LFWM: LIAM HODGES AUTUMN/WINTER 2019
Fashion has overdid nostalgia that attempts to cash in on your impossible longing for a perfect you and a perfect time, that doesn’t exist now and actually never did. Knowing exactly what to wear, what to listen to and where to go, sucks all the life out of life, slick control is no fun. We’re mutating, identity is no longer fixed, authenticity is outdated, online life is IRL. The having of fun, discovery and the path to self-knowledge are born of of diving in and getting it wrong. Mutations in the 4th Dimension is a struggle, an attempt to work out a look for this new wave, it bops, citing a tee seen in Hackers and Y2K-ish asymmetrical graphics, Ray Kurzweil’s claim that the singularity will arrive in 2045, while the Ellesse collaboration reworks the rm’s ski-wear, using prints of salt crystals taken via powerful a microscope. The tracksuits draw from the projection of a tesseract, a four dimensional cube that exists within mathematics but that can only be rendered in 2D. T-shirts are printed with multiple repros of a T-shirt as if the Xeroxing has glitched, alongside bio-punk prints inspired by the work of artist Lee Bul. Finally, the collection’s motif is a figure stuck between dimensions. Living in the right now we can’t know where we’re going. Instead it’s like we know inside out all the people we’ll never meet, the books we’ll never read and the mixtapes we’ll never listen to. It’s as if we’re caught between dimensions, our in infinitely informed, totally connected, fully mappable digital selves and well that fallible person in all your selfies. The tesseract is a four dimensional square that can be drawn in 2D, but can’t be seen in all four of it’s dimensions by the naked eye, but scientists have proved to be perceived by humans in virtual reality environments. A representation of a tesseract then is a representation of our state, our current mindset, stuck as we are between dimensions. As the world gets faster, we perceive crisis, but perhaps we’re just in the process of growing pains, as the future we were promised has arrived and in some ways surpassed anything we could imagine.
