Analogue Chic

Archive for the ‘My Other Projects’ Category

There is a formal dress shop on Main Street in Danbury, and while the dresses aren’t my taste, I enjoy the prop styling in their windows.  Earlier this week, I walked by on my way home and the sun was hitting the scroll decals on the windows, and casting a shadow on the white dresses they have out, creating this big, graphic pattern.  I didn’t have my camera with me that day, and then had to wait another day for clear skies, and today I tried some shots.  My timing wasn’t exactly the same, so the scroll patterns aren’t in the same placement as when I first framed the shots, but I think I got a couple of not-too-shabby pictures, and the black & white filter helps a lot.

(The title refers to a great song by the Go-Gos that was on their album in the early 2000’s…)

I’m going to just direct you all to this blog post by a writer I admire very much.  Here’s an excerpt.

It’s the thin end of a wedge that on the thick end results in death, or abject misery. Women’s culture in the west – or at least the UK – is suffused with a miasma of self-hatred. Success isn’t success unless you have the kids, the perfect man and the perfect home. Women won’t allow themselves to settle for less and they won’t give themselves – or each other – a break.

I have heard it said that it isn’t important that the images of women we are surrounded with are so ridiculously unreal as to be alien. But it is. We grow up looking around us for what’s ‘normal’. We look at these images for what we expect to become.

Body image and female self-esteem has been an issue for me since high school, having myself dealt with the traumas of adolescence, and being saddened by the constant refrain of self-hatred from all the females around me.  And it doesn’t end with public school: working at a clothing store for the past 6 months, with female customers from 11 to 90, perfectly lovely, healthy women constantly tell me they need something to cover their arms, their stomach, their breasts, etc.

Those comments and related mannerisms in an individual would result in a referral to psychotherapy.  But since it’s exhibited by all women, all the time, and reinforced by the wider culture, it’s normalized, expected, even becoming a badge of pride or a match of one-upping a litany of physical flaws.

It’s not acceptable, in my book, and it’s definitely not healthy, on a society-wide level, if our mothers, sisters, educators, businesswomen, have no self-love.

Lesson #1 in healthy human relations: you must love yourself before you can love anyone else well.

And it’s doubly pertinent as I’m working to create a career in the fashion industry, where fantasy images are everywhere and only one physique is idolized and acceptable.