CITY Issue 54

CITY LIFE IN ROGUE I WAS R AISED ATHEIST, BUT ONE OF THE MOST POTENT Using My Religion With exposure to far-off cultures growing at an ever-furious rate, religious and political iconography is finding a new home on, of all places, the fashion runway. Elyssa Dimant examines the new coding of style. symbols of my wedding this past fall was the chuppah that hung overhead, configured as it was from the tallitot (Jewish prayer shawls) of my grandfathers and great-grandfathers. There they were: vestments of pride, of perseverance, of tradition, of identity. Yet, as only a cultural Jew at best, the identity was not really mine. Even as the quilted chuppah protected us and honored us, I couldn’t help but wonder—before the ceremony, mind you—wouldn’t those stripes of royal blue and white, the colors of the state of Israel, and the long cream silk fringe that radiated from each edge look incredible worked into a bias-cut gown? Yes, this is a symptom of my fashion-centricness. But doesn’t it also speak to our familiarity with reinterpreting the aesthetics of “other” indigenous or religious groups as a means of conveying a contemporary, enlightened persona? We explore the intricacies of other communities through documentary film or literature. We elucidate foreign struggles through fine arts or spoken word. But most tellingly, we wear our causes and aspirations on our sleeves, literally, through the appropriation of sartorial signifiers from around the world. Today, we are positioned in a crossfire of mass communication and acclimated to the mosaic communities of 21st-century urbanity and the virtues of cross-cultural learning and reciprocity. In turn, our adoption of African, Indian, or South American garb is no longer “exotic” as it was in centuries past, but a strategy of cultivating one’s identity through a global wardrobe, whether extreme or subtle, that is familiar to us all. The kabbalist’s bracelet, no longer a token of transcendence but of status or celebrity; the Che Guevara T-shirt, no longer a revolutionary’s but a drummer’s; the once-formidable Communist print of Mao Tse Tung—they’re all headshots, reels, portfolios of one’s ideals and beliefs. The routine interconnectedness of our world has fostered a generation keen on distinction via sartorial ownership. Appropriating age-old imagery to communicate transcendence, strength, and even righteousness has become commonplace, and has birthed a coding system in mainstream fashion that relies on ignorance as much as information. After all, I just have to cross the street to run into some chump in an Aumprinted fluorescent T-shirt that says, “Hey, even though I was born in Jersey, yoga really works for me one or two nights a week.” For his “Between” collection of Spring/Summer 1998, Hussein Chalayan, the Cypriot-born British designer, showed Islamic chadors of varying lengths (one model wore only a yashmak—a head veil—revealyashmak ing her business to the catwalk audience), thereby offering up religious garments to the fertile grounds of runway appropriation. But born as he was in a predominantly Muslim region, Chalayan’s presentation seemed as much a soul-searching autobiographical portrait as it did a shocking commentary on Islamic gender repression. Rei Kawakubo interpreted the Sind or Gujurat mirror cloths in a Fall/Winter 99-00 collection for Comme des Garçons, but more controversially mixed Scottish and British kilt tartans on the Spring/Summer 06 runway, and in doing ALL OF A SUDDEN, THEY’RE ON THE SUBWAY, AT THE CLUB, GETTING COFFEE IN THE MORNING— THE SHEEPISH SCHOLAR, THE MODEL, THE PROMOTER—ALL CASUALLY FITTED WITH A KEFFIYAH: A BITING ACCESSORY TO AN OTHERWISE INDIFFERENT WARDROBE 54 CI T Y

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 54

CITY Issue 54 Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment The City Life The Amused Bouche On the Rocks Fast Food City Insider: Austin Fit How We Live: The Bedroom City Insider: Warsaw In Rogue The Value of Vintage Taking the Plunge Raising the Bar The Science of Scent Changing of the Guard The New Fashion Cities A Cut Above Chrysalis What Dreams May Come Dawn & Dusk Will o' the Wisp Where To Buy It Socials Icon

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