Tea at Trianon: Dress-coding

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, November 18, 2019

Dress-coding

Fashion and technology. Weird but interesting. From Ssense:

After my last class I went to visit the artist Pamela Liou, a former jewelry designer who build her own open source jacquard loom using IC3 chips and a 3D printer. Fun fact: IC3 chips were first used in guided missiles. A closed loop–from weaponry back to clothing looms. When I asked her about her world of fashion and programming, she crystallized a lot of what compelled me to take classes at all:

“I feel like the fashion world and women at large could benefit from the lessons of open source, the idea that we're greater the more we share with each other. I wanted to do the loom because I was really frustrated with my own lack of access to something that I wanted. And it made me think about craft differently. The jacquard loom is sort of the symbol of displacement of craftspeople, but I see it as an opportunity to upchange craft. Machines can be idiosyncratic, they can have personalities, it can be tooled for one specific weird thing and it doesn't have to be the lowest common denominator appliance. It can be meditative for your own state of mind, rather than eking out every ounce of productivity from you. Having an intimate relationship with tools can and should be part of the craft. Many people want more clinical perspectives but this loom is the opposite: it embraces materiality, chaos and eccentricity.” (Read more.)