Alexander McQueen said “Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of punishment.” I agree, we should wear what makes us happy and only follow those trends that appeal to us. After all, style is more important than fashion and style is about our choices. There are always wonderful choices in Second Life®.
I have also finally figured out how to make Marketplace work again and uploaded the projector I used to shoot these pictures.
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Gizza recently released a skirt and shirt/jacket combo that is a rocker’s dream. Called Shake With Me, even the name acknowledges this rocking inspiration for this outfit. A short flared skirt, a fitted crop top with lace topped by a leather jacket combine to rock your socks off.
You can trust me, I bring a book everywhere I go. I just finished the magnificent All the Light We Cannot See that I recommend to all of you. Meanwhile, am busy reading The Culture of Make Believe which I read in small doses at a time because it is so rich in ideas and in detail and full of pain that I have to think about each concept before moving on. So, for relief, I am also reading Get In Trouble, but other than being intrigued already, it’s too soon to say how much I will like it.
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I love the music of Leonard Cohen. I have a playlist I love of Leonard Cohen covers and know nearly all his songs by heart. One of them, Anthem, is one of my favorites because although on one level it despairs of the world; it also calls us to act with hope. “Ah the wars they will be fought again. The holy dove, she will be caught again, bought and sold and bought again. The dove is never free.” It is true, endless wars are a constant stream throughout history, started by governmental leaders, the “killers in high places who say their prayer out loud.”
But then there is the chorus.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Ring the bells that still can ring acknowledges that as bad as it is, there are still some things that you can do. Don’t let excuses stop you from doing what you can. “Forget your perfect offering” reminds me of Voltaire’s aphorism “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Do not wait for the perfect answer, the perfect solution, go with what you’ve got because good enough is better than nothing, and nothing is what you get if you wait for perfect. Everything we can do is going to be slightly imperfect, “there is a crack in everything” but it is those imperfections that reveal our humanity and “that’s how the light gets in.” I love how he asserts that it is in our imperfections that we will save ourselves.
“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
The Instruments, a monthly themed showcase of Second Life fashion and design opened today. I was instantly drawn to BYRNE’s Eternal dress. It’s a shape I like and I love batik fabric. It always make me think of my three housemates in college who were from Malaysia and their seemingly endless supply of batik sarongs. It seemed like the only thing they ever wore. They gifted me with beautiful sarongs, though I never got the hang of making them secure enough to wear rolling skating like they did.
I like the form of the dress as well as the fabric. The ruffles complicated finding poses, of course, but that happens with most dresses that have ruffles off the side. I do wish the cuffs had not been rigged. It is easier to adjust the cuffs than adjust the arm. Alphas hide the arm, but the alpha cut on the mesh body did not line up with the cuffs, so I had to play around with my shape. It’s not that big a problem, I always save a copy and then go back to the original that I never edit.
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JUMO just released Arthuriana – a skirt and top combo in chocolate, oil, marsala, navy and violet The dress comes with a luxe wreath of gold and pearls, earrings, bracelets and a headpiece. However, I was inspired by the print to take the outfit in a different direction.
As you can see, Arthuriana has Wow! factor aplenty with its design details such as the dramatic sweep of the skirt and drama of the cutout back.
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There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields –
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come! …Emily Dickinson
I love the sweater and skirt from ur favorite one (u.f.o.) for Collabor88. They come in a wide range of colors and have a hint of fall, but are still lightweight and open for summer. Perfect transition clothing for September. That big knit bow is perfection.
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I went to Misfit Ghetto last night and saw this sign. It comes from Robert Lowell who said “The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.” Robert Lowell has been a favorite since I first discovered him in 7th grade. I was shy, a mumbler, constantly admonished to speak louder and my mother made me join the speech team. She believed in meeting challenges head on. I chose Extemporaneous Poetry as my specialty since I loved poetry and my mom made me memorize a poem a week. I figured I could get two for one out of the way.
For my first competition I drew “For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell. The imagery bowled me over and I fell in love with his way of writing, though the poem was not without its problems for my 7th grade self. It used the n-word once, in quotes to indicate that was not a word Lowell would have used. It was a word I had never used and was certainly not acceptable. I had thirty minutes to prepare an introduction and decide how to address this dilemma. I punted and inserted the word soldiers instead. You know, as an adult, I think the person who picked the poems that day probably had not read them.
But also, from hindsight, I don’t mind, because that poem was thrilling to me. If you have seen the film Glory, you know the story memorialized in the statue he describes. But it was not the story, it was the images from phrases like his nose crawling like a snail on the aquarium glass and the yellow dinosaur steamshovels grunting as they work. Most of the poetry I had read (or my mom had chosen for me) had been prettier. She was a big Longfellow, Shelley and Shakespeare fan. Lowell was my introduction to a more robust kind of poetry. He felt rebellious and fierce and I gobbled him up. And yes, he was also bleak and grim and depressive – perfect for adolescence.
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W.H. Auden wrote in his collection of prose essays, The Dyer’s Hand, ““Every man carries within him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.” Then he went on to suggest a good parlor game would be to look at different people and imagine the kinds of mirrors they might be carrying. One might be carrying a gilt baroque hand mirror, another a small compact mirror in a leather case, each of them, carrying mirrors that by design and dimension reveal their character.
I don’t know want my unique mirror would look like. I have one mirror that I purchased that goes over my dresser. It’s huge and heavy and requires two people to shift, framed in a beautiful dark cherry but free of ornamentation or embellishments. That is the kind of mirror I chose to buy, but does it reveal anything about me other than I dislike dusting? I don’t know.
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Out of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,
Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping
To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.
Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel
Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel
Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.
And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.
And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,
The rainbow arching over in the skies,
New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.
All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea
Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously,
Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea
Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death we see.
…D.H. Lawrence
Who does not love the brisk fresh air of the seaside, the glittering waves that sparkle and catch the sunlight, scattering miniature sun sparks across the landscape. How lovely, then, that Ariskea made a floating bed for us water lovers to cast off and float away, dreaming of happy things in the sunshine and listening to the steady rhythm of the waves. Ariskea also released lotus flowers which technically prefer still fresh water, but Second Life habitats are more forgiving.
With fashion, one plus one does not always equal two. For example, what I am wearing today combines two pieces from Liziaah into something new. I think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. After all, there are three outfits, not two.
I was drawn to both the dress and the top from Liziaah. I noticed they both had similar embellishment, common in a collection where designers seek to find unifying elements. I though they might work together
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