FASHION & MOTION IN TIME

Hello and welcome!

With my lovely website now up and running it appears now is the best time ever to write my own blog.

My blog will be comprised of shared thoughts, ideas and inspirations that have shaped my life and made me the person who I am today and consequently the type of artwork that I love to create.

The fact that I'm a skilled fashion illustration artist, it stands to reason that I have a deep love for fashion, And, of course, fashion is influenced by many things.

Fashion has always been a spearhead for us homo sapiens. It leads us, evolves, shape shifts and defines a period in time, which it sometimes likes to revisit.

Back in the mid-late Nineties, when Great Britain couldn't do no wrong and Brit-pop and YBA's (Young British Artists) were ruling the World, my mum put together a series of fashion files that included newspaper articles, magazine cuttings, Vogue covers, brochures, promo cards, advertising, photographs of window displays and much, much more.

She continued putting together these amazing files up until the late Noughties. Each folder is like a piece of the past that, when opened, becomes suspended in present time. Just to experience this is truly magical. I can only describe it as being like some kind of time capsule. Or, as the 2nd Mrs De Winter puts it in Daphne Du Maurier's "Rebecca", "If only there could be an invention... that bottled up a memory, like a scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, When one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again."

Only in this case, opening up the files and immersing yourself in them transports the person to another time and place.

Now, I've had the greatest of fortune to have inherited them and everything about these fashion files fascinates me.

It's hard to take into consideration that the models featured are well in their 40s today and that their modelling days are well and truly over, except for likes of Kate Moss.

Some fashion appears a little out-of-date, but not much of it. At least in my opinion.

At the time while writing this I'm pouring over an office box file filled to its capacity with newspaper clippings that my mum never got round to filing, all relating to fashion between April 1997-February 1998.

One debate that has never gone out of style is the Thin Model vs. Big Model on the catwalk. During the mid-late Nineties Heroin Chic took off in a big way. For some bizarre reason fashion dictated to young and impressionable people that it looked cool to appear to be on the lethal drug Heroin. Thin, emancipated, ill-looking with smudged, black eye makeup and appearing to be lifeless was the ticket back then. Fashion models exposed jotting hip bones, ribs and collar bones. Then came the buxom beauty in the shape of Sophie Dahl, a then size 16, and crushed that completely.

I've got beside me an article from the Daily Telegraph dated January 20 1998. Its headline reads: "Galliano fantasy reveals the hand of a true genius." It mentions about a "Ballet Russes" gown featuring thousands of lapis lazuli beads hand-sewn on to hand-painted silk velvet and that it required 750-1000 painstaking hours of work by the "petit mains" of the atelier to create it. His collection was described as breath-taking and life-giving and that he was a true fashion genius of our time.

Another newspaper article, this time from the Guardian, is dated Thursday February 26 1998. Its headline reads: "Joan goes up in flames in McQueen's grand finale." It describes how the audience was met by a solid lava catwalk and the sound of flames crackling at the Alexander McQueen show. The show was called Joan (as in Arc), and it ended on a pyrotechnic note with a model encased in crimson beads standing in a circle that burst into flames.

McQueen was described as being as cool as cucumber, only stopping to kiss his mother as he took his bows.

I went to the McQueen exhibition back in 2015 at the V&A and saw this crimson beaded outfit for myself. I can only describe it as remarkable and one of his many standout pieces. He will be sorely missed in the fashion industry. McQueen was a London lad who made it good and changed the landscape of fashion. His legacy lives on...

As I put my box file away, I think to myself how valuable the information in it really is. It would take an age to gather and search for this actual information online with no absolute guarantee.

What I've inherited isn't worth its weight in gold, but to me and anyone who has a deep passion for fashion it's priceless and I wish to share this with you.

Thank you,