra can have, like, up to 48 components. So it really taught me about function and fabric. You can find beautiful vintage leavers lace, but actually there’s only certain parts in the bra where it will actually work. Underwear has to be very utilitarian, so I think I was learning a lot about that – but subconsciously. Where you need stretch, where you need rigidity. It was about the feeling of the garment on the body.

How many years were you doing that?

Seven years. Seven years of pants! I started it straight out of university.

What were you doing at university, if it wasn’t fashion?

I studied business. It’s funny because I got into an art foundation in London, and then suddenly decided I was going to travel and work for a year. Then I ended up doing business for no other reason than I felt it was broad, and I like learning about things that are real and current.

Why did you decide to enter into the rag trade, of all things?

With underwear, I actually didn’t see it as fashion. I’ve always been interested in the more psychological side of dressing. How people interact with an object. I was 22 when I started the brand, so who knows if it was actually this deep at the time, but I’m interested in how something makes a person feel. Whether it’s a bra or underwear – or a tunic.

Last time we spoke, you mentioned that when you left your last brand, you swore never to do another label. Now, three years later, you’re doing something new. What changed?

I had been feeling that the world is so full of stuff. I’d made this rule for myself, though, where I was like: if I ever make something again, I have to imagine I’m going to live with it for the rest of my life. Have it with me in my room forever. Then that was the test to see if it was good enough or not. I thought it was.

That feeling, of there being too much stuff in the world. Where did that come from?

I was actually moving house at the time, which is probably the best time to reflect on everything you have. I was shocked by the whole thing. I felt that all the clothes I owned were very specific. I had this coat for that occasion, that kind of thing. I felt like all my garments were very situational. I started thinking about why we accumulate more and more stuff, what we’re looking for when we do that, and how I was consuming. Questioning all of it. I wanted to create something that was able to transfer, that could be many different things. I think that’s what started the whole versatility side of it. This idea that the less you interfere with an object, or the more simple an object is, the more you can do with it.

I then became very interested in this idea of subtracting. How can we simplify everything as much as possible, reduce it to its most core form? And then put the design or the creation back in the wearer’s hands. Businesses need to keep selling stuff, so they’ll keep finding a reason to sell you something. I thought: what if I can create something that is so simple that it is infinitely interpretable? That’s such a beautiful thing you don’t need a billion things, you just need this one. That was how I wanted it to feel.

You know, there are people who look at some forms of contemporary art and are like, ‘Oh, I could do that!’ And actually, in most instances it takes a lot of skill. I feel like the Etc. pieces are similar. They are all based on rectangles and squares, and maybe someone could just pick up a piece of fabric and do a more DIY version, but they are also very precise and they have a lot of very distinctive character. How did you land on these exact shapes?

For the first four months or so I just played with fabric, wrapping them, knotting them on my body. I also worked with a lot of friends, seeing what silhouettes we could create. From there I worked backwards. There is a level of security and guidance people need from something, but I still wanted to have as little interference as possible.

I worked with a close friend of mine, Nicolas Mezes, who’s an amazing designer, and we literally sat on the floor for months, testing how little we could interfere with the fabric. We were looking for the minimum amount of intervention in this rectangle, so that people could make a silhouette easily, but still have freedom with it. Some days we thought it was genius, other days we were like, ‘It’s just a fucking square!’ Patience was a huge part of it.

Cut-wise, we’ve approached it with this attitude of working with cloth rather than against it. But it requires such skill to work with this kind of silk. It’s so slippery. So I work with a man called Somya and his tailor Ramdayal Ji and seamstress Veer Singh in Jaipur to cut and sew the pieces.

The design itself is very much based on historical design. I was really interested in this idea of what clothing design was before ‘references’, when people were creating for solely utilitarian purposes. How did they make that garment?

That’s probably the most Bog thing you could possibly say.

Right! There’s something very primal about it, which I also find super exciting. You can obviously see the silhouettes are incredibly simple, and so there’s an element to this project where you need to directly interact with it and play with it. I felt like a sense of familiarity was probably important in order to encourage people to work with the garment too. In a weird way, I also wanted people to feel that even if they can’t actually buy my pieces, maybe they can go and make something. If someone wants to copy it, I think that’s cool.

Ok so I have to know – what kind of historical periods were you actually looking at?

I have this book on Ancient Egyptian garments. On the front of the book is a tunic. It’s one of the oldest garments ever discovered. And it’s kind of a dress but also not a dress. I just thought: ‘that’s it.’ That’s as far as I would go with actually designing something. I didn’t want there to be an inside, outside, front, back, anything like that. I actually don’t see myself as having designed anything, really. It’s almost just reimagining something that already exists. Most of my efforts have been put into developing the textiles.

It also sparked this idea in me that everything can be derived from a square. It’s zero waste, because as soon as you start adding curves, you have fabric that is redundant. And I was really looking at the positionings of armholes – they’re not meant to sit right on your shoulder, they should be able to let your armpit breathe and so be a bit further away. There’s something incredibly relaxing about treating garments as shapes with dimensions or rectangles or squares. They’re uncomplicated.

When I was in Jaipur, I remember a woman described fabric as having nine lives, and she said, you know, it can start as a garment, it can end up on cattle, you can swaddle a baby in it, and then it can end up as a dish rag. When she said that, it changed everything for me. This idea of versatility and endless resourcefulness.

Now we’re on the subject of Jaipur, how did you end up at the workshop with Susan that led to you designing again?

A friend had shared it with me online, and then that week I bumped into three friends over from Barcelona who, totally by chance, had signed up to the workshop. I had no idea what it was but had a really good feeling about it. Because it was with Susan, I was happy to go in quite blind. It was all about reimagining textiles. The workshop kind of included everything from Ayurvedic dyeing to weaving with local artisans.

Susan has been incredibly influential to me, of course. Both her as a person and her work. The way she makes and displays things is incredibly approachable. People feel that they can join in. I hope that the narrative around the garments is not just like, ‘Where is that from?’ I also hope people ask, ‘How did you do that?’ Skill sharing or a language rather than a branded thing.

Let’s talk about the textiles.

All the weaving is done in West Bengal, then all the dyeing is done in Jaipur. My dyer Zubaida Ji does all her dyeing on her rooftop in Jaipur. She is the coolest lady. I can’t speak Hindi, she can’t speak English, but we communicate through body language. She works a lot with hand dyeing and natural dyes. I also did some dyeing in Bagru with an amazing guy called Deepak. I spent days there with him perfecting the colours. I also worked with some artisans who specialise in a specific technique, where they wrap string around the fabric and dye it, then remove it.

And how did you connect with these artisans? Was it like word of mouth?

Stella, my fairy godmother who runs the workshops in Jaipur, put me in touch with them. Most of the artisans I work with have been doing this for hundreds of years. It’s very much a family tradition.

I can imagine there’s quite a lot of back and forth with the people you work with.

Yes, it’s very collaborative. You know, I’m not a designer, and the way I work with people is always incredibly collaborative. I’m working with people who know their craft so much better than I ever could. They’ve been dyeing for 40 years. So, for me, I think a lot of it was coming to understand the limitations. For example, you’ll never get the same colour match because the weather changes throughout the year. The stripes will never be absolutely perfect, the string may have broken. I love that kind of imperfection.

*The Etc. showroom is at 60 Frith Street and has just been extended until the 12th of July. Usual hours are Tuesday-Sunday 12.30-7pm

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The Scrappy City

Where to find cool stuff in Athens

Flattening the Archive

Words: Eilidh Duffy

“The weather’s wrong,” Cecile Tulkens laments over the phone. We were catching up last Tuesday morning, which was, indeed, depressingly cold and wet. I agree with her as I swaddle myself in a hoodie and ginormous scarf. “It’s the Spring-Summer collection, so I’m making all this linen knitwear and cotton outerwear. It’s a ‘Yeah got my jumper on, because that’s all you need!’ kind of thing.”

Shown at twos last Friday evening, the collection, titled ‘A Dream of John Ball’, takes its name from the William Morris short story of the same name, in which the protagonist falls asleep only to be taken back to the peasant’s revolt of 1381 when an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 peasants marched to London and demanded an end to serfdom. It was unsuccessful, and set abolition back another 200 years.

“This young man from Victorian England ends up having a conversation with one of the leaders of the peasant revolt,” Cecile explains. This was John Ball, a priest from Essex who was hanged, drawn, and then quartered for his challenge to the crown. “He is explaining the concept of modern capitalism to Ball, who then is like, ‘Oh, surely nobody’s happy’,” she continues, “and I guess that really resonates in terms of how we all feel now.”

Cecile seems particularly attuned to the atmosphere – and not just the dreich summer weather. ‘A Dream of John Ball’ is a collection that she’s made while thinking about how we all feel right now, particularly how squeezed our generation is, financially and politically.

As if by some strange perverted allegorical twist of fate, the day we spoke, riots broke out in Belfast that turned into racist pogroms during which Loyalist youths attempted to burn non-white people out of their homes, and on the day of the show, four young people who took direct action against Elbit Systems were sentenced as ‘terrorists’ through a grim sleight of hand by the UK government and English justice system.

A cohesive identity in left-wing, anti-imperialist English radicalism is sort of over now. At least that which can be found in the figures of William Morris or the Diggers or the Levellers or indeed John Ball himself. “The lost Anglo-Saxon ‘utopia’ has been made to disappear,” cultural studies legend John Clarke opined on this great podcast about his new book, The Battle for Britain, I was listening to shortly after speaking to Cecile last week. “People [are mobilising] for different versions of what they think Englishness to be.”

So yes, at the moment these romantic figures of English radicalism such as John Ball feel particularly appealing – and particularly now.

“Fashion is so emotional, so process driven, that thinking about something political and how it comes out, it’s not didactic,” she explains, “it’s like an oily soup version of all that thinking.” If there is any notion of politics to be found in the collection, though, it’s a sense of liberation. Clothes that, as she explains, carry “a level of romanticism”, a type of vibe that she describes as “grandma’s handbag – a freedom in the textiles, because you’re not actually trying to keep anybody warm.”

Cecile’s version of ‘Englishness’? “I guess it came out a little crusty free rave,” she laughs. The harsh aniline dyes of the madras cotton shorts and blue perforated suede bomber; the bootleg Westwood orb leggings (“she took it from Harris Tweed so I’m just continuing the cycle!”); and those svelte knits in light, airy linens. It all felt particularly hot and free and seemed to want to rupture the surface of things.

The day of the show, the sun finally broke through a near two-week bank of rainclouds, and as it drew to a close, Liam Casey’s soundtrack phased into Dunstan Bruce’s strident tone bashing out his 2024 song F***ING EXPENSIVE whose lyrics lament the price of living in late capitalism. “COCAINE (FUCKING EXPENSIVE), FREEDOM (FUCKING EXPENSIVE), FREE SPEECH (FUCKING EXPENSIVE), IDEAS (FUCKING EXPENSIVE),” he shouts in a distinctive Northern twang.

Someone, in hushed tones, whispered to the person next to them, “Cecile Tulkens, fucking expensive…” It brought the few who could hear it back to the reality of fashion in 2026. Clothes can indeed speak to something inherently subversive, but designers still need to work out how to pay the rent.

Read on for Cecile’s recommended books to get you through this working week and a rare glimpse into how one of the very complex and impressive knitted pieces came to be ✪

Garm of the week

After the show, I wanted to give some insight to the more process based things we get up to in the studio, so here is the process behind the ‘Ikat’ knitted chemise.

‘A Dream of John Ball’ is all about misplaced nostalgia, or longing for a pastoral past that perhaps never actually existed.

For me, scrambling a ‘pastoral scene’, making it like a Jean-Antoine Watteau painting on acid, would discuss this a bit. There’s a romance to it, like being driven in a fast, expensive car down a country lane by your boyfriend.

We took very fine knitted cotton yarn and painted it with dyes.

Then unwound the painted knit, and reknitted into the same shape.

Our textile experiment then needed a vessel – and what better than the Swedish military thermal I got from bog itself!!

Here are the cut pieces.

And here is the finished piece!

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

The history of Afghan war rugs

I am unfortunately suffering from quite severe studio brain rot, however lovely Rosie sent me this incredible podcast by Blood Work on Afghan War Rugs. The section where grenades and pomegranates blur really speaks to the hard-to-pin-down nature of textiles and their shifting meanings.

Home as alternative universe

Thinking a lot about building, homes, rooms as complete alternative universes. I got this book from Anna about Woodstock’s self-built homes, and also plan to go see Cosmic House and Eltham Palace as soon as possible too.

Listening to people complain about work

I also got a new book called Working Hands which is about what people do all day and how they feel about it. It’s from the 1970s and spans loads of different jobs from steelwork and call centre labourers to sex workers. Nice to read about people complaining.

New favourite song

Instant coffee convert

I’m also now officially converted to instant coffee and would highly recommend it to those anxious and hardworking nighttime people ;) Nescafé gold with milk in the morning then a short espresso style one for a 9pm emergency.

Show credits

Styling: Max Permain
Casting: Piotr Chamier Casting
Hair: Tasos Constantinou
Jewellery: CC Steding
Music: Liam Casey
Studio team: Aeyesha Cundy, Faye Simister, Zoe Noble, Calantha Gerrard, Flint J McDonald, Jeanine Richards, Steph Linn, Carla Barwick & Oonagh Phipp
Special thanks: twos & Josh Cook, Alan Gaynor, Anna Howard, Joe Skilton, Rosie Woodhouse, Alfie Dyson & Sam Thompson

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News from the Bog #9

News from Lengua

News from Ryan Skelton

Intro: Eilidh Duffy
Guide: Will Reuben Howell-Jackson

Rome is a city with many layers. Being almost three millennia old, there are, of course, literal archaeological layers to the place: underground complexes and buried palaces, one of which appears in this guide, as well as ruined walls at almost every turn. At Bog, we are partial to a ruin or two. But we are also interested in getting under the surface of the other kinds of layers, the social and cultural strata; to dig in a bit and get to the heart of things. Rome is a city, however, that is so sprawling, so deep and rich and alive that peeling back the layers – particularly as a non-Italian-speaking outsider – is somewhat of a gargantuan task.

So we’ve called upon our friend Will Reuben Howell-Jackson, who moved to Rome in 2020, to help us. While assisting a friend sourcing costumes for a film, Covid struck, and with no permanent place in London to return to he decided just to stay. After immersing himself in the endlessly deep vintage-buying opportunities the city has to offer, in 2023 he started A-Collection, a vintage shop with monthly drops online (and a few specially-made pieces by Will) that will soon open up a permanent space in London. (Although, if you can’t wait, they’re doing a trunk show at Yorkton Worshops in Hoxton on the 19th and 20th of June.)

“I think living in a place where I have had the time to contemplate my goals instead of constantly fighting to pay rent was what initially kept me in Italy,” he explains. “Then the healing qualities of living in a place where the food is fresh and there’s 200 to 230 days of sun per year made me wonder why I had always insisted on being in London – I wake up looking forward to taking a coffee amongst the people in a place where a coffee is a universal right and doesn’t break the bank!”

As well as buying for the shop, learning Italian and basically becoming Roman, over the years Will has built up a vast and exciting personal wardrobe, and is probably one of the keenest eyes at the Roman markets. Given his talent for finding incredible stuff (every time we hang out I basically want to steal everything he is wearing), here he gives away some of his biggest secrets, including an ecclesiastical tailor with Rome’s best socks, a haberdashery shop selling deadstock cashmere from the 1940s (in its original wrapping, of course), the shop where Miuccia Prada apparently gets all her clothes made, and, of course, some of the best places to eat and drink in one of Europe’s oldest, most fabulous cities. Take me there right now!!!!!

Read more

It’s become summer, and we’re writing this from the hot concrete slabs of Brockwell lido. We’ve also been in Japan again, which was going to be the subject of this blog but we’ve had so many other good ideas this week that we will just to pop it all in a different kind of post at some point soon.

One thing we will mention, though, is a show we got to visit. Straight off the plane, we rushed off to Daitabashi for the opening of CC-Steding and Oscar Foster-Kane’s show at Gallery Kudo. We love their work and known them and their respective practices for a really, really long time, but never encountered them in a more formalised space like this. CC-Steding were sharing some more experimental pieces that include sculptures and found objets crafted into strange shiny magpie-coded objects, and Oscar some more leftfield photographic works.

“We were exploring the relationship between value and availability, with rarity defined by luck, chance, or memory, rather than artificial scarcity or cost,” Nic from CC-Steding explained the premise behind their works. Things that are one-off, special because of our attachments rather than their monetary value – in other words, the textbook definition of ‘priceless’. These objects included a single piece of silver wire with a loop to hold a found wildflower (😭) and a single diamond set within it, a candle holder made from an ingot of melted Sterling Silver scraps from around their studio (a nod to the age-old circulation of precious metals) and an attractive clump of shattered safety glass.

Oscar’s photos, similarly, were an exploration of stuff that’s not quite settled. Often he uses really long exposures (sometimes multiple hours) that capture light over an unusually long period of time, creating strange spots of unnaturally bright or coloured light within the works. The selection of photographs were also taken over a longer period of time, having selected both early and more contemporary works for the show. Oscar mentioned he was focusing on an “irrational logic” in which “sequences don’t fully resolve but unfold through intuition, fragmentation, and loose association.”

Present at the opening was a shiba inu that used to belong to Kim Jones, Shoichi Aoki of STREET and FRUiTS wearing Oakleys and a green plastic fly swatter in the back pocket of his jeans (fangirling!), and the legendary Judy Blame / Nemeth / HOBAC archivist Kudo, who has no relation to the gallery which we found out too late, having already rather embarrassingly thanked him heartily at the end, to which he looked quite bewildered. At first we thought it was due to the language barrier, but no – just our sheer stupidity!

Garm of the week

When doing some research into late 19th- and early 20th-century sportswear a few weeks ago, we discovered an incredible little book published by the first ever fashion museum in the UK, The Gallery for English Costume.

Opened in 1947 in Plat Hall, an 18th-century mansion that was formerly home to the Worsley family, its stores consisted of the private collection of Dr C.W. Cunnington and his wife, Phyllis, who had sold their collection to the Manchester Corporation in 1947. Cunnington was an avid collector of dress, although not a doctor of fashion, but a medical doctor whose “passion for costume was a hobby which he pursued with delight and scholarly insight,” according to his obituary in The Guardian in 1961. When it was sold, the collection consisted of “550 articles of underwear, 650 hats, bonnets and caps, 100 parasols and 90 shawls, as well as 15,000 photographs.”

In a series of seven booklets published in the 1960s by The Gallery for English Costume, of which this sportswear edition is included, garments from Cunnington’s collection are brought to life. What strikes us about these publications is that the garments – in this case women’s sportswear that at the time of publishing in 1963 would have been up to 130 years old – were not shot in the cool, climate-controlled environment of the museum, but around the manor on actual living, breathing, sweating, moving models. It’s a form of documentation that might seem completely absurd to us in the days of accreditation and best practice and guidelines around object handling et cetera. But in the 1960s, it wasn’t necessarily requisite to keep garments in such controlled conditions.

Climate control in museums is a relatively recent thing in relation to, say, the actual objects it is meant to preserve. The first heating systems used to prevent damp in museums date from the late 19th century, but fashion collections weren’t really consolidated into museums until the opening of the Museum of Costume Art in New York the 1930s (which would eventually become the Met) and the founding of The Gallery for English Costume in the 1940s. Clothing had been collected by museums before this point, but these were the first public archives in the US and UK dedicated to fashionable Western dress.

From a quick click around online, we couldn’t discern when the actual guidelines for the care of clothing and textiles in museum collections were drawn up, but these likely evolved in the years after the founding in 1950 of the International institute for the Conservation of Museum Objects, an international organisation that was founded to deal with conservation problems and techniques.

They defined ‘conservation’ as a practice with two distinct prongs: the first, controlling the museum environment to avoid or minimise decay of objects; and the second, guiding how objects were treated to avoid decay altogether. Now clothing that has been accessioned into a museum collection cannot be worn, for fear of “sticky and careless fingers,” and “physical forces such as twisting, shaking, pulling, snagging and rubbing”. This is, at least, the reasoning given by An Illustrated Guide to the Care of Costume and Textile Collections, published by the UK’s Museums & Galleries Commission (MGC) in 2000.

It wasn’t just The Gallery for English Costume that used live models to display their clothing, though. In 1949, Doris Langley Moore, who would go on to found the Fashion Museum Bath in 1963, shot her entire collection of historical woman’s dress on the celebrities and high society ladies of 1940s England for her book, The Woman in Fashion.

And just a few days after discovering the Gallery of English Costume book, we came across another instance where models were used in a rather incredible shoot, this time of new sportswear design based on garments from the archives of the Museum of Costume Art. The exhibition’s rather clunky title is A Designers’ Exhibition of Costumes and Millinery Derived from Museum Documents and was opened at the International Building at the Rockefeller Center on 9th November 1940.

Perhaps the premise – making Western fashion influenced by non-Western traditional dress – is a little icky to the contemporary viewer, but it’s pretty interesting to think that this idea of sportswear was sort of just shorthand for comfy clothing you could move in, and that traditional forms of dress were posited as good examples (at least within womenswear, anyway).

We’re not 10000% sure where these images were published, as the exhibition itself displayed these garments on mannequins. Regardless, we are quite taken by the division between the ‘contemporary’ and ‘archival’ pieces: that one was shot on a model, being ‘alive’, and the other was shot on a mannequin or other type of museological support, being something sort of signalling that it’s reached a point where it’s beyond its former use.

As our friend Claire reminded us in her coverage of the Met museum’s latest exhibition for Harper’s Bazaar, in the 1980s the inimitable Elizabeth Wilson wrote of the garments in a museum being “eerie, uncanny, and, somehow, ‘dead’ without the bodies that once animated them”. When something is accessioned, it is considered beyond its original function. It is an example of its material; any sweat stains, repairs or rips are noted, at least traditionally, as defects. And so this weird sort of sacrifice of the garment has to happen in order for it to be ‘preserved for future generations’ or whatever museums say these days.

Our discovery of these images of models wearing clothing in the possession of a museum is, as some of you might have noticed already, sort of timely. Olivier Saillard’s recent show, The Living Museum of Fashion made a strong argument for the activation of these apparently ‘dead’ garments, and in fact claimed that it is museums themselves that ‘kill’ clothes, by erasing the body from the garment itself (see the work of Ellen Sampson, too). He told Vogue: “Things look very beautiful under glass, like taxidermied animal trophies in a chateau.”

In terms of other stuff that has made us think about the body and the museum: this book on wearing archives was just published (*which we’d really like to read but it’s currently sold out and if anyone reading this has the power to get a copy to us we will give you a bog bag in exchange*). But perhaps the most news-cycle-esque thing is the Met’s new exhibition about ‘fashion art’ or whatever it’s called and all of the mannequins that have been designed to look like ‘real’ bodies based on a small selection of actually existing people.

What’s notable is that the garments displayed on these special mannequins are all relatively contemporary, as museum guidelines for the display of clothing *probably* wouldn’t allow, say, a Rudi Gernreich monokini or, ironically, a Comme des Garçons ‘Body Meets Dress’ piece to be put on a mannequin that is not specifically made for museum garments. This is, as the aforementioned collections care guidelines lay out, in case they get damaged. And ironically oftentimes the museum mannequin is constructed with a smaller form than a normal shop mannequin, and is fitted with pads to fill out the garments without damaging the fabric.

Here’s a couple of fun illustrations demonstrating how:

In short, museums are public institutions, and their collections are, in theory, meant to serve the public. Thus popping on an 18th-century chemise à la reine might damage it, and this being a deliberate act, against the ethical guidelines of good museological practice.

Non-museums, even if they posture as a ‘museum’, don’t have to adhere to any of this. Take the infamous moment when Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President’ dress to the Met Gala in 2022, for instance. Owned by Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, the dress is not part of an actual museum archive, thus can in theory be worn, or even destroyed, by anyone if the company lets them.

Exhibitions outside the realm of the state-funded museum have indulged in letting people wear things that under the auspices of the museum they could not. Yohji Yamamoto’s 2006-2007 retrospective at MoMu, Dream Shop, for example. Yohji has always been very critical of the fashion exhibition and its reification of the static object, and so Dream Shop which was his attempt to fuck with the system by going against all museological sense and leaving things out in the elements as well as allowing people to try on a selection of the garments from his archive – deliberately doing stuff that might destroy them, but also letting them live as their design intended.

In 2015, this premise was continued at The Live Archives (now Aro Archive) with a special exhibition of Yohji’s work you could try on, alongside narration from curator Jeffrey Horsley.

We first encountered Yohji’s hatred of the deathliness of the fashion exhibition when assisting Matthew Linde on his 2017 show The Overworked Body, in which some of the garments (loaned from private collectors or the designers themselves) were worn in a guerilla fashion show set between two galleries partially inspired by Yohji’s Dream Shop.

As if the museum gods wanted to smite us, a pair of 1990s Raf Simons leather trousers ceremoniously ripped up the butt seam when worn on the raised plywood catwalk. This may be a curator’s nightmare, but it was a thrilling moment to see these trousers, rarified as they were in the gallery space, be destroyed by the model’s feverish animation. We can’t quite remember how the archivist who owned the trousers felt about it, but it fundamentally changed how we think of clothes in the gallery – fragile, but dynamic and, despite their conditions, still alive.

Which brings us to the subject of the archive, and what the archive might do that the museum cannot. The archive is usually private, its objects used on the whim of their benefactor. Museums are rigid. ‘Dinosaurs’ as one V&A researcher once described them. And so objects crystallise within them, for better or for worse.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Plane hats

In the early 1900s, women in Chicago and Paris loved aviation so much they wore miniature planes as hats. Yes, you read that right – MINI PLAnES AS HATS.

The mouldy mall

Sort of related to our garm of the week is this mouldy mall (ty Joseph for the tip). A Malaysian mall closed for 50 days, and the damp took over, covering every single leather good in mould <3

Hanae Mori kissaten show

At a big retrospective of Hanae Mori’s work at the National Art Centre Tokyo, we discovered that she used to do fashion shows at her husband’s kissaten (coffee shop) round the corner from her boutique. They had this fab photo to illustrate it. More Hanae Mori content soon………

Seditionaries shoes

Also in Tokyo was a big show of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s work in Omotesando Hills, a giant concrete shopping mall in the middle of Harajuku. Cool to see old SEX and Seditionaries stuff, sure, but really Vivienne Westwood’s early solo stuff is so much more exciting and weird. Maybe we’re just too used to punk shit that it’s kind of vernacular now and not really saying much…. Anyway, these shoes were our fave thing in there, and you can still get them today!!! Although the older colourways are like five billion times better.

Want more?

News from Ryan Skelton

News From the Bog #8: (en)closure special

News From the Bog #5

Words: Ella Sweeney

When it comes to tracing the history of floristry and those who pioneered the craft, very little exists.1 The material history of flower arranging is knotty and hard to untangle; it has been flattened by simplified and reductive narratives about the art and practice of floristry as a feminine leisure pursuit, apparently unworthy of more serious analysis or attention. Yet floral decoration has been practised since the dawn of human civilisation (approx. 12,000 years ago, give or take), and most likely in some form before that. The ancient Egyptians are known to have decorated spaces using cut flowers and crafted vases, and in medieval Europe the devotional Book of Hours was adorned with floral designs in the margins.

Originally published in 1953, Julia S. Berrall’s A History of Flower Arrangement is one of the only comprehensive guides that explores the broader social and cultural contexts in which floristry has developed since AD 1. She begins in China, one of the earliest cultures to formalise floral design, drawing upon Confucian teachings on contemplation, preservation, and symbolism to develop a highly formalised and codified practice of floral design. Then to Japan, where for centuries the practice of Ikebana has been a significant part of culture and custom, and a type of flower arranging that has been studied and documented more seriously than any other. Then to the seclusion of medieval monasteries in Europe, and through the courts of 18th-century France and the Victorian estates of England.

How a culture relates to its flowers can tell us something about the people of said culture. What might the exuberant and electric arrangements of 1980s LA restaurant Spago, hang out of rich kids, poseurs and the young Bret Easton Ellis, tell us about the hedonist and hypercapitalist culture of Reagan’s America? And what could the high street florist, a somewhat dying breed, often managed by working-class men and women, tell us about the history of our high streets, local economies, and wider communities? More recently, why are ever-increasing numbers of shops and cafes, predominantly in West and central London, inflicted by what I call the “modern flower virus”. A floral aesthetic that emphasises sheer spectacle and scale for the sake of social media metric value, led by the likes of Chelsea in Bloom.

Floristry can reveal much about culture and a society’s mode of living. Berrall argues that floral design is intimately connected to the social and material conditions of the period in which it appears. When we practice floristry, “themes are taken from our direct experience of the world around [us] and translated into interpretive arrangements,” writes Berrall.2 She links the “tension, brutality and speed” of ‘modern’ 1950s arrangements common during the period she is writing to the lasting artistic influence of the abstract expressionists, a movement itself influenced by and responding to the existential anxiety of the Cold War and the proliferation of American capitalism and individualism.3

A History of Flower Arrangement is indispensable; yet I can’t help feeling there’s something missing from Berrall’s survey. Floral histories tend to focus on the styles, lives, and practices of the aristocratic and upper classes, leaving the distinct but misleading impression that it was these groups alone that possessed the access and desire to pursue and practice floral design. For example, in the chapter on Victorian floral design, Berrall rarely says much about a middle- or working-class experience of floral design. Nor does she acknowledge those who made the arrangements that adorned Victorian parlour rooms, let alone those who grew and tended to the flowers used – a job almost always relegated to servants and staff.

It is within the history of gardening that we find something more closely resembling a working-class history of floral design. In The Gardens of The British Working Class, Margaret Willes describes the concept of “weavers’ floristry”. This was practised in pockets across the country in the 18th and 19th centuries, notably in Lancashire, England, the place where I grew up. At this time, Lancashire had devoted a great deal of its energy (and population) to spinning and weaving cotton and silk. In what was a primarily poor agrarian society, home to rows of brick houses called “weavers cottages” that handloom weavers and their families lived and worked.

Here they practiced weavers’ floristry, the practice of both growing and arranging flowers. In the 18th century, men were the dominant gender within the weaving and spinning workforce and many of them were also florists, which, in the 1700s, meant not just an arranger of stems, but a person who grew, cultivated, and arranged specific plants for appreciation of their decorative flowers.4 At each window a “weaver worked behind his loom, able to watch the flowers as carefully as his work, his labour and his pleasure intermingled, interwoven, as intimately as his silken threads.”5 Often these were displayed on “theatres”, dramatic tiered displays placed outside of the weaver’s window, and shown at local exhibitions and competitions where fantastical floral creations were:

Made up of two or more individual flowers “dressed” with all the artistic skill of an accomplished milliner [...] Hyacinths shown for competition with small pins sticking the flowers close to the stems, and the drooping flowers of a loose tuss brought to look you in the face by the flower stalk being tied to the stem by an almost invisible ligature of fine green silk.6

Weavers’ floristry was a practice that required skill, manual dexterity, attentiveness, and patience, much like the practice of weaving itself. It has even been argued that their appreciation of floral artistry influenced their weaving. As Willes writes, “the rearing of flowers, by a reaction, must tend to improve the genius for invention in elegant muslins.”7 It seems like no coincidence that the tulip, iris, ranunculus, hyacinth, auricula, and anemone – all mainstay florals tended by the weavers – were also the most popular fabric motifs of the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, the cottons and silks used for the robe à l’anglaise, a style of dress worn by fashionable aristocratic women in the mid-18th century, were adorned with such floral motifs. The act of floristry for pleasure and leisure, then, was not isolated from the weavers’ work but articulated in relation to it.

The Lancashire weavers led a rich cultural life. As well as tending to their flowers, many were highly literate poets and musicians. Poetry and lyricism would become a medium for protest throughout the turbulent industrial revolution and cotton famine of 1861-1865. The below lyrics, composed by John Grimshaw and recorded in John Harland’s 1865 book Songs of Lancashire, capture the importance floristry to the cotton weavers:

So come all you cotton weavers, you must rise up very soon,

For your must work in factories from morning until noon:

You mustn’t walk in your gardens for two or three hours a-day.

For you must stand at their command, and keep your shuttles in play.8

By the early 19th century, with the industrial revolution in full swing, working conditions for handloom weavers were subject to drastic upheaval and change. As work moved into the factories from 1760 to 1860, traditional handloom weavers suffered mass unemployment and eventual obsolescence. Yet, even amidst this drastic upheaval weavers resisted the transition to the factory, preferring to remain in their homes and determine their own hours for as long as possible.9

In 1826, the Lancashire Weavers’ Riots (also known as the Weavers’ Uprising) took place. Driven to the edge by unemployment, poverty, and starvation, thousands of weavers protested for four days, from 24-27 April, breaking into factories and destroying over 1,100 power looms. They did so during a period in which machine breaking had become a relatively widespread form of protest. The Luddites, the 19th century movement of textile workers who opposed the new factory system and its wider social impact, had pioneered this kind of protest just over a decade prior, during the years 1811-1816.

Not only did the machines create a factory system that removed textile workers from their gardens, but their furnaces polluted the very ground in which they grew their flowers. Waste was dumped unchecked in waterways and a dense fog of pollution restricted access to sunlight, creating a hostile environment for cultivating almost anything. As a result, by 1855 there had been a huge decline in weavers’ floristry. In Spitalfields, London, another place where the practice had taken root, it is noted that weavers stopped growing flowers some time in the 1840s.10

This is not to suggest, however, that we fall into the trap of rural romanticism. The lives of the handloom weavers in Lancashire were tough; the work was tedious and ceaseless, while poverty and cramped living conditions were common. The weavers, however, led a life that was informed by the cultivation and display of flowers, emblematic of an independent lifestyle eventually destroyed by industrial capitalism. Even in the midst of significant social and political upheaval, floristry provided a botanical nomenclature that helped to reproduce the values of traditional artisan ‘work’ culture. It provided a “property of skill” to hand-loom weavers who became “deskilled” by the power loom and factory system.11

Weavers’ floristry presents a history of flower arranging outside of the already-existing discourse. It demonstrates that working-class people did not simply use floral design for ornament, but practiced it in a way that remained intricately connected to, and informed by, their daily lives and the land on which they lived. The process of cultivation was as important as the aesthetic results produced, and weavers’ flowers were more than just a vase on a table.

Berrall closes A History of Flower Arrangement with the message that modern floral arranging is “losing touch with one of the most gratifying experiences that is to be had in the handling of flowers – their cultivation.”12 Since writing in 1953, this division has widened. Most flowers we put in vases at home are grown and arranged in a modern factory system, and the floral industry is one that utilises mass production, exploitation, and causes extreme environmental damage. It’s an industry that is consistently pulling in opposing directions between luxury and adornment at one end, and the earth and soil on the other. Considering the more multifarious material and cultural histories of floral design might help create room for further, less exploitative explorations of the craft.

I grew up in Lancashire, playing around (and occasionally breaking into) the abandoned factories and cotton mills built in the 18th and 19th centuries. The industry was dead by the time I was born (it had practically vanished as mass employer in the area by the 1980s) but the mill system was around long enough for my grandmother to have worked in one, powering six looms at once and learning to “lip read”, as she puts it, so she could still gossip with the other women over the sound of the machines.

I also walked the same moors, coppices and quarries that the weavers did, inspired by the landscape, flora, and fauna, always wanting to bring some of it back home with me. It doesn’t seem a surprise then, that when I think about growing and arranging flowers, I always seem to picture the process of stitching and weaving, of starting with a single thread and creating something new. In the act of growing flowers, the single thread is a seed or bulb that with time and patience will blossom. Within floral design, it’s a single stem, curved in a certain way, marking the moment a new arrangement begins.

Increasingly, florists like myself are working hard to relearn and understand their medium, making an effort to understand the importance of growing flowers, as well as what they are and what they might represent. Working with and cultivating flowers in a way that is led by the plant rather than our own aesthetic desires not only allows for the appreciation of natural variation and rhythm but it also helps florists develop a style rather than imitating others. No stem of a flower grown and cut by hand ever mirrors another – the same should go for an arrangement.

Weavers’ floristry shows us that the arrangement and cultivation of flowers throughout history was not just the pursuit of the upper classes. The history of weavers’ floristry is enmeshed with artistry, community building, knowledge sharing, and protest. Like fabric and flowers, this practice is always in process, never quite finished, and, today, ripe for recontextualisation.

Words: Eilidh Duffy

I catch Ryan Skelton as he’s taking a lunch break from his job at the SOAS library in central London. Pigeons coo and ambulance sirens blare intermittently in the background. We’re on a call, so I ask for a photograph of what he’s wearing. This way I can imagine him speaking from the garments in which he has decided to dress himself on that particular day. This is more important than you might initially think.

I am humoured: he is wearing a Cecile Tulkens dress shirt, wide open, with a peach taffy-coloured corset he found at a car boot sale cinched around his waist, waspie-style, suspenders jangling over the hips. On top of this he wears a gossamer pink dressing gown (the earlier, slightly quilted mid-20th-century style) from a Roman flea market and a coat designed by his brother, John Skelton (who also made his felt shoes and tartan trousers) for whom he often does research and consulting, a term he apparently loathes.

I ask him why he chose to wear this particular ensemble.

“I met with a lover last night and wore the outfit (though with a dress, not the shirt and corset) and en route I caught myself in a window and liked the combination of colours and draping effect while walking. Then today I was thinking: this outfit, especially in the library, is an ode to one of my favourite ever collections from Comme – the ‘beyond taboo’ lingerie-inspired collection for Autumn-Winter 2001.”

See. No one does it quite like Ryan.

We’re only slightly on the phone to talk about outfits, but mainly to discuss his new poetry performance, which will be happening at twos, Regent Studios this coming Sunday 26th April at 4pm. This show – a Sunday sermon he’s calling it – is about what Ryan does best: dressing. More specifically, his love of fine cloth and his penchant for over-ordering clothes made in these textiles to dress in, thus ending up in a large amount of debt.

The poem-performance, titled Oh cloth, dearest…, was conceived while immersing himself in Galliano-era Dior Couture shows over the darker, more dreary months of winter. This is something he does every single day, although the particular designer and timbre of fashion show usually rotates every couple of weeks (he is currently coming to the end of an Atelier Versace season). Fashion shows are a form of TV for Ryan, who, as you will find out from this News segment, is heavily invested in the circulation of fashion show history online. Galliano is particularly fitting for winter: “like pantomime, so ridiculous,” Ryan opines.

>> The Spring-Summer 2003 Dior Couture show that started Ryan’s thinking. A chaotic melange of costume references plundered from all over the world. Complicated, overwhelming, and “gives you so much to talk about”. <<

It’s the very real relationship he has with clothes, rather than the celluloid impressions of them, that will concern Ryan on Sunday. In this performance he will celebrate his cathartic and bacchanalian approach to the consumption of clothing. Rather than lambasting himself for being terrible with money, “the performance is me preaching as to why I buy so much, why I’m always in debt,” he explains. “This piece, it’s about the art of dressing and the seduction of getting dressed, because these clothes, they can transform the mundane.”

This mundanity is something Ryan is particularly allergic to. In Oh cloth, dearest… dressing, as an antidote, becomes “a summoning of what hurts deep in crevices of selfishness to be covered by a hallucinogenic shimmer.” While the sight of bleak contemporary dress on the train is met with utter disdain:

They think that constitutes as attire?

Or construction

desire left quite alone

Bored

Misery guts

Avid readers of bog will be more familiar with Ryan’s photography work (remember this?), in which he often uses self-portraiture as a medium to explore elements of his psyche in a decidedly public fashion. “My art practice is kind of my therapy,” he explains, “anything that’s very personal, I try to make it very abstract.” Clothing (or sometimes lack thereof) is a pivotal object within these photographs, which, as he explains, allow him to experiment with endless reinvention whilst holding on to a core identity. It also diverges from a typical fashion image, so they don’t become “easy to digest and to market”.

“It dawned on me that I’d never really written poetry about fashion and clothing and the psychology of wearing clothes,” he explains. “So, not just fashion, but clothing that has identity.” It’s this absolute dedication to how clothes feel, and what that means, that makes Ryan such a compelling, and convincing, researcher of dress.

Read on for Ryan’s most prized bankruptcy-inducing garment and fashion-related rabbit holes to dive into this weekend ✪

*Oh cloth, dearest… will be performed at twos, Regent Studios on Sunday 26th April at 4pm.

Garm of the week

You know that moment when Carrie looks aghast at Miranda and exclaims: “I spent 40,000 on shoes”? Well, I can somewhat relate because of how much I paid in import duties for this wee little Comme des Garçons Autumn-Winter 1998 ‘Fusion’ number.

As seen on the catwalk in a fashion show without music, as Rei is an assassin and her clothes are just a bit better than that motley crew that is the rest of fashion month in the sweet March to April of 1998.

Why this payment was an essential as the garm is both complex and very simple – it is a little cryptic number to satisfy the mundanity of life. I love, love trying to dress as ambiguous as I can, don’t you? And the 1990s Comme era does help, does it not?

It suggests a uniform that doesn’t really bother me; you are not keeping up with conventional standards of being hot, but at the same time you clearly are very demanding for the highest craftsmanship in prêt-à-porter.

And don’t look obvious.

Or trendy.

It is just very direct.

Very decisive.

Cute dress.

Before I get to work or have to do my domestic duties I have to watch a fashion show while having my coffee. I mean, it’s caffeine in visual form, no?!

I often joke with my flatmates that I am getting changed in my 6th look when I put my moka pot on the gas and quick-as-you-can dash upstairs to get dressed for the day. To try to look as Prada-catwalk-worthy as I can with the petite funds I have and the slim amount of time before the coffee may get burnt. And I will run, I will fall down those steps to get it off the gas. Pedro Almodóvar would grin at me doing so and keep the camera rolling.

God, you wouldn’t believe the amount of collections from the 1990s to 2000s I pray to see on video, and yet for some deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeply annoying reason (the simple fact that they are not online) I won’t be seeing. Ann Demeulemeester Autumn-Winter 2000, or Balenciaga Autumn Winter 2000, 2001 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 – or Spring-Summer 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 in better quality. Or Helmut Lang Autumn-Winter 1999 and Spring-Summer 1998 and 1999 or Comme des Garçons Autumn-Winter 1997 or Yohji Yamamoto Spring-Summer 1998 or Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture Autumn-Winter 1997. WHERE ARE THEY?!

There are at least 50 more that I could list. I wish I was saying so in jest.

But yes, the spring erupted with aplomb and vigour when this Comme show got transported to the public domain.

I mean,

Talk about killer.

Talk about I need to see that draping in its full 3D fit.

Talk about no music but the occasional Nokia beeping away as silent mode was not yet invented, clearly.

And the models have loads of outfit changes.

Because that’s the common denominator with the 1990s that I can’t seem to shake off – the you have a minute to get changed so no fussy irritating styling tricks plz just plain old very good designer clothing to grab and go– FIRST LOOKS!

I want clothes like this.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Unpacking the shows on the Fashion Spot

You plebs, you think you know this and that on fashion, well you are so deeply entrenched in being wrong because The Fashion Spot members know what’s what my dear. By mercy when fashion month rolls into town those anonymous critics are on it. The severity!

I first frequented TFS on the Abbey Lee Kershaw thread when I was an A-Level student 14 years ago. As we all know, everyone is on the side-hustle journey of being an oracle of high fashion via the vessel of social media. HOWEVER, the me! me! me! vibe of it all is just not the same as the reddit vibe in which one is not getting paid a dime. I don’t know who these people are but by jove, do I know their opinions.

And those opinions are really special when apathy in fashion criticism is a popular sensibility – the anonymity is needed when one is fine with not getting invited to the party. The no-invitation-to-the-show aspect may pertain as to why those in opposition to TFS just view it as those being salty with no face to match their opinions.

I have thoroughly enjoyed being a lurker on the forums for 14 years and only on the very very few occasions have I spoken above the parapet when I argued why Prada Autumn-Winter 2024 was a good marriage between Raf and Miuccia’s sensibilities (under the username Razzer), but 98% of the time I am just lurking away feeling no need to contribute but to listen away attentively like a monk.

A forum member we all love is PDFSD – time to learn! Go lurk.

The Leopard (1963) at Ciné Lumière, Institut Français

The French Institute in West pulled out all the finest embroidery with a weekday afternoon showing of Visconti’s The Leopard. Gosh, to depart from this mortal coil – yet still be conscious! Such is the spellbinding allure of a Visconti film that simply demands to be seen on the largest screen: the detail, the set design, the palaces, the long vistas of courtship, the severe lack of people in the audience on a Thursday afternoon, the virginal experience of being baptised into the French Institute cinema with such a splendour of filmmaking – take me!

I ate a coconut macaroon before and wore a low heel.

I will be campaigning to see more Visconti at such a fine establishment. Imagine, The Damned!

The House is Black (1962) by Forugh Farrokhzad

To tie this up with a bow I have to share the most powerful thing I have encountered this week.

All due to someone returning the DVD at my work and then… How pertinent, that 21:49 mins delivers multiple layers of thought.

Beautiful.

Words: Jame St Findlay

I first encountered the Bristol-based artist Charlie Davenport (and by virtue, his work) in 2012 when we were both students at Edinburgh College of Art. Charlie was in his final year and I was in my first. I began art school without any real knowledge of art. Art was not an expansive thing to me at the time; it was a painting on a wall or a sculpture on a plinth and existed within a set of parameters established, I assumed, by some kind of governing body. It was mandated and its scope was limited to only a few forms of expression. Art school, of course, tore my worldview apart. I emerged completely changed, my mind rewired in favour of the ephemeral – works that sat on an in-between, not quite here or there. It was through encounters with the work of artists like Charlie that my perception shifted.

I still remember his degree show vividly: three pieces of coloured sugar paper cut into wobbly shapes, with green, red, and blue feathers glued to them. The paper and the feathers were clearly purchased from our on-campus art shop, the work looked as though it had been made in seconds. Initially I thought, “That’s it...?” I was bitterly disappointed, confused – upset even. At the time I questioned how this was enough to merit a ‘final show’. It felt like it could easily be walked past and forgotten about – but it wasn’t, it stuck with me throughout my time at Edinburgh College of Art and remains with me to this day.

Over time, I have realised that it is a kind of transient viewership that is endemic to Charlie’s work. It needs to be seen, but it does not need to last; it exists for a moment and then it ceases to, but in its wake you’re left with a deep, stirring feeling that is sometimes hard to place. Sometimes it makes me melancholic, sometimes it makes me laugh, but it always stays with me. In every work I have encountered over the years, my perception of what art can be has shifted slightly. Charlie is a radical in his approach to making, totally ungoverned by any rulebook, developing a singular practice.

Read more

Words: Bog

Recipes: Bog & Lulu Bullock

Last week, when our friend Lulu told us that there was a special event at Somerset House that involved eating dirt (soil, earth, mud, the literal ground) we knew we had to go. We felt we have a responsibility to report on this, an opportunity of gargantuan proportions for a blog called ‘bog’ to bring this story to you all – and, in turn, for you to be able to visit too (as it’s on until the 26th of April). Usually we wouldn’t report on foodstuffs, it’s not really our bag, but we thought this was too exciting not to report on. Maybe we will do more of this, who knows (working title: Boggles?)

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Is it just us or does it feel like everything is closing down? If not closing, enclosing. Becoming more private, more expensive, more out of reach. Which is very much the theme of today’s bogstack. In a kind of bittersweet way? Maybe not, we’ll let you decide.

For some context: we are writing this in the wake of two bouts of news that make us feel quite winded. Firstly, Glasgow’s arts institutions all seem to be on the precipice of total collapse. Trongate 103, home to Glasgow Print Studio, Transmission, and Project Ability, is very much under threat as Glasgow City Council has ended their tenancy and upped the rent fourfold. (There’s a protest against this rent hike today from 12-2 if you’re in town, and if you’re an artist you can help materially by signing up to be a member of Transmission for £20/year.)

This comes just months after the CCA (Centre of Contemporary Arts) went into liquidation in January, an awful depressing end to the amazing struggle by Art Workers for Palestine Scotland that resulted in the resignation of some evil slimy zio board members and directors. Then just this month Listen Gallery was evicted from its home, another victim of Glasgow’s rent increases (you can help them find a new space by donating here).

At the other end of the cultural spectrum, just a couple of days ago we found out that the last style + culture mag in London that we like is folding. They haven’t announced it yet, so we don’t want to steal their thunder, but just know it’s duhpressing news. It is perhaps an unhappy coincidence that the last magazine we bought was a copy of this soon-to-be-gone magazine from Brixton News, Pritesh Patel’s newsstand at Brixton station which he was forced to close after TfL tripled the rent. By the end of next month, both the magazine and the place where we got it will be gone.

But, really, is this a coincidence? Not really. All these closures feel like victims of the same forces of cultural enclosure within the UK today – the siloeing of certain cultural forms into profit-making enterprises (or their transformation into profit by way of extractivist rents).

Our current rumination is part-inspired by Aude Fellay’s essay we published last week, in which she argues the history of fashion (with a capital ‘F’) is a history of enclosure. Building upon Minh-Ha T. Pham’s framing of “intellectual property as a racial project,” she locates the enclosure of ideas and forms in fashion she places within colonialism-capitalism, which, like the many acts of enclosure (both legal and gestural) that have taken place throughout history, has framed ideas in fashion as ‘private property’, owned by ‘artistic geniuses’ and luxury conglomerates:

Cultural enclosure is not some new idea we’ve just come up with, but we find it’s often used and/or understood in the context of the privatisation of heritage (tourism, museums, et cetera). What we’re trying to get at is that there is a middling place that exists within our collective access to culture, be it through a publicly funded gallery, a magazine, or the very site where you access said printed matter. ‘Commons’ may be too strong a word for this space, but you get the gist. And that is currently being both closed and enclosed.

In other words, it feels like access to stuff is shrinking. Part of this is due to stuff is getting really expensive – this extends to our hobbies too. Like consuming old clothes. Mr. Vintage Fayre a couple of weeks ago was a complete cesspit of price-gouging fuckery, but more than that – it felt like one’s love of old stuff was becoming increasingly enclosed; privatised and gentrified for a tiny elite of marketing dads. This may sound facetious, and we don’t intened it to, but why the actual fuck would someone buy a pair of patched up trousers for £800.00? You are literally being scammed.

Not everything is so awful though, and there is still plenty happening that is not closed or enclosed. Such as the very affordable Brixton Community Cinema screening of Landlessness (2017-2022), The Black and the Green (1983) and The Ban (2025) – at a thriving community centre in Stockwell that happened on Monday night.

It is not particularly surprising to feel that all three have resonances that are deeply relevant today – particularly their touching upon the effect of the OG kind of enclosure that involved the stealing of common land and turning it into private property (of which there’s actually a really good two-part podcast on enclosure with legend historian Peter Linebaugh here and here) and the spreading of this out towards other territories in what we now describe as the colonial project.

As Emma Dabiri pointed out in the q&a after the screening on Monday, we’ve gotta talk more about enclosure guys!! Because all the stuff that’s being taken from us is by capital, not other people. Even the price-gouging fuckery at the menswear fair – can we really be angry at some dudes just cashing in on a trend? There is indeed a strongly-believed narrative that loss is caused by the Other (the migrant, or in our stupid analogy, the menswear seller), rather than our boss, our government, and the big spectral figure we call capital.

Perhaps somewhat appropriately, then, we have two things to share with you that feel like they’re pushing back against this kind of alienation, and supporting people pushing back on the various frontiers of neocolonial enclosure and deep, irreversible loss in Palestine and Lebanon. First, we’d like to share with you a fundraiser for mutual aid groups in both Lebanon and Palestine on Saturday 4th April some friends are co-organising at the Horse Hospital in London, with a roster of donations from many fantastic friends and family (including us fyi). There’s too many to list and we don’t want to start in case it looks like favouritism, but at the end of the newsletter you can hear about a few of the magic things they have (which will all be pay what you can on the day). We also spoke to them about the groups they are raising money for, the realities of the situation in Lebanon, and how you can do your own fundraising. Skip to the end for this. —>

& if you are not in London, but you are in Brussels, the 2DAY store will be on for 4 (!) days between the 9th and 12th of April at Place de la Justice, 27-28 feat. LOADS MORE fabulous people we love: Giovanna Flores, Kersti Jan Werdel, Christaseya, Kostas Murkudis, Series of Aesthetic Manufacturing, Atelier E.B……. the list goes on and on. A percentage of all sales will be split between Singa, a Brussels-based non-profit who create meeting places for the city’s residents and newcomers (asylum seekers, refugees, undocumented people, migrants); and UAWC, an org that works alongside Palestinian, Arab and other international organisations to support and protect the rights of Palestinian farmers.

Garm of the week

Clearly, this week we have been thinking a lot about what we are collectively losing. This also extends to the making of certain things too, and their first point of circulation: the shop. You know we love a shop here at bog, and we’ve just discovered two amazing ones which are unfortunately closing down. Both, however, are wrapping it all up due to old age rather than rent hikes, which is sort of bittersweet. In some way, these businesses are coming to the end of their natural lives, dealing in objects that don’t seem to have a wide-ranging customer base in the late 2020s. Sad, but inevitable when a place becomes a relic of a long-gone form of consumer culture.

Don’t get us wrong, we hate to see an old shop go, but perhaps it’s better to close something down that still has some spirit, than to let someone come across and hollow it out. 🥲

So, now as they enter their final months of operation, we wanted to give you all a chance to visit them before they’re gone:::::::::::

Shirley Leaf and Petal Company + The Flower Makers Museum, Hastings

Within walking distance in Hastings, there is a shipwreck museum (ft. lots of cool objects dredged up from shipwrecks), a fishing museum (ft. a bit of a ship with excellently-dressed life-size wax figures of 1970s-era fishermen) and, as we very recently discovered, a fabric flower makers museum in the basement of a building whose foundations date back to the 14th century. Safe to say, Hastings is one of the best populated place for incredibly good heritage museums – which will sadly be depleting in number quite soon.

The building that the Hastings Flower Makers Museum occupies is being sold by the owner’s daughter, who lives quite far away. The woman who owns the building, Brenda Wilson, bought the whole place in 1981, including the Shirley Leaf and Petal Company that resides within it, from an elderly couple who were eager to retire. The ground floor has been kept as a working shop, selling fabric flowers and greenery for some very decent prices, as well as bolts of 1920s cotton velvet for £20/yard.

The museum has been operational since 1993, when Wilson decided to share the now-115-year history of the company that first opened its doors in Bow, East London. In particular, she felt inclined to document the history of homeworkers: women, children, and disabled people who were often employed to do this kind of fiddly work, many of them from home. It was often extremely toxic, too. “The children, their hair used to turn green with the lead that was in the products and they used to lose their hair at the front,” Wilson explains in an interview for the Museum Mapping project. Alison Matthews David, in her book Fashion Victims, describes the horrors many women in the industry faced due to their exposure to arsenic, and recounts the grisly story of Matilda Scheurer’s death, a 19-year-old flower maker who died of arsenic poisoning, whose skin and eyes were said to have turned bright green. These powders and dyes killed both the workers, and made the wearers violently ill.

Having previously worked for the NEC (National Exhibition Centre) in Birmingham, Wilson was able to run the shop and museum supported by nice big contracts with theatre and TV clients such as the National Theatre and the Munich Opera. Before taking on the company, she’d helped the business score work with Selfridges and Harrods to produce Christmas decorations, and in the late 1990s, was tasked with making the fabric flowers for this John Galliano corset for his SS97 show:

More recently, we were told, they’d sold a very large supply of velvet to the costume designers of Bridgerton.

The interview with Wilson is a very special read, and demonstrates how the shop sits within the community as a historical, social and cultural resource, not just as a shop. As recently as 2018, the company was still employing elderly homeworkers to produce fabric flowers, which, as Wilson explains, gave them something to get involved with. “They love earning a little bit of money because it’s something for them to do, to keep the hands supple,” she says in the q&a.

Flower-making has been a type of work available to women and disabled people since the 19th century, providing income for those who had little recourse to much else, and a way to avoid the evils of the poor house. Still, it seems to have always been paid terribly and was, as we already mentioned, potentially very dangerous. Thomas Holmes, the British philanthropist who set up the Home Workers Aid Commission in 1904, which provided this very precarious workforce with with annual holidays and recreational facilities, wrote of the trade: “Artificial Flower Making is one of the most interesting home industries. It is also one of the worst paid…This work makes a great strain on the wrist, the arm, and the chest.”

& on the process of making the flowers themselves:

The centre of the flower is first made; for upon this whole flower is built. In the creation of the centre the skill of the artist is apparent, for this gives the character of the flower…One by one sufficient petals are added, the calyx is slipped along the wire stem and glued into position…a few deft touches from clever fingers press the petals into the required position, the warm curling tongs are skilfully applied to the edges of the petals, and, hey presto! The flower is finished, and has become “a thing of beauty” if not “a joy for ever.”

We feel a pang of great distress that this place will be gone before long, and considering that flower making is a critically endangered craft, it may be the last time we have access to such objects and their method of production outside the crystallised realm of the state-funded museum. That is, if the contents of the shop even make it to a museum… Which we suppose might not be guaranteed. All the more reason to go while it’s still there.

Mason Menswear, Edgware Road

Word broke last week that a very interesting shop was having a mega closing down sale. Opened in 1974, Mason Menswear is quite possibly the last shop of its kind in the UK – although please correct us if we are wrong because we would love to be wrong. A total men’s outfitter, Italian style, and very much worthy of M. Tony Soprano, Mason specialises in custom-designed and ready-to-wear tailoring in ‘larger’ sizes, much of it designed by Mason and produced in Italy, and footwear each of which is made from genuine exotic leathers (ostrich lizard, etc.)

Mason is now ready to retire, having been in the business for 52 years. At 81, he still feels the need to be in the shop every day to show face. Simon, his lovely, more chatty left hand, is there every day too, and if you get talking (not super hard) he very much loves to show you the stuff. It’s very unlikely the shop has changed much in at least 40 years (maybe ever, but we forgot to ask when the last refurb was) and is cloaked in dusty coral carpeting.

The general vibe is kind of like the dream shop, and Simon knows this too. He seemed amazed that so many ‘young people’ had come through the shop that week, but said he knew that if they just made it a bit more hospitable, put in a few more sofas, offered clients a drink upon arrival, their sales would increase in a heartbeat. But Mr. Mason, he said, was just ready to retire.

As for the clothes: think sexy southern Italian geezer in, like, 1996. Or 1986. There’s a sort of strange timelessness to the pieces. The fabrics are completely wild (Kiko eat your heart out) and many of the garms, as we said, were designed by Mr. Mason and produced in Italy specifically for the shop – so you will not find them anywhere else.

You’d be hard pressed to find a place like this outside of Italy (or maybe, like, Belgium or Switzerland). If you’re in the business for a suit, there are literally three entire walls lined with them; a flashy shirt in a sexy box, probably like 150+ on offer. Their backless exotic leather loafers, however, are maybe the most enticing thing, quickly followed by the belts and the ties.

Simon mentioned they’ll only close when they’ve sold all the stock, and there is A LOT. So you probably have a good few months to get there. And if you’re interested in the shop space, as it is, not to develop into some ugly pret(!), we know that they are renting……… If you’ve ever wanted a dream shop on Edgware Road, or to at least do something (anything!) in a space like this in London, this may be your last chance!!

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

A beautiful text about Issey Miyake and the mind

We loved this rumination on Akshi Singh’s relationship to the pleats of Issey Miyake. She traces how her attraction to the pleats – where they come from, how they’re made, how they look and how they feel – is embedded deep within her psyche, her desire for the garments caused by a wide, sprawling network of associations she has with the folds. Some of the best writing about clothes we’ve read in a long time.

Cool fūten bags that Miyuki-zoku wore in Ginza in the 1960s

We were reading a great essay by Hiroshi Narumi about postwar subcultures in Japan, and this detail about the Miyuki-zoku (Miyuki street tribe) emerged, whereby they repurposed imported coffee sacks as a fashionable garm called the fūten bag. Their loitering on Miyuki street was seen as threatening, and on 22nd September 1964 it’s been said that 100 of them were arrested in preparation for the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Given that this was when student revolts were murmuring below the surface across Tokyo, v interesting to think about why young people were consistently denied access to public space. If anyone knows anything/anyone who has written about the connection between the left wing protests in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence of spectacular subcultures in the English language (also/or if there is an English translation to this book) PLEASE tell us because we are desp to know.

Women’s History Museum know what’s up

Because we make all our money in fashion rn, sometimes it can feel like we are going crazy. So when you see some fab girlies going for the jugular, it’s just a joy to see.

These mental paper dolls

A small book we picked up at Perfect Lives with an intro by James Laver we haven’t read yet. The full thing will be in the secret PDF folder for paid subs SOON.

Quick chat with the Lebanon-Palestine Solidarity Market

Tell us what you’re raising money for (in your own words rather than ours)?

The solidarity market is raising funds for mutual aid networks that we have connections to in Lebanon and Palestine. In Palestine, The Sanabel Team food bank provides emergency aid for families in Gaza, delivering meals and daily necessities. The Sanabel Team initiative started in Khan Younis in 2018 to provide support for Palestinians living under the decades-long Israeli blockade through funding education, distributing food and emergency aid, and supporting displaced Palestinians in Egypt. Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in 2023 it has been growing its food bank and food distribution to try and meet the escalating needs of besieged Gazans, particularly with ongoing Israeli-created starvation.

Its name, Sanabel, refers to the part of a plant with which love is formed, and is a religious name used in the Quran: ‘like a grain, seven seeds sprouted in every one of the hundred grains’.

Many mutual aid networks have been extended, re-mobilised, or newly set up in Lebanon since the bombing by Israel resumed on 2 March. As of today (26 March), a fifth of the population, 1,000,000 people, have been displaced in Lebanon, with more than 1,000 people killed.

The funds raised at the market will in part be distributed to friends in Beirut who have set up a relief network that is working in tandem with several grassroots initiatives already assisting those suffering through this current mass displacement. This effort is focused on neglected areas around the mountains, Beirut’s north and east, providing heating, food parcels, baby kits, medications and other survival necessities. The funds will also go to a mutual aid network in South Lebanon, providing emergency shelter for displaced communities.

Whilst we are directing our funds to Gaza and Lebanon, we want to add that it is harder to directly support people under siege in Iran in the ways we describe here. International sanctions have made monetary transfers from Europe or the US to Iran difficult - because of legal restrictions and criminalisation. Donating directly to the Iranian Red Crescent Society is one way that’s possible right now.

What is the reality for the friends you’re in contact with on the ground?

In Lebanon, our contacts have emphasised the centrality of self-organisation: unions, cooperatives and neighbourhood committees to strengthen their steadfastness and reclaim genuine political spaces where they can sustain each other. The central Lebanese government has betrayed its people in the South, they survive on solidarity, local and global.

In both Lebanon and occupied Palestine, people feel compelled to record their experiences to call on the international community for support. For this reason, we focus on supporting them so they can focus on resisting the senseless aggression they are facing.

The recent attempts to exploit sectarian divides in Lebanon (for instance, with Israel ordering Shia communities to evacuate to predominantly Christian areas, or else be bombed) have proven futile. The solidarity across the region and resistance of US-Israeli expansionism – which the genocide in Gaza, that the West did nothing to stop over the past two and a half years, set a renewed precedence for – is unwavering.

How can people contribute beyond coming and buying something?

We want to stress that organising a solidarity market or event is doable with a few friends and a little time. We are organising the market together after one of us posted an instagram story expressing the wish to organise another market to raise money for networks in Lebanon and Palestine. At the first one in November 2023, we raised over £3,000. Doing it feels easier than doing nothing.

Across London others are organising raffles, gigs, screenings, supper clubs… Even getting friends together for a meal and each making a small contribution to a food bank makes a meaningful difference. It can be seen as an internationalist way of sharing a meal together.

Fundraising efforts here in London in support of the region have dwindled a bit since 2023. Now we’re at another critical point of escalation – an escalation coming from the unholy US-Israeli alliance, which the British government, as well as governments across the EU are scrambling to support in countless ways – that demands a recommitment to international solidarity work. Fundraising is just one of them.

The most meaningful way to get more involved is with something that is doable for each person. If it is also sustainable to go beyond these moments where there is a rush of action, into times where fewer funds are coming in but the on the ground networks are still working, this is even more meaningful.

You’ve decided to make everything purchasable to anyone no matter their income, using a pay what you can system. Why is that?

We want it to be as manageable and affordable for as many people as possible, meaning that it will be pay what you can – no questions asked. We’ll include guide prices to give an indication of how much each item would sell for elsewhere. Only a few items come with a reserve. This is rooted in the market’s purpose. Being a solidarity market means coming together for a cause across our different means and circumstances. Rather than to help somebody else, somewhere else, this is just one way to try to make a liveable life across struggles.

What are some of the things that we will be able to get on the day?

In terms of fashion, have some specially selected vintage, with brands such as Margiela, Costume National, JW Anderson, Sarah Pacini, et cetera, on top of donations from London-based designers like Martine Rose, Cecile Tulkens, Katya Zelentsova, Jawara Alleyne, LEUDER and more.

One of the more unusual things is a year-long Cafe OTO membership, a way to turn something that you might be thinking about anyway into a meaningful donation. As well as merch and records from Rita P, Still House Plants, 5 gate temple, Kelman Duran & Annie MacKinnon, to name a few.

Although some of the artworks have higher guide prices, the solidarity market is an opportunity to buy a work from somebody you admire, even if you aren’t in a position to collect otherwise. Palestinian artist Izdihar Afyouni is making a series of new works on paper for the market. Mica Levi and Hannah Black have both donated paintings. Sophia Al-Maria has given us a range of things from her studio: original artworks and even some reference materials (including some old Egyptian Film Posters) meaning this is a rare chance to own something by her at any price point.

Aside from those we’ve named, the generosity of the makers, designers, and artists means there will be something for everyone. We’ve received one-off artworks; signed and framed artist editions; fashion, accessories, bags, jewellery and millinery by London designers; archival clothes; revolutionary propaganda; theory books; art books; specially selected second-hand books; poetry books; fiction books; records and merch; posters and bumper stickers; home-made butter; Lebanese meze; lamps; candlesticks; hand-made quilts and rugs; metalwork; really, everything…

We can’t overstate how grateful we are to everybody who has helped make this happen. The Horse Hospital for providing us the venue and support setting it up so quickly, everyone who has asked in their networks for donations, everyone who has helped with collections, offering to pitch in on the day, sharing donation details for our friends in Palestine and Lebanon. Thank you.

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News from the Bog #4: shopping special

Twos Trends #1

News from Lengua

After funding for the book was pulled last minute, these texts were left adrift – until now. Together, they reflect on fashion’s entanglements with art, labour, authorship and power, and we’re very happy to be able to give them a home. See the first entry, written by Alberta Romano, here.

Words: Aude Fellay

The relationship between art and fashion is as old as the fashion industry itself. Early twentieth century couturiers such as Paul Poiret were notorious art aficionados. Over the past decade, this relationship has arguably evolved to become tighter, if more fraught. For art critic Benjamin Buchloh, reviewing its highest-profile iteration in the work of Anne Imhof (famously, a good friend of Demna during his time at Kering-owned Balenciaga), the relationship is symptomatic both of the “fashion industry’s ever more voracious and desperate forms of compulsive self-affirmation” and of “the increasing despair of current artistic production.”1

In the case of Balenciaga and Imhof, art and fashion come together in their ability to capture and monetise cultural expressions: club culture, subcultures and class cultures are appropriated and stripped of life to reappear in a zombie-like form under brand names. This is arguably one of the points artists Hito Steyerl, Miloš Trakilović, and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze strove to make in their performance and installation piece MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE. Fashion eats up whatever it can get its hands on. But arguably, so does art.

What these artists’ interest in fashion reveals is that fashion, spurred by its nonstop mediatisation, has become a full-blown pop cultural phenomenon.2 Its inclination toward the spectacle naturally befits the current media environment, and the selfie (today’s all-pervasive media form) has made clothing a central aspect of culture at large. Art, then, looks to fashion seemingly for both cultural clout and as a lens into late capitalism. Fashion is both capitalism’s shiniest object and, in the case of Balenciaga, a commentary on global capital, which made the brand under Demna’s tutelage a focal point of artistic collaborations and critical scrutiny.

From an institutional perspective, this renewed interest in fashion comes as sweet revenge. Fashion studies and fashion design have struggled to establish their worth and disciplinary singularity within higher education.3 Legitimacy is less of an issue for the industry as a whole; the trillions of dollars it generates give fashion reason enough to exist. The billionaire owners of fashion conglomerates have sought, however, greater cultural significance through the more elite pursuit of art collecting and museum building. This is symptomatic of a key bind within the relationship: fashion remains a somewhat degraded cultural form yet an extremely profitable one, while art continues to signal a more virtuous conduit for fashion’s “dirty” money.4

Nancy J. Troy’s Couture Culture, A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (2003) is perhaps the first detailed study of art and fashion’s conceptual ties. By drawing parallels between the early logics of high fashion and debates in art at the time, Troy outlines the discursive role of fine art within haute couture’s economic model.5 By self-fashioning as artists, couturiers such as Poiret marketed their originality both to cultivate their aura among an art-savvy elite and to promote the mass production of their designs. Insisting on the “rarity of the producer (that is the rarity of the position he occupies in the field),” as Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Desault put it in 1975, together with the relative abundance of the product, became fashion’s winning formula.6

From the outset, the fashion industry was indeed a “global export industry.” It relied on the symbiotic relationship between the “craft-based French fashion system and the mass production of the American garment industry”.7 Put differently, couturiers sold ideas, not merely dresses. Their value depended on both their perceived originality and the couturiers’ ability to claim property rights over them. Unsurprisingly then, over the course of the century Parisian couturiers, from Vionnet to Dior, went on to battle copyists by pushing for legal protections over their designs in order to “establish and sustain global hegemony over style.”8

The history of Western high fashion might be understood as one of enclosure – a fencing-off that runs parallel to its democratising thrust. Briefly put, this process involved a discursive component in the adoption of the figure of the artistic genius, a racial license to copy, and a related series of legal and economic tools that came to fruition in the postwar years.9 When the gates of high fashion were eventually ‘flung open’ to greet a mass audience, it was because the leveraging of brand names and design identities (or ‘house codes’) as intellectual property had made ‘democratisation’ a possible and profitable enterprise.

The figure of the designer-as-artist found its culmination in the star designers of the late 1990s and early 2000s, high fashion’s so-called golden age, which owes much to its pillaging of non-western cultures. Designs from the period by the likes of John Galliano are today carefully displayed by museums alongside panels about cultural appropriation. Minh-Ha T. Pham argues that “the informal allocation of the rights to copy and not be copied” underwrites the mining of a non-Western “commons” and its recasting as the “expressive work” and property of a Western author (or brand).10 In fact, the first couturiers displayed few qualms when it came to their own ‘copying’ – or, more accurately, acts of dispossession.11 Colonialism had enshrined this cultural mining as a right, or as Min-Ha T. Pham describes it, as “a property of whiteness.”

The late 1990s also marked a renewed proximity between art and fashion. In 1996, art curators Germano Celant, Luigi Settembrini, and Ingrid Sischy organised the first (and last) fashion biennale in Florence, which saw artists collaborate with fashion designers on small pavilions and installations. Damien Hirst was paired with Miuccia Prada, Comme des Garçons with Oliver Herring, and Helmut Lang with Jenny Holzer.12 In many ways, the star-studded cast epitomised the rise of a ‘creative class’, famously pitched as the saviour of post-industrial economies in the wake of globalisation’s disruptions.13

Looking at New Labour’s reign in the UK, Angela McRobbie has shown how creativity “c[a]me together as a form of governmentality,” depoliticising workers by promoting entrepreneurship over waged labour and expressive freedom over financial security, and thereby further eroding welfare rights and labour organising.14 Giulia Mensitieri’s 2018 investigation into the hidden abodes of high fashion’s dreamworlds, where forms of “self-exploitation” proliferate, brought renewed attention to the subject of labour.15 Similar debates on the “decommodification” of cultural work have taken place in the field of art: Leigh Claire La Berge’s 2019 Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and The Claims of Socially Engaged Art is a notable example.16

Despite converging struggles, the relationship between art and fashion has seemingly evolved into a more ambiguous one, as the various crises capitalism engenders have sharpened and concerns for the environment have grown. On the one hand, art is confirmed as the lesser evil, if not a redemptive choice in the face of fashion’s disastrous ecological impact. On the other hand, certain practitioners have adopted craft and DIY fashion methods to both scrape together a living and mount a critique of capitalism. In fact, some corporate art galleries have been quick to capitalise on this trend by setting up online platforms to sell “artist-designed” products, riding on fashion’s bad reputation while borrowing from its book – and hijacking the modest commercial models’ artists have drawn up to make ends meet.

This renewed and broad interest in craft has also benefited established high fashion houses, which are all too eager to showcase their unique set of craft skills, as well as the designers who astutely play up – or rather, embody17 – the value of craftsmanship and design knowledge. Fashion scholars have questioned the politics of ethical fashion discourses, including the revival of craft. Christina H. Moon notes that “the fetishisation of making” tends to pit the “moral” making of objects in the West against their “immoral” mass production abroad in racially coded terms.18 Craft, narrowed down to its moral heft, is seemingly an insufficient strategy on which to hinge the future of art and fashion.

Of course, as a feminised field of cultural production, fashion has always been readily demonised. The practice itself registers as the problem, and its popularity is explained away as a matter of false consciousness. This has arguably forestalled solidarities, discredited its voice and obscured its lessons. For one thing, what is quite evident from the many documentaries about the making of high fashion such as Loïc Prigent’s Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton (2007) or the 2017 documentary about the early Margiela studio We Margiela, is that fashion enlists a distinct form of creativity, one that is more overtly collaborative – and desirable on those grounds.

In the context of the fashion industry, that fact must be carefully managed; it is fitted into a hierarchical structure which seeks, at every turn, to foster competition and enhance exploitability. As a marketing strategy, the mediatisation of fashion’s workers, and in particular its craftspeople, functions as an ‘ethical’ justification for the prices luxury items command, and for the industry more broadly, as it draws both on the moral value of skilled work and the collaborative aura of fashion’s creativity. The art world, for its part, seems less eager to have its anonymous workers be seen.

In her introduction to Be Creative, Angela McRobbie asks how we might “resist this imperative to become creative” in the face of creativity’s entanglement with capitalism’s neoliberal turn.19 Put differently, how does one betray “the creative classes”? Perhaps by joining forces as workers against those who profit from and curtail creativity, confining it to the ‘productive’ spheres of art and fashion, and by paying attention to the ways in which both overflow the dams and pipes laid out to capture them.

Credits

Series editor: Marlie Mul

Editor: Perri McKenzie

Words: Dal Chodha

The British designer and educator Shelley Fox may live in New York but she was made in London. It is here that she trained as a designer. Here she worked for Joe Casely Hayford – and at the Renoir Cinema (today known as Curzon Bloomsbury), the N…

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Here in the northern hemisphere we can finally feel spring in the air. Every year we forget that just a little bit of warmth (10°C+), some sun peeking out from behind the clouds and the scent of phytohormones in the air gives you a feeling that can really only be likened to coming up off a pill. And now it’s back. Thank the lord. Everyone survive the winter ok?

In other news, apparently it’s been (london) fashion week. We usually miss most things, which is not necessarily on purpose but more because we’ve never really been tapped in, avoiding any fashion week responsibilities like the plague (ok so a little bit on purpose). What we do love, though, are all the interesting satellite things that happen around it these days. And we did manage to seek out a couple of these.

We piggybacked on an appointment to Townwear. Which means we must admit to you all that we are now eating our words about it being AI and the brand is very real and incredibly good. Not AI. None involved, apparently. The man behind it, Greg Chester, is heavily involved with One of a Kind, that ancient vintage shop on Portobello market that used to have all those Chanel bags in the window (haven’t been in a while, maybe they still do?) with his brother(?), James (who is behind Another Kind).

We remember they were very early players in the scans of stuff and archival fashion/art imagery on Instagram game, and probably have an encyclopaedic bank of references tucked away. Hence the imagery for Townwear being so unbelievably slick. Hearsay says that Greg has teamed up with a woman called Xinyuan Zhang and got some financing to start a label. He’s been working on it for three years, and they were showing it for the first time this season, beginning to drip feed it out. They said they weren’t even going to do a showroom, but they’d had so much interest they thought: ‘fuck it’.

The clothes themselves are very real. Almost everything is double faced, and the idea has been to make everything as beautiful on the inside as the outside. A tuft of organza inside a structured silk shirt; ultra-fine merino wool doubled over on itself; lyocell-nylon duster coats whose finish had a peachy soft fuzz. Greg mentioned he’d started designing the collection from the pieces he loves to throw on if he’s in a rush to get out the house. It certainly had that: the ease, but also the lavishness of those pieces you feel make you look really good and are likely to garner a few ‘where did you get thats’. Highlight of the visit, though, were the crumbling Adel Rootstein mannequins partially dressed in the odd piece. Kinda terrifying? But terribly fab.

Garm of the week

Then, this week, we thought we’d deep dive slightly on the November Books exhibition-slash-event at Tenderbooks. This consisted of a very tantalising window display of issues 1-30 (1985–1990) of STREET mag (which we’ve been thinking about writing about for a sec because we are major fans) plus sheets from a 1980s trend forecasting binder. Apparently the acquisition of nice big long runs of STREET is more common than you think, and lovely Paul from November sold his last run to the creative director of Cèline. Whether that was Miss Phoebe, Hedi, or Michael Rider, we didn’t manage to establish as we were interrupted, but we think it’s probably Phoebe or Michael just judging by their general vibe.

We really love STREET, and we turn to it whenever we feel like we’re a little underinspired in terms of dress. STREET was started in 1985 by Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki, the guy who would go on to launch FRUiTS which obviously became a whole phenomenon for documenting the street style in Harajuku in the 1990s and 2000s. STREET from the 1980s and 1990s is hilariously underrated in our humble opinion, and if you can’t afford to buy the early run from November, you can get yourself a few PDFs direct from Shoichi Aoki himself via this link here.

The trend forecasting binder was, really, the pièce de résistance, featuring shoes from Paris and Tokyo snapped by some sneaky photographer’s lens. Paul told us he’s had it in the shop for a long time, but hasn’t felt able to sell it yet, so he’s taking it home after the show. A quick look at library holdings and google showed us that these are not things that tend to be preserved very often (at least not in publicly-accessible archives, maybe company archives would be a better bet), reminding us just how important all these dealers are in preserving stuff from the past that is treated as ephemeral. Alas, we dream of a world where commerce is unnecessary and we can all just collect and collate for a giant library of things.

Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

LA Timpa at Cell

Last night LA Timpa’s show opened at Cell Project Space. Sorry we didn’t make it! But we will be going ASAP. Lots of beautiful discarded, ancient analogue technologies creating mystical sounds and a video about a fictional spy rebuilding a relationship with his daughter. Sounds cool af.

Julie Velut’s zine for Mind :)

We did manage to get to Julie Velut’s gorgeous zine launch at twos. They were raising money for Mind, the British mental health charity, and from what we’ve heard it was quite successful.

Galerina IRL forever

Our friends @ Galerina opened a permanent space!! They used to do shows in one of their bedrooms in council flat, then graduated to temporary moments in other galleries, but now they’ve set up shop in Clerkenwell with a group show ft. DeSe Escobar, Andrea Fourchy, Stuart McKenzie, Alan Michael, Sophie Reinhold, Coumba Samba and Vivienne Tétaz. Fun fact we found out when googling the gallery to check the address: galerina is also the name of fungi that have tiny brown mushrooms. Cute!

Dr. Noki’s painting <3

We interviewed Dr. Noki, the iconic textile artist who came up in the Shoreditch scene in the 1990s + 2000s for a piece we are writing, and the whole time we were talking we saw this fab canvas in the background. After the chat he sent a photo of it (as per our request). It’s called ‘Wrapped and Weaved into Society’. J’ad!

Words and images: Celia Philips

My first experience of Greece, the place, was in 2013 after meeting a Greek boyfriend in London. I had grown up in Hamilton, New Zealand, where the rolling hills that made up the majority of the setting in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was just a short drive away. My mother was a classics teacher, so our home was filled with books like Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, The Iliad, Euripides, Aristophanes, and books about ancient Greek ruins.

When I first visited, I was overcome to see the country for the first time. It felt a bit like landing on the moon: the arid rocky landscape, the endless sun, the crumbling neoclassical buildings and terraced apartments, not to mention the strong, sweet iced coffee – and there were cats everywhere. From then, I started visiting Greece every year and, in 2020, I settled in Athens permanently with my husband, who grew up in the city.

I found out rather quickly that Greece can get under your skin. There is something about the light here that gives everything a certain luster. And since moving here, as an outsider I have found that the best way to understand Greek culture and history is by immersing myself in the country’s folk craft. The beautiful handmade tools, the textiles and ornaments that reveal narratives, superstitions and traditions, be they personal, protective, religious or mythological.

After the end of the Second World War, Greece underwent a process of rapid urbanisation. As people were leaving rural, agricultural ways of life for an urban alternative, many of these folk craft traditions were left behind. Thanks to a handful of visionaries such as Ian Vorres and Angeliki Hatzimichali, who understood folk craft’s importance and were involved in setting up some of the places mentioned in this guide, these special objects and traditional skills have been preserved.

Here, I will take you through some of my favourite places in Athens where you can admire, and sometimes acquire, pieces of this rich folk tradition.

Vorres Museum Folk Art Wing

One of the best places to immerse yourself in an older way of life is at the Vorres Museum. Tucked away in a serene garden in the Athenian suburb of Paiania, inside a whitewashed stone house that holds the museum’s folk art collection, you will find what is, in my opinion, the best collection of Greek folk craft available in Athens.

The collection consists of hundreds of beautiful handmade objects made of wrought iron, terracotta, ceramic, wool, wood and marble. Even the heavy wooden doors of the house are closed with elaborate, heavy, hand-forged locks. In particular, I love the wrought iron candelabras that look like some kind of medieval torture device.

Ian Vorres, the museum’s founder, was an obsessive collector of folk pieces that people were throwing away as they left their island homes. Here, hand-forged scythes and intricate embroidery are displayed with equal reverence as the fine art which populates the museum’s contemporary art wing. It is a magical place to visit and has inspired my own small collection of folk craft.

Amorgos Arts and Crafts

In the neighbourhood of Plaka in the centre of Athens there is a dimly-lit store down a pretty stone alley called Amorgos Arts and Crafts. The store specialises in folk craft, both antique and contemporary, and here you can find carved and painted wooden shelves, statues and stools, an array of wrought iron hooks and doorknobs, folk jewellery, intricate lace-edged textiles and traditional pottery. On the ceiling above you, and in a manner evoking the placement of items in a traditional Greek home, hangs a collection of shadow puppets, copper scales and iron lanterns.

Museum of Folk Art and Tradition

Just around the corner from this store lies the Museum of Folk Art and Tradition. Housed in a traditional mansion, this was once the home of prominent Greek folklorist Angeliki Hatzimichali (1895–1965). Hatzimichali made it her life’s mission to document the daily customs and crafts of Greek rural life and was heavily involved in the preservation and promotion of these practices. One prominent instance is her exhibition of Greek Folk Handicraft held at the Delphic Festival in 1927. This was said to be one of the highlights of the celebrations and one of the first instances of folk craft being exhibited in Greece.

The interior of the Museum is cavernous. Dark, carved wooden shelves line the walls, replete with objects like painted pottery and wooden filigree distaffs, an ancient tool used for spinning wool. Upstairs you can see a tunic in the ancient Greek style, formerly owned by the founder of the Delphic Festival, Eva Palmer-Sikelianos. It is hand woven from thick wool and looks like it would have been rather scratchy and uncomfortable to wear.

Mitropoleos 47

Also in the city centre, on Mitropoleos 47, three unassuming stores stand in a row, their windows filled with embroidered textiles in various shades of white. If you ask the shop attendants, you can see intricately hand-embroidered traditional curtains, sheets, tablecloths and cushion covers in all shapes and sizes, all kept in wooden drawers that line the store’s walls.

Gradually the skills to make these handmade textiles are being lost, and machine embroidered pieces are starting to make up a lot of their stock, although they still work with a select few traditional embroiderers to produce new work. To see the handmade pieces, you need to ask, and some of them are very old, bought from artisans many years ago.

Particularly impressive and beautiful are the intricate Kopaneli bobbin lace pieces made on the islands of Aegina or Crete. They are called Kopaneli after the rhythmic clinking of the sticks that hold the threads when they are made, and their construction involves crossing and twisting threads on a bolster pillow: it is skilled and patient work.

Tatoiou 69 Architectural Salvage Yard

Take the train from Monastiraki and you’ll reach the neighbourhood of Kifisia in the northern suburbs. A short walk from the train station on Tatoiou 69, you can have a less curated shopping experience by visiting the architectural salvage yard. It’s a massive place, full of objects cleared from old buildings that have been renovated or demolished. Here you can find an amazing array of terracotta pots which were traditionally used to store olive oil.

I am particularly interested in their terracotta antefix (in Greek, acroceramo): moulded blocks that cap the edge of roof tiles which often use mythological imagery. Even though the use of antefix originated in antiquity, they can still be seen lining the edges of neoclassical buildings. The most interesting ones have the face of the god Hermes peeking out from the middle of the acanthus leaf!

They also have a huge array of antique hand-blown glass bottles – some large flagons once used for wine production, others from ancient pharmacies now long gone. Amongst shelves of brass and a tangle of iron there are strange statues, some taken from old nativity scenes and others made by mysterious and grandiose outsider artists. In the salvage yard you can find almost anything, including the ubiquitous Athenian marble kitchen sink.

Kifisia

Aside from the salvage yard, Kifisia itself is a beautiful tree-lined neighbourhood where you can see the traces of a more bourgeois way of life. Mansions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries line the streets, some of them featuring fairytale turrets. Others are Bavarian in style, or neoclassical with terracotta statues of goddesses hidden in alcoves on their facade.

These mansions hark back to the time when Kifisia was relatively disconnected from the city, with many upper-class Athenian families choosing to live in this area because of its cooler microclimate and proximity to the Tatoi Palace, the summer palace of the former Greek royal family. If you happen to have a car, to end your journey you can drive a short distance up the mountainside to see the old palace, now abandoned. Another chapter of Greece’s history, now lying in ruins.

Words: Róisín Hurley Hirschkop

@secondskinarchive joined Instagram in April of 2020 and their page contains a total of 297 posts at the time of writing. Their first post is made up of three photos, dated the 5th of June 2020. It depicts a flat lay photograph of a brown skirt on a white background, with the second photo showing the back of the garment, and the third the interior tag. The caption reads ‘Junya Watanabe x Comme des Garçons 2005 windstopper gortex structured skirt with toggle back. Size M. [NFS]’.1

Although the account now posts predominantly 1990s and 2000s runway scans and photographs of models’ bodies with their faces cropped out, many of the photos from around the time of the account’s founding are made up of ‘flat lays’ of clothing produced by designers now commonly associated with what is colloquially known as ‘archive’ fashion: Prada, Miu Miu, Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe, alongside occasional ‘cult’ or lesser-known labels such as Gomme, Nozomi Ishiguro, Three as Four and A.F. Vandevorst. According to information provided by Instagram, this is the only username the account has used, making it one of the earlier accounts to use the term ‘archive’ in its title.

This use of the flat lay photograph extends to many other accounts selling secondhand clothing with and without the word ‘archive’ in their name. Its visual rhetoric – objects arranged neatly onto a neutral background and shot from above in indirect light – is an inescapable presence on social media if one’s algorithm is trained on a diet of secondhand clothing accounts. Many of these, and where the trend seems to originate from, are secondhand clothing sellers whose focus is on flogging ‘archival’ designerwear.

See @velvetknife.archive, for example, as well as @archive.club, which intersperses flat lays with mannequin shots and runway content. On the other end of the spectrum, vintage menswear sellers such as @sumshitifound or @anataresarchives have adopted this technique to display their ‘thrashed’ wares, foregrounding patina and trace – the softened cotton, the frayed cuff; evidence of previous lives – offering a more somatic encounter with the clothing they sell.

This type of photography, though, didn’t emerge on Instagram. Some believe the precise sterility of the flat lay can be dated back to 1987, when a janitor at Frank Gehry’s furniture fabrication shop called Andrew Kromelow noticed how satisfying it looked to arrange all his tools at right angles (a practice later dubbed ‘knolling’, so-named after the clean lines of the modernist Knoll furniture Gehry was working on).2 The American artist and sculptor Tom Sachs, who also spent time in Gehry’s studio, adopted Kromelow’s practice and formalised it into an aesthetic, complete with informal guidelines, bolstered by the mantra ‘Always Be Knolling’. Later, this kind of photography was (and still is) used for fashion e-commerce. Diffused lighting and infinity curves have become the defining features of product photography: objects displayed so that they can be viewed, assessed and consumed.

Our understanding of the flat lay photograph has, however, been transformed by its use on Instagram. Lev Manovich, an academic whose research mostly centres around how Instagram has changed photography practices, argues that since its inception, Instagram has been able to produce an aesthetic culture and digital subcultures in its own right. He argues that Instagram “establishes small and subtle distinctions from this imagery in terms of what is shown, how it is shown, and for what purpose.”3 Thus, on Instagram, this style of photography has been used to intellectualise and ‘museumise’ the selling of garments and the process of collecting.

Often when archives are discussed, we have an archaic and outdated association with objectivity: there is an assumption that what is contained and organised within the archive fulfils a system with little arbitrary acquisition. Thus, using the term ‘archive’ in the name of a shop introduces an elevated, authoritative approach. The overhead shot of the garment reduces it from a three-dimensional object into an artwork or a specimen. Similarly to how one looks at clothing in a museum vitrine, the screen (and digital platform) might act as a display case; a figurative glass wall. Flat lay photography can be understood as both a defining feature of the ‘archive’ account and a visual mechanism through which their ‘archival’ claims are sustained.

It might be more accurate to call these ‘archive’ accounts, ‘amateur archivists’, defined by academic and photographer, Kyler Zeleny as those who “collect out of interest [and] scour for hidden gems,” operating outside formal institutions yet actively organising and circulating material online.4 This is a term not intended to be reductive, but to differentiate what an Instagram ‘archive’ account does, and what the job of an archivist is within an institution. Given that to become an archivist, one usually needs to meet a set of strict criteria, such as an academic qualification or considerable experience handling and preserving archives not to sell but for the purposes of future research, in order to understand the ‘archive’ account, it’s important to distinguish between these two roles. Yet, the ‘archive’ fashion account plays into the slipperiness of their title.

The attempt to draw parallels between fashion and the ‘artwork’ or museum-worthy object has not gone unnoticed by scholars of fashion. The perceived ‘artification’ of fashion objects – often achieved through the adoption of modernist aesthetics – has frequently been understood as part of a broader effort to intellectualise fashion. This process first became visible in physical retail spaces. Diana Crane, fashion theorist and sociologist, has argued that the ways in which conceptual or ‘avant-garde’ designers chose to display and curate their stores were themselves indicative of this intellectual ambition. Through careful visual organisation and associations with museums and galleries, fashion objects could be framed as cultural artefacts, edging closer to the status of art and, by extension, legitimacy. As Crane observes:

Many luxury fashion designers have attempted to frame their collections in such a way as to minimise the commercial context. They have created stores that appropriate the appearance of art galleries, with white walls and floors and a minimum of garments on display, but the fashion objects on display do not acquire the same aura as art objects, in part because they are not unique objects.5

Accounts such as @archive.club or @sumshitifound demonstrate how these display strategies can be mimicked digitally by those operating outside formal cultural institutions. A few years ago I interviewed Etienne Bolduc, who founded @myclothingarchive and who, when I interviewed him in 2024, was posting photographs of flat lay garments on his Instagram page. He told me that these photographs were used as research documents, and that he would only sell these garments as a means to sustain his research practice. Now he has transitioned his account into one that primarily shares fashion history infographics, but the commercial aspect of his venture is still to be found online, and represented through the flat lay image.

When we spoke in 2024, he noted that although his actual page did involve the sale of clothing, he was careful not to make this fact its dominant visual cue. Instead, he wanted to code the space as non-commercial, drawing explicitly on the sterility and restraint associated with museum environments:

….but the thing is, if I want to have something that’s more museum-like I need to have it flat and remove the background and all. So, it depends. If I had to change it, let’s say, if I have more time, and if I had to document it in a different context, I think I would probably hang it on a wall, and try to make it as nice and as sterile as possible.

Bolduc’s reflections echo the intent to render fashion objects as intellectual art objects, suggesting a contemporary iteration of this strategy in digital form. By presenting garments as museum-worthy objects – flattened, isolated and carefully staged – the commercial dimension of these amateur fashion archives is obfuscated, even as it remains structurally present. The flat lay imagery that appears on these ‘archive’ accounts can be understood as a visual representation of this effort to turn commodities into artefacts through replicating a museum-like display.

This is only reinforced by these sellers’ use of language. Accounts such as @secondskinarchive, and @velvetknife.archive use their Instagram pages primarily to contextualise and identify garments fashion provenance, noting their collection, designer, date, condition and, occasionally, whether or not they are for sale. In some cases, bios and captions even hint towards future research use, suggesting that these accounts position themselves not just as marketplaces but as sites of documentation and knowledge production, providing context for the flat lay photographs rather than simply promoting the storefront. This is how @myclothingarchive now positions itself: as a pay to play resource, with a shop attached.

The way the clothes are represented through scans and flat lays combined with the caption’s copy seem to mimic what one might imagine a more formal fashion archive or library might look like. In fact, this type of photo has been adopted by museums and archives for cataloguing purposes for many years. A photograph from the Instagram account of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Antonio Ratti’s Textile Centre is flat-laid and contextualised by an in-depth caption addressing both the history of the garment and its construction, as well as its date, place of manufacture and textile makeup. A similar style is used by the Fashion Museum Bath, as well as the Shetland Museum and the Westminster Menswear Archive. The structure of ‘archival’ flat-laid photography is pervasive throughout museums and archives that house fashion and textile collections, and reflects how some garments are stored and displayed. A video posted by Palais Galleria Musée de la Mode shows a curator fetching a garment from their vast archive which is already being stored perfectly flat-lay flat.

Using this genre of photography in a commercial context infers that these ‘archival’ Instagram accounts emulate the care demonstrated by textile conservators and curators, contextualising and highlighting the history and specific design of each item. By locating these fashion objects within the context of an ‘archive’ and establishing them as collection items, it allows them to acquire what Walter Benjamin termed ‘aura’. Benjamin used the term ‘aura’ to describe the unique presence of an object, a quality that cannot be reproduced mechanically. This presence arises from the specific time, place and cultural context in which the object was created. By subjecting mass-produced items to this archival framework, these accounts bypass the garment’s lack of original ‘aura,’ using the curation of digital space to manufacture a new sense of historical singularity and presence.

What becomes apparent when we interrogate the flat lay photography used in these archive accounts is that it functions as more than a neutral method of documentation or as a simple e-commerce tool. While ‘archive’ accounts do sometimes depict models wearing the garments, they are often cropped to remove faces or identifying features, rendering their bodies mannequin-like. Sometimes mannequins are used in lieu of bodies altogether, adding to this museological effect. The wearer disappears, replaced by the garment as object. This absence reinforces the archival logic: the clothing is not styled but catalogued, not lived in but preserved.

Through its repeated use, the flat lay begins to operate as a structuring principle, shaping how garments are viewed and valued. Clothing is not simply recorded, but rendered legible as something to be preserved, compared and historically situated. In this sense, the archive does not exist prior to the image; rather, it is brought into being through the conditions of its display. The flat lay, with its emphasis on order and detachment, its rendering of a garment flattened, isolated, and intellectually framed, is intended to quietly produce an archival logic of its own.

What a start to January! We’re already so tired lol! Maybe because we’ve been overdoing it a bit, burning the candle at all of the ends, et cetera. Which is not a very January thing to do, but needs must boglets.

We do, however, think you’ll find that it’s been worth it, we have a bumper News edition to share with you today. Including a very special guest Garm of the Week from the incredible clothing dealer Harriet Vogeler, and a mini interview with Rat Section about their amazing music video which came out last week (scroll to the end if ur too impatient to wait).

We were in Paris for a sec and truly thought that we’d be so inspired that we’d blog about it in the spirit of the mid-century monthly – think, like, a 1950s ‘Paris correspondent’ kinda vibe. We ended up not doing that because we actually spent the whole time catching up with friends, and missed almost all the fashion. Which is how it should be, non?

We did, however, manage to visit a few non-fashion shows which were mostly quite good, with one notable exception that was maybe the worst exhibition we’ve ever been to. And, we assure you, we’ve been to many bad ones!!! We were actually going to write about it in this edition (sorry the dek is kinda misleading) but we think it deserves its own post, so in honour of this truly shit exhibition, we will be sending out our inaugural ‘Bad Exhibition Review’ very soon…… Keep your eyes peeled……………….

As for stuff to do in the next couple of weeks, we’re thin on the ground for stuff to suggest because we’ve been so fkn busy, but gonna be making a stop through at the Perfect Lives takeover of House of Music at the Serpentine tomorrow. We also wish we could make it to the opening of Solomon Garçon’s exhibition at the Kunstveiren Dusseldorf with Taylor Thoroski, Paride Maria Calvia and Precious Renee Tucker (what a lineup omfg); and a Rick Owens furniture exhibition in London is on for a millisecond more. Plus all the cool shit at Condo (like the Women’s History Museum show @ Soft Opening!) Oh, and we will soon be paying a visit to this amazing looking exhibition about ‘war craft’ aka trench art before and after the trenches of wwi.

It’s funny, though, cos you’d think with all these think pieces and podcasts and exhibitions happening about ‘the human side of conflict’ and military dress entering civilian fashion and how everything is the military *all the time* bla bla yada yada there would be a bit more of a move to push for actual demilitarisation amongst the curators and podcasters who are analysing all this. But, we’ve been observing that there are too few commentators in this space who are actively antiwar…. Apart from this small reading group we are deeply sad to have missed (ty for the tip rosie). Interesting, huh? Food for thought.

Garm of the Week

Speaking of militarised fashion, we have a *really* good garm for you this week from Harriet Vogeler, a clothing dealer we’ve been obsessed with for a while. We must keep how we met a secret, but we’ve been voyeuristically keeping an eye on all the cool stuff she posts on IG for over a year, which eventually culminated in finding out about this week’s garm! Our longtime dream of a bog collab has finally come true <3

In a 1969 edition of American Fabrics and Fashions, designer John Carr Doughty presents a line of garments as a speculative fashion forecast for the year 2000, made using a new technique that links paillettes into knitwear. Hole-punched plates of wood laminate, leather, mirror, metal, titanium and carbon fibre plastic, are all part of the catalogue of materials in development at his knitting mill.

The article reimagines knitwear as a flexible protective system, designed for deflecting violence, with scale arrangements that borrow and aestheticise both medieval and military design concepts for defensive gear; hard plates inserted into, and shells worn over, clothing that could be removed, replaced and repositioned.

Doughty’s knitted armour seems to trade on the structural threats associated with Cold War tensions and post-war unrest, and markets it as a piece of engineered hardware made to protect bodies under hostile conditions. As much as this helps to affirm the garments usefulness, the sensible appearance also adding a layer of technical legitimacy, it calls attention to the practicality of tiled knitwear; how the mechanics of it might affect and restrict movement – plates overlapping and locking – and the feel and weight of wearing metal.

Perhaps for this reason, other applications of this plating technology are decisively high fashion, with evening dresses (similar to those of Paco Rabanne, who famously based his initial metallic designs on the protective structure of a butchers apron) that take the same paillettes into a space-age, pop-futurist, utopia. These corresponding pieces recast the knitwear from tactical-utility to fantasy-fashion, demonstrating the work of the magazine caption in contextualising these garments and how, in turn, it would be possible to reproduce the same armoured looks to a very different effect.

It is in this way, for example, the toughness of armour connects with the glossy mirror-ball finish and mutates into something campy and queer-coded – read: homo-futurism, proto-fetish – that the garment’s appropriative potential deepens. The differences in how this garment is worn, for and against Doughty’s objectives, sets out the complexities and appeal of an object that at once refers back to the past, articulates the present moment, and anticipates the future.

— Harrier Vogeler

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Other stuff we liked on and off the internet

Lenin + Sia via the Cuban Embassy

Cuba’s probably gonna be invaded in like a week but their shitposting is rly keeping our spirits up. Any time we feel a little bit sad we watch this. Because it’s, like, even though everything is continuing to go to shit, THIS is the spirit we need to keep going. Thank u to the intern at the Cuban embassy who made this <3

Stealing

We’ve been obsessed with ‘things I racked’ for a while. They just post about stuff they’ve ‘stolen’ which feels both incredibly poignant, as well as wonderfully spirited. Also for legal purposes we, do not condone shoplifting either (yes, we know you are watching mr. p*l*ntir and you won’t get us that easy!) but we do think we should get more invested in normalising shoplifting clothes. Purely for style’s sake, of course.

Rat Section’s Video for daj mi

We hate to admit it but we actually think a lot of music videos are really boring. But Rat Section always has a really simple, clever, funny idea that makes us feel excited. Their latest video for ‘daj mi’ is so fab, and we loved the video so much, we thought we should ask the Rats some questions about it.

Why did you film yourself walking?

The song is about walking but it’s also a love song since ‘walking with someone’ in Polish means to be going out with someone. We were in Japan at the time and we were really into their colourful, patterned flooring on the trains so we decided to make use of that.

I recognise some of those floors. Can you tell me where you shot all of them?

A lot of them were shot in Japan, on the streets, trains and train stations. There are some shots from London too and from the plane.

I think the floor is such an underrated part of our visual and architectural experience. Do you?

We agree! More focus should be placed on floors and ceilings. It can actually be stressful to consciously look at the floor sometimes. You try to talk to some people and they’re always finding money on the floor. Floors in Japan felt much more fun to look at, but maybe it’s a familiarity thing. One of the shots is from Oval station and we wonder how many people disregard or don’t see the floor design there as it is part of their everyday. Maybe some people travel from Japan and find London floors really interesting. There’s a possibility you pay attention to floors if you are in new places but if it’s part of your daily life you maybe are just on your phone or looking out for dog shit.

Your music videos are always so good at capturing these really everyday experiences, and turning them into vignettes of heightened experience. What do you think it is about these oft-mundane, unnoticed parts of daily life in the city that you’re interested in?

We never really thought about it too much but it’s true. The music videos we have put out are all set in public and in a city context but it just made sense with the songs. The video for ‘Chuggus’ was made by our friend Carola Derting who staged a lot of performances depicting simple struggles in public and we love them.

Where do you get your shoes from?

Mostly online although one of us has bought a couple of pairs of shoes in a christian bookshop on the Old Kent Road sold with the promise that they would last an eternity.

Bog Communism

Admittedly, we have not yet subscribed to the breakdown so we can read this article about data centres being built on bogs in Ireland, so we’re leaving here for posterity. X

Words: twos corp.

We have long held that the concept of time travel is at its most generative when studied in its actually occurring form: the disappearance and reemergence of modes across history. In this spirit, our inaugural trend forecast for bog prophecies a historical return, the reemergence of a band of characters rarely found in these parts today: the travelling salesman, the hawker, the peddler.

Queueing for arepas on an arid august day at Burgess Park’s Carnaval del Pueblo last year, we were approached by a smiling woman brandishing a bag of Panama hats. Susana explained that she and her husband Doug import them from artisans in her home country of Ecuador, and gave us a card to get in touch if we wanted to learn more.

A month later, leaving the Hermit’s Cave in Camberwell before a night at nearby Spanners, we met Chef Zion on the street, selling homemade fresh juices and punch from his soundsystem-cooler on wheels. We bought a £5 bottle of ice-cold ruby rum punch, which we shared together on our way to the club.

In a cityscape overrun with supermarket and cafe chains, fast fashion outlets, empty storefronts, and bookies, these two experiences set a few weeks apart began our train of thinking for this piece. How might this city begin to feel if more people took their products directly into the street? And how might more imaginative or transgressive modes of distribution and exchange transfigure our relations with one another?

Looking back for examples of this form of retail over recent years, we recalled La Nausée’s “rail sale” of 2024, where owners Ross and Harry ran across London over the course of a day with a rack full of clothes on wheels, stopping in various locations at preappointed times to sell a special edit of pieces direct from their rail.

As we awaited our move into the Hackney Road shop in 2022, by necessity as much as in vernal homage to Comme des Garçons’ ‘guerilla stores’ of the late 2000s, we disguised twos as a birthday party in Clissold Park over a few spring/summer weekends, selling clothes with helium balloons and cake to set the scene.

“Brick-and-Mortar Is Back” ran the lede for BoF executive editor Brian Baskin’s briefing for the rag last September. A month later, Baskin sat down with colleagues Sheena Butler-Young and Cathaleen Chen on the BoF’s Debrief podcast to ponder the question ‘Can a Shop Truly Be a ‘Third Place’?’, citing beauty chain Sephora as a key disruptor in the field.

The industry’s current preoccupation with all things experiential mirrors a wider ongoing trend across retail, as capital scrambles for phantoms of the very ‘community’ and ‘authenticity’ that it has spent the last half-century merrily liquidating for profit. Far from such lofty ideals, the past decade in fashion has been characterised instead by labour scandals, price gouging, and the relentless hiring and firing of creative directors, all the while standards of quality and integrity in both design and production have plummeted in favour of cynical hype cycles and a brazen cash grab in China and the Middle East.

What industry reporters refer to as ‘consumer malaise’, we might actually read as the body politic’s very rational rejection of a sickness endemic to the system itself. All the while the euphemism of ‘geopolitical turmoil’ works to elide so many real horrors of the present moment: revanchist warfare, genocide, climate breakdown, and fascism, all presided over by a class of tech-oligarch-billionaires and their servile lackeys.

It is hopefully not too bold then, if we suggest that their attempts to conjure ‘community’ within this context will only continue to fail.

What, then, for fashion and for culture? Contra Sephora et al, Jake Burt’s eponymous and ever-evolving Saturday boutique Jake’s captures something of the ephemerality and excitement of the shop-as-event, continuing a tradition of underground retail that finds its beginnings, at least in London, in Kensington Market, a place that served as both site of commerce for the early days of many of London’s most revered cult labels (Christopher Nemeth, Leigh Bowery, Pam Hogg, Red or Dead) and as a ‘third place’, perhaps, for the artists, designers, photographers, stylists and musicians who frequented it.1

Spaces like this, however, are scarce – at least in London today. As surveillance permeates ever deeper into our lives, and as the screen becomes just another frontier of the rentier economy, the past few years have shown us just how important the irl is. Not least, for us, in its capacity to nurture spaces and scenes that exceed the narrow bounds of representation. In the context of exorbitant retail rents then, concurrent with a yearning for a more expansive life offline, might we find instead for now an opening onto the street?

From the early modern peddlers of Bruegel and Bosch, to the Parisian hawkers of Proust’s Paris and the travelling salesmen of the 60s midwest, our motley historical troupe are bound by a few key common threads. To begin with, their activity: selling. As well as its object: the merchandise. Being without premises, they carry their wares on their back or in-hand, on a wagon or sled, in life-size or in miniature. So unfold a myriad of possibilities for display and portability – the travelling salesman’s briefcase, the hawker’s trolley, the peddler’s woven baskets.

Second, their itinerance, and its attendant locales – the city street, the country road, the dark and dingy alleyway. Passing to and fro among buildings and crowds, fields and villages, in the fog or the rain, under bright sun or falling snow. And linked to this itinerance, an ambiguous relation to the law. Might a whisper travel on a peddler’s tongue to ignite revolt in a nearby town? Could a tray of fresh cherries conceal a trench coat lined with contraband?

With the increasing resemblance of our present moment to a dystopian science fiction, the atmosphere has carried with it a tangible sense of noir, and one in which the peddler may yet emerge as a protagonist. We can think of two examples that smack of the spectral form of our street-seller. In her interactive 2021 manga ‘Unrecognizable’, Lolina charts the adventures of characters Paris and Geneva, as they navigate a dystopian future London in which buildings are being used as weapons in a war between the government and the people. More recently, in their performance entitled ‘Counterfeit’ for the 2025 Kaunas Biennial, the duo Rat Section donned the uniforms of the fictional Audio Infringement Agency (AIA) to perform a ceremonial destruction of contraband in the form of 1000s of pirated CDs, crushing them below a steamroller with a crowd watching on.

In their 1980s investigation of the reputation of shoemakers for radicalism, Eric Hobsbawm and Joan W. Scott pinpoint the cobbler’s independence and control over their time of work and leisure as a key component of their capacity for self-education and exchange. Moreover, they note the shoemaker’s “contact with large numbers of humble people” and “independence from patrons, wealthy clients and employers” as a possible explanation for their radical bent: “The rural shoemaker was always present, his eyes on the street, and he knew what went on in the community.”2

Our prophecy therefore, is also a proposal: to wrestle back the commons in the here and now, and by any means necessary. Or in other words, a return to older modes, to the lo-fi of subterfuge and noir, might be a means by which networks of distribution and exchange can once again exceed the boundaries of mere commerce, and reawaken a sociality that we so desperately need.