Journal
Articles
Coat tales
We throw a spotlight on everyday menswear in twentieth-century Australia here because even though commentators have often conjured quick impressions of it in passing, it has less often been a subject of contemplation in its own right. Exhibitions and discussions of dress in Australian contexts have focused more on the feminine and spectacular. This emphasis means that the more mundane ways in which social and economic power relations played out through menswear have largely slipped from view.
No scrubs
WHEN FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE’S band of thirty-eight nurses set sail from Folkestone, England, on 21 October 1854, each woman was...
Standard issue
The first thing nurses get us new admissions to do is change into a gown – standard issue. It’s not what I’d call comfortable, exactly; it’s not even about dignity. It’s about access. If your condition suddenly becomes critical, doctors need to get to your body fast. Even so, when I’m allowed to leave later that afternoon, I tear off the gown and pull on the clothes I arrived in.
Sanford Meisner
TO HELP THE Year 10s reconnect with their craft after the September school holidays, Hale has them do Viewpoints....
Hat trick
BEFORE THE CALL, I was a girl in a new city, with a new job and a roommate I chose...
The little black book of black dresses
We see black in so many ways: as boldness, as strength. We see it as playing grown-ups, as a coming of age, as an expression of grief, as mourning, as a power to reclaim from those who took from us the selves we once wanted to be. As I sit now, to finish this essay, I can no longer recall what happened to my first little black dress, how old I was when I stopped wearing it, who I might have given it to, or why it was so emblematic in my mind of black dresses as a whole, when in reality there were likely many other black items in my wardrobe from many years before.
The jacket
DOUG CLOUDY WAS desperate for it. He hadn’t been laid since the backpackers came through town all those years...
Killing me softly
Camellias, carnations, chrysanthemums, daisies, daffodils, dahlias, gardenias, hibiscuses, lilies, magnolias, pansies, peonies, poppies, roses, tulips and more: perhaps we wear them complacently or ironically – or consider any symbolic associations as feeble, irrelevant or outdated – yet we cannot totally outrun, or outpunch, the connotative powers of a floral dress. Nothing signifies a well-behaved, compliant woman with no rough edges or anger-management issues quite like a pleasant and inoffensive arrangement of petals on a skirt. The signifier, however, is often a disingenuous and deficient representation of the signified.
Totentanz
We are loose now. We peel our skin veil by veil to what lasts longer. To the pulse of...
ode to Kylie’s gold hotpants
50p at a West London flea market. rumoured to be worth 10mil. see those ruched metallic folds behind bulletproof glass...
clothing is a language
Fashions fade away like epidemics once they have ravaged the imagination. – Jean Baudrillard day after day we change into clothes we change...
Change of clothes
I used to ask to be dropped off a block early flee the dumpster that somehow grew wheels evade the goodbyes...
