borrowed from style.com
Last night I had trouble falling asleep. I was exhausted after a long day of work, but as I laid staring up into the dark my mind was racing. I opened my laptop to source the internet for distraction, and went to style.com where I studied the coverage of Spring 2010 shows in NYC, Paris and Milan for an hour or so. I clicked through Marc Jacob’s creations for Louis Vuitton and stopped on this look below. It reminded me of something. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it….oh gotcha…this piece of art I had seen at the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair last month. The recalled image was of a canvas, approximately 3 by 2 feet, with patches of worn-in denim haphazardly adhered to its surface. The result was a tattered quasi-quilt that would make grandma weep.
This piece of art is representational of the directional denim trend — a hodgepodge of patchwork, rips and stains– that is sweeping across the world, including Shanghai of course. Jeans, of all the articles of clothing in our wardrobe, are the arguably the most personal. Please roll your eyes forward and hear me out. Unlike the confining feeling of donning a suit before trekking to the office, we wear jeans on our own behalf when we do things we want to do. With each wear we infuse our special pair with sentiments with the same permanence of indigo dye that once sept into the fabric. Torn and tattered, ripped and shredded, our jeans only increase in value as memories soak into each thread.
The weekend wardrobe basic, jeans are our go-to staple that we wear however we want while we do whatever we want. As unique and adored as a single old pair can be, jeans are, on the other hand, ubiquitous. As jeans become more and more omnipresent, the desire to own that special, personalized pair increases as well. Yet with our busy schedules, who has time to actually live that ideal life in jeans when we could just as easily go out and buy a pair that looks like we have done just so? Enter in the rips, stains and shreds. Prefabricated nostalgia. See that torn pocket seam? Shhh. Nobody has to know it was actually strategically done by Zara masterminds to emulate that the clothing casualty came from the time when they snagged while you scaled the chain-linked fence to sneak backstage after the concert to meet the band.
Maybe that’s what this artist is getting at. The paradox of denim is that it is fashion’s most casual textile that we can beat to a pulp; yet its value is immense…enough to literally put it on a pedestal at the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. Maybe it’s just common cotton, but the contexts in which we wear this article of clothing can be priceless.
