Text by Kat George
B O U D I C C A will not be showing during Paris Couture this season. Well not as such.’ So was the loaded opening line of a very cryptic email we received from Boudicca this week. The email went on to explain, albeit obscurely, that there will be no physical couture collection from Boudicca this year, but instead an online, new media art project that will attempt to challenge and promote discussion on ideas of ‘couture.’ Tempted by the possibilities tucked away in this mysterious message, we just had to know more. Bouddica offered up some interesting answers to our questions in that inimitable Boudicca style…
What exactly will the 'website exchange and essay' entail?
During the dates of couture, a select few will be invited on to a new website. This invitation will come as a password found in a conclusion to an essay, a short piece of writing. (see the essay they most recently wrote for the A/W08 issue of AnOther magazine on the next page)
The site will present an initial look at ideas around COUTURE that have found a certain freedom by not having to be made into the finest fabrics and construction that BOUDICCA are known for. This is a freedom that allowed us to create an image, build a moment of beauty that does not have to walk down a catwalk to exist and feel impact.
This is still a work in progress, so its difficult to totally clarify.
Why has Boudicca chosen to create this new media art project instead of showing a physical collection?
To remain alive in ideas, within your own experiences, in an auto didactic sense, within an unknown, is crucial to us all and available to us all. Why not explore this?
Will Boudicca still produce a full couture collection? How does Boudicca propose to manifest a couture collection online?
Ideas and expression, are limitless unless we choose to limit it. A collection is as it states, a collective of thoughts that may or may not have been finished or concluded. Some of these ideas may go further to a state of conclusion as we best understand, some not. The idea of capturing an unintentional beauty for a moment, to struggle to find that, is what we are interested in within the realm of the ideal of Couture (ideal).
Boudicca would like to 'build dialogue with a few select people,' yet the internet by and large democratizes social/cultural dialogue. Who is Boudicca hoping to build dialogue with in this online project?
There have been many moments in the history of the idea, particularly quoting the last century when smaller groups of people who felt open and comfortable with each other, spent time in discussion, maybe in silence and maybe in contemplation, to allow ideas and dialogue to feel free to possibly fail, enable new horizons of thought.
The Bloomsbury group, ‘their’ time in Tangiers; the residential hotels such as the legacy of the Chelsea Hotel all show moments of this, and the tradition of the Salons in Paris for example.
And yes the internet by and large democratizes social /cultural dialogue but it does not have to. Even on Facebook you can create private rooms, as this is a conduit for conversation that surely you choose to test and develop with whoever you like.
Conclusively and firmly though we state, we have no clear idea of how this will manifest itself as it’s a start of a dialogue and could go many ways . We are open to failure, open to complaint and negative debate. It is an idea that in itself can be criticized and that is all that is important.
Difference is confusing and unsettling but if we stay still we become stagnant and that is what we wish to avoid.
Here, Zowie Broach and Brian Kirby, the design duo behind the London-based label, invite Another Document on a journey through their inspirations, Shakespeare to Sinatra via orwell and Bosch, in typically inventive style:
Our spirit has been beaten into submission by the heavy weight champion of acceptance and within us this spirit of an ancient warrior, feral yet possessing a nobleness, fights a battle of human need. The need to feel the honour of imagined worlds. We begin.
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact."
William Shakespeare
The moon rises; the bed is left un-made and the Internet calls another morning in our lives. The modern soothsayer. Machines connect amidst the whirring fans and serve up endless pages. We have been taught to look for answers, instead of imagining them.
Back arches and I want to talk to you, converse with you. Modern erotica... Hhhmm no, I need go to bed with you not to talk into the night or first thing in the morning. ‘Talk poetry to me’ is that what we wish for…?
The cuff against a tapestry woven chair; the cuff of Dirk Bogarde in ‘The Servant’, white pure an elegant inch of crisp cotton; a white pure escalating fish in the air, ‘The White Diamond’ flies, makes a man dance in joy, and echoes of a whisper from the past… ‘Rose bud’
"Rrrrrrrrrose bud"….. burrs and winds and turns within the same sky. Dietrich looks up and the camera snatches her image for us to view and within the very same frame, a Russian paper czar builds another column of glass in his head, a paper dream. A paper moment. A moment of poetry, a love of lunacy. An imagination that is fed by all. Blow a bubble for Nan, as Alsatian dogs and robotic wolves parade the surrounding grounds, walked through fields of pink Carnations. We sit and are offered a glass of iced water, with a small crystal bowl of preserved fruit and a mouthful of liquor.
Poiret designed a cape to walk along that cobbled way, the way of 13 images that leave a hole in our heart, in our head. ... And I say, "That little girl in the elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name and address?” Jack Kerouac in Robert Franks’ The Lines of my Hand.
Turn the page and a little bit Leigh Bowery a lot of Lisa Lyons, every outfit affects us.
“Living in time.” Proust states, writes back. A counterpoint in multiple. All composed on a moving train.
Heidegger interrupts, “The question is: Why is there any being at all and not rather Nothing? Suppose that we do not remain within metaphysics to ask metaphysically in the customary manner; suppose we recall the truth of Being out of the nature and the truth of metaphysics; then this might be asked as well: How did it come about that beings take precedence everywhere and lay claim to every "is" while that which is not a being is understood as Nothing, though it is Being itself, and remains forgotten? How did it come about that with Being It really is nothing and that the Nothing really is not? Is it perhaps from this that the as yet unshaken presumption has entered into all metaphysics that "Being" may simply be taken for granted and that Nothing is therefore made more easily than beings? That is indeed the situation regarding Being and Nothing. If it were different, then Leibniz could not have said in the same place by way of an explanation: "Car le rien est plus simple et plus facile que quelque chose".
Frank Sinatra dies in his orange silk pyjamas and we sit in the best cinema in the world. An adventure that takes us nowhere and yet we feel everywhere. Let us disappear into the past..
'The struggle for the poetry within the poem is the struggle against ourselves, insofar as we, in the everydayness of our existence, are exiled from poetry," Heidegger. So say it to yourself, repeat out loud as you stare out but stare this time into the eyes of La Strada, and learn of love and try not to repeat. And to punk ugly; yes Bosch imagined punk. Thank you for the memorization. Thank you Umberto Eco.
So do you maybe need a translator at points and if so whom, whom should she be? Our very own Literary Prostitute. Tell her,
“We want to go everywhere but go nowhere, to be anonymous. A total stranger to you all.”
“To live in absence, like Mr. Orwell who had his wife destroy everything. He left us with myth. Let us lye in myth. Our imagination compact. That we, we are unique, dreadfully unique.”
(All written wearing a white fifties swimsuit and a black silk neckerchief)
It is all an adventure that does not hurt you.
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