WOEBOT

Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashion.

My lovely wife was feeling blue, so I took her shopping. I love showing y'all what a nice romantic dude I am. I've a new theory that (in spite of the creeps, you know who you are!) the internet is full of love. All those beautiful isolated people like yourselves too genuine to be mashed up by Babylon have fled here to practise the fine art of being sensitive, helpful and generous.

She has expensive tastes my missus, but she doesn't really indulge them terribly often. Going clothes shopping with her is awesome, suddenly I'm thrust out of the dingy basements I frequent in search of vinyl blinking into the neon glare. As it stands today the "youf" fashion industry is divided into two halves. On the one hand you have clothes which are influenced by Hip-Hop. These are easy to spot by their unisex nature, their simple colours, "practical materials" and by staple items like T-shirts, hoods, jeans and trainers, also by the abundance of apes (groan) and wild-style graphics.

On the other hand you have Electroclash clothes. Slightly more upmarket, or pitched as "slumming", slashed garments (holes everywhere in fact), lots of black material, neon highlights, touches of chrome and silver, flowing diaphonous silk, punk style stencilling, items such as long dresses, high-heels, wierd furry open-topped boots, decorated denim and everywhere reflective sunglasses and the whiff of cocaine.

Really it's a clear as daylight the divide. On the one hand Hip-Hop. On the other Electroclash. It caused me to think of the way in which what becomes style is first felt as a sonic idea. The dematerialised weirdos who lurk at the boundaries of this dimension pick up cosmonic echoes and transmit them into the first wave of solidifaction.....sound. Then that sonic impact causes ripples to radiate outward, first into the cohort of sounds which follow it, echoing the original's patterns, often unsure as to it's meaning, but wide-awake to it's sensations. Rippling from the domain of sonics into the word, then on to more substantiated matter. Til, ha ha, fashion picks up the baton. It's too easy to scoff here really. It's a hell of a alot harder to manifest a clothing range than it is to make a 1,000 white labels. Isn't Wiley working on his own clothing range? I was wondering how it'd look, probably devolved Wu-Wear of course, but why not reclaimed charity shop clothes hewed into bizarre forms?

Fashion always runs about 5 years behind the latest sonics. Take the new branch of Voyage in London. Voyage was for a few years THE clothing shop in London. Run like an exclusive club Madonna was famously refused entry, Naomi Campbell too. Their clothes used to be a Lenny Kravitz-meets-Victoriana vision of South-East Island frills. Always preposterously over-tailored. They usually had a naff Ambient 4th World CD playing, or Jimi Hendrix. The shops I visited today with the Mrs had either Hip-Hop on the deck or like Vivienne Westwood and the new Voyage shop, Electroclash. Yeah that's right Voyage has done an about turn! I always thought the last shop was evidence of Ambient House lapping on the shore six years late, and now they've gone Electropunk. Bankrupted in the meantime, jeez how symbolic is that!

Voyage's look trickled down into the mainstream. All those frilly things girls were buying in Top Shop and Monsoon, that was (via Voyage) the distant echo of post-rave utopianism. While they couldn't claim to have invented the Electroclash look, just a reassemblage of an imagined notion of what dystopian punk electro chic might have looked like (working their imagination harder than the music scene in many cases), like Donna Karan, Versaci and Vivienne Westwood Voyage have capitalised on it, produced it to mirror the music.

We got her some nice boots.

Posted by Woebot at November 7, 2003 03:07 PM