text by Bliss Foster
Everything about fashion has been a serious endeavor throughout my career. I discovered what I wanted to do with my life when I was in my early twenties. It was at this time that I realized clothes were not simply a practical tool, nor just a status symbol. Fashion, instead, can and should be an effective, brilliantly complex form of storytelling.
With an undergraduate degree in literature, I began looking for resources to learn more about the intellectual complexities of fashion design and the narratives within collections. I expected fashion to have a similar academic community; to find an endless quantity of people online discussing and interpreting runway shows, dissecting the meaning of seam choices, and decoding pattern construction. Yet sadly, deep analysis was nowhere to be found. No one seemed to examine fashion on a microscopic level and no one wanted to understand the conceptual mechanics.
Granted, at that time, I didn’t know about the excellent fashion theory work of scholars like Caroline Evans, Franchesca Granata, Shahidha Bari, Dana Thomas, Andrew Bolton and many others, who have all now become inspirations for me and my work. Truly thinking I was alone, I started analyzing fashion in my own way. I was relieved to find that fashion runways, like the literature I had studied in college, lent themselves well to analyses; there was plenty under the surface to uncover and, most importantly, I felt like I appreciated the runways even more after I had done extensive work to dissect them.
As quickly as I could, I made fashion analysis my profession. I began a series where I dedicated a twenty-minute video to each runway show by Martin Margiela, I released weekly videos where I wrestled with questions of theory, and I began traveling to Paris for runway shows every few months. Once I met my wife, Daniella, she kicked me into overdrive. Daniella is much more educated than me; her ocean-like knowledge and her laser-focused taste pushed me to new places. We started writing and making videos together and the work soared as a result.
Throughout my time in the fashion industry, I have been rewarded for rejecting levity. To be blunt, my brain developed a ‘fuck off’ policy towards any fashion that was cute, fun, light-hearted, or just functional. I wanted only Iris Van Herpen, Comme, Dries, Maison Martin Margiela, old Prada, Carol Christian Poell, Undercover, Deepti Barth, Craig Green, Rick Owens, Raf Simons, Final Home, and Yohji. Levity was for everything else; fashion deserved respect, damnit.
All this changed when I had the opportunity to interview an outstanding designer from Antwerp named Jan-Jan Van Essche. Jan-Jan’s life and business are what many starry-eyed fashion students think their life will be as a designer. Jan-Jan has a beautiful studio in Antwerp where he and his small team design, draft patterns, craft prototypes, and occasionally weave textiles on an in-house loom. They even take turns making food for each other. I was so struck by the pureness of Jan-Jan’s process, that I wanted to support them in some way. The clothes are priced fairly, but were still a little steep for me, so I settled on a long-sleeve t-shirt. While I was buying it, Jan-Jan’s partner in business and life, Pietro, told me, “Careful, that textile is addictive.” When I asked what he meant, Pietro said, “It’s a special blend of cotton and cashmere. It’s quite functional, but there’s nothing else that feels like it.”
If I’m honest, special blend or not, I walked away feeling embarrassed that I had spent so much money on a t-shirt. I even apologized to Dani, though she assured me that she wanted to support them as well. I didn’t think the shirt flattered me, so I tucked it away in a drawer and forgot about it.
Months later, I came down with an intense fever and was in bed for days. Daniella suggested I sleep in my new t-shirt. I resisted because I didn’t want to stretch it out. “You spent all that money and haven’t worn it once! It’ll be cozy, just try it on and see how it feels.” She was right. Since that day, I have slept in that same long sleeve for 137 nights in a row. And just as years before when I had come to realize the beauty of a collection's narrative and intention, I now understood the importance of textile and material.
I am now more aware of how narratives can be told through the haptic sense. The tactile experience of any given material can’t be properly appreciated by grabbing the fabric with your hand; that would be like experiencing a hot tub by standing in a puddle. Textiles can only be fully experienced by living with them, wearing them to stay home all day, outfit-repeating multiple days in a row, taking care of them when they’re damaged, and experiencing how the textile ages over time. Knowing now how radically different a well-considered textile can feel, I’ve become fixated on finding new tactile experiences with clothes. There is no academic pursuit that can provide more insight into these feelings than the experience itself, and with these sensations, there’s a heavy dose of levity. I’ve since bought a yak wool beanie, a few more cotton+cashmere long sleeves, and a pair of oversized cotton pants with a heavy wax coating (my viewers say it looks like I’m wearing a massive, wet paper bag—in a good way) all from Jan-Jan.
For the last five years, the seriousness with which I treated the fashion industry was a defining part of my personality. I felt it was what made me valuable to my viewers and the designers who I admired and critiqued. I’ll forever owe a debt to Jan-Jan Van Essche for showing me how to bring levity into my fashion life. It’s a debt I’ll likely pay off by slowly collecting his clothes. 2024 will hopefully be the year that I pull the trigger on an Icelandic wool sweater.