Way back in the midst of the swinging sixties, lived a funky wee gal called Gail. Gail was a dress designer, and had her own shop on Carnaby Street. She organised fashion shows, briefly dated the drummer from The Moody Blues, and was once wolf whistled at whilst leaving her shop by all of The Monkees (I image them all walking down Carnaby Street in their customary hands-on-each-other’s-shoulders, one-step-at-a-time walk - didn’t Carnaby Street sound like the place to be then?). She even had to pull out of the last round of auditions for the James Bond movie Thunderball when she found out she was pregnant.
Eventually, she fell out of dress design, or ‘the rag trade’ as it was known then, and settled down in West London to raise a family as the wife of an HR Director. She’d potter with her former skills as a part time job, switching over to interior design, stitching curtains and settee covers for the both the pretentious and affable of Chiswick. Much of her time was devoted to raising her two children, and she would on occasion lend her talents to making them costumes for fancy dress parties or school competitions. In later years she made the bride and bridesmaid’s dresses for her eldest son’s wedding.
Her youngest son however became particularly influenced by the mountains of cloth, buttons and fabrics all around him as he was growing up. The scent of cotton, the soft catlike feel of velvet between his fingers, or the sound of the electric sewing machine juddering away late into the night both sharpened and cushioned his developing senses. Though he never developed any skill of his own in clothes making, and indeed maintained an extreme dislike of “fashion” as a trend or concept, the almost often theatre-costume environment he was raised in shaped his imagination in ways he could never fully realise until much later in his life. If he had a hero or idol, he would ask his mother to make him the clothes of that idol, and they became part of his playthings. This boy became used to seeing the concept of himself as he imagined actually there when he looked in the mirror. This was a boy who never knew anything of a divide between fantasy and reality.
And these are the origins of the style in his creative work in his adult life that he has realised only now. This is where the view of the everyday as a solipsis comes from - a fantasy or hallucination that isn’t quite real. This is the birthpool of that “arrogant” certainty that life should be just as you want it, just as you imagine it to be. This, on a more superficial level, explains a little perhaps why he so detests wearing suits and ties.
My so-called “eccentric” style, limited only by availability or money, is never limited or contained in my imagination - never restrained or toned down by what is expected in the “real” world. The realisation of the self as seen in the mirror of my mind is limited only what is around me and the cost of it, as I said above, and my own inability to emulate the creations I grew up watching come to life in my mother’s workroom. I don’t know where my style comes from - my love of the mock formal, the overly gentlemanly, the almost vampyric or Byronic coats, waistcoats, velvet, pinstripe, silvers, blacks and reds. Doctor Who maybe, the era of the New Romantics I grew up in perhaps. Whenever I try to think where it comes from, I become certain only that life is a game - a party, a play or a make-pretend adventure in the playground. Everything is make-believe. And you need costumes for that.
The purpose, the fundamental act of any artist in creating something is to bring its imagined components - the sights, sounds, scents and sensations they are able to clasp so brightly in their mind - out into the real world. To give solid form or representation to their thoughts and thus share them with others.
An artist’s first canvas is themselves. By the tools of my trade, I can put myself down on paper, but I can never wear that conception as crafted by my own hand. Everything always seems to stay that little bit insubstantial, like a meal you can smell so strongly that your mouth starts watering, yet inhaling its scent is as far as you go in tasting it.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say - that I’m disatisfied using only words to create? That I wish I’d learnt more skills in music, sculpture or dress-design as I grew up? That, no matter how hard I try, I can never sufficiently drag out of my mind the things I see so clearly there, and translate them into three dimensions to exist in the “real” world?
If I could dress in my own my clothes - surround myself in my own creation for only an hour or so, would that really make a difference? Would that be all that’s needed to completely give birth to all these lose conceptions floating uselessly in my head?
Sharks.
Youth.
Time.
