Features • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
I was raised, for three years, in Virginia, where the elementary schools taught us that the Chesapeake was our bay, the Appalachias were our mountains. This was the Virginia I recall, singing an old folk song about the Shenandoah River Valley, Oh Shenandoah, the one that starts, “I long to see you,” and ends, “I’m bound to leave you.”
Poetry • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
after Ellen Bass
O black bean boy, O owl eyes,
O package of muscle and fur.
My cautious companion, my
in-love-with-me friend. What will we do
without your low grumbles
your hot-water-bottle body
beside us all winter? O sun-scorched nose,
O wacky teeth that can’t bite a thing, O
fluted, veined callalily ears
taking the world straight to the heart.
There is no guy I’d rather sleep with,
no slinky tuxedo like yours.
When you frolic and hop
in your nightly routine, the sounds
of cracked glass and low howls
are like the heartbeats in a womb.
In that embryonic waterfall, we sleep.
Two lucky mothers.
O bloated bladder, O swollen,
sleepy heart. When we nearly lost you,
we sought you in our grief
to ease our grief. We held your exhausted body
to us. O seeing soul, O aperture closing and
widening, catching the landscape
of more than mere humans can know.
Beloved beast, dear body that heals and heals.
Tiny horse, honeyed contralto,
our leaping, whiskered seal —
Fiction • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
W E The People entered the home of the Crisis Actor illegally. This is true. Why deny it? We certainly weren’t going to be invited in. There was the matter of him knowing our faces, from those days when we picketed on the gum-spotted sidewalk or confronted him at his car in a parking garage downtown, our accusations drowned out by the scrape of skater boys. And, of course, there was the restraining order. Legal lines had been drawn and, yes, we decided to cross those lines, which resisted no more ably than strands of cobwebs stretched across a basement doorway.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
Notes
The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.
From the Archives
Features • Winter 2014 - Trial
*The incident reported below took place on July 1, 2011, at 11:41 p.m. In Blue Ridge, GA. Jim Callihan has been indicted with charges of vehicular homicide, among others. His trial is set for spring 2014. Names have been redacted out of sensitivity to the family.*
1. Summer in Blue Ridge is a time of coming, not going. It is a time when all is provided. The local grocer sells produce only in weeks of drought, and the pesticides used are from spray bottles, intended for skin. Once the evening air has cooled, dinners are taken outside, where dishes are left till morning, licked clean by our nightly visitors. Backyards end at the man-made lake, which was filled years ago in the shape of a spider. This way, it was thought, everyone could live by the water.
2. On warm nights, Jim and I swim in the dark, naked and male, loving the feel so much it leaves us hollow, floating on our backs so the fish don't nip at our peckers. We look up, out of courtesy, talk girls, belch. Back on the shore, we shake our clothes of ants, or worse than Back on the shore, we shake our clothes of ants, or worse than ants, before re-dressing. The morning sun finds our backs marked by the harmless teeth of fish.
3. "Floridiots" come in droves to the town of Blue Ridge, keeping locals off the roadways after five on Fridays. These tourists trade in their beaches and Surf-N-Turf for our mountains and grits. Downtown store owners, who were once tourists themselves, lather on our accent and sell things none of us locals will touch for prices we can't afford.
4. Downtown is a five-minute walk from our side of the lake. This is a fact that realtors selling summer cabins remember, but it doesn’t stop us from driving to church on Sunday mornings. What stops us, usually, is the lack of parking spots. This Sunday, we are running late because my mother can find nothing to wear. We decide to fight it out.
Our neighbor’s truck is parked in their driveway when ours pulls out. This is the second week, but everyone understands. No one doesn’t know. Their pew will be left empty, in case they decide to show, and another family will take up the far half so that it will not seem obvious if they sit this one out.
The congregation, with their shined shoes and combed, gray hair, know how to deal with those who are dealing. They understand what the newspaper left out—that it has been a rough ten days for the Callihan family.
The tendency, here, is to say: “You should see the other family.”
5. In Blue Ridge, the church is beside the courthouse, as is everything downtown, and at the back of the courthouse is the jail. This is where I go when I break for the bathroom as the preacher fields prayer requests.
The jail is half full. Its occupants include two DUIs, one misdemeanor for marijuana, and a man being held for the things he did to his daughter.
And now, I guess, my neighbor, Jim Callihan.
6. Growing up, Jim Callihan was better than me at everything that mattered. At that point, this was horses, girls, and age. He thought we stopped riding horses together because I was jealous, because he was too fast. The truth is, there came a point when I no longer wanted to wash naked in the creek with someone who had four years of puberty on me. And yes, he was fast.
7. Summers of my childhood were spent playing John Wayne in the woods behind my house. Or my neighbor, Jim, played John Wayne. I played Clint. We liked cowboys, the sweat on horseflesh, the glint
of a spur. The others—the tourists in town—liked the idea of cowboys. They wanted to be John Wayne for the weekend.
Jim wanted it for life.
*For life*, I should mention, is not a term we hope gets thrown around a lot. It is something we in Blue Ridge do not wish on Jim Callihan.
8. With a television, toilet, and twin bed all on twenty-four square feet of concrete, the jail cells in Blue Ridge leave little to the imagination. It is not the place I want to be on a Sunday morning, but I decide to play it light.
“This is a good look for you, Mr. Wayne,” I tell my friend, keeping my eyes on anything but the patchwork of stitching across his nose. I slide open the cell door and sit beside him on the bed. “Two good
Christian boys on a Sabbath morn.”
9. Friendships of a certain length are bound to run through phases. The best was my childhood friend’s cowboy phase, which he did not grow out of but rather increasingly into, eventually leaving me behind. The worst was his faggot phase, which followed shortly after I was no longer included in his cowboy tales of cigars and tits. The brunt of this phase was directed at me, the child faggot, though I’m sure there were others—at school, in locker rooms, surrounded by cowboys.
These phases you forget when your friends are in need. When your sister’s first boyfriend, for example, who had a year or two of puberty on you, gives you a black eye in the McDonald’s parking lot because you didn’t like the way he was talking to her, you forget that, afterward, she asked *him* if he was alright.
And when your childhood best friend is in jail for killing one person and paralyzing another, you forget the time he pinned you to the ground in his backyard because one of his new friends called the game “Smear the Queer.”
10. My mother was upset when she heard the news—what had happened to the neighbor’s son. My father was practical. “Give it a couple days,” he said, folding the newspaper and dropping it on the table. “All this will blow over.”
“And when it does,” said my mother, “that family is in for a long vacation.”
I picked up the newspaper and gave the story a read. “On second thought,” I said, “don’t forget what happened to the last family who said that.”
11. The people of downtown Blue Ridge are not kind to the Callihan family. After what happened, they are cold, petty. They quiet for even the Callihan’s acquaintances.
I do not care for these people. They do not make me feel guilty. The most pressing concern they seem to have about Jim Callihan ramming his truck into an Orlando license plate is the effect it could have on souvenir sales.
12. Families vacation in Blue Ridge expecting to show their children some semblance of a culture different from their own: to let them experience a life less complex and a people less sophisticated. They come hoping to uncover the history of the first southern settlers, a history borne in gold-rush towns, tucked under lines of mountains, in bootlegging, butter, and incest.
In other words, these people* come* for the lawlessness.
“What the hell did they expect?” asked Jim Callihan, having sobered up for a couple of hours in jail.
13. The wreck was the biggest news all year, and the offender was the doctor’s son. It made sense, then, that the better of the two town lawyers took the case, free of charge.
“We sure showed them,” said the lawyer to the family. Then, recanting, said, “I’m going to hell for that one, aren’t I, Doc?”
Laughing: “Aren’t I going to hell for that one?”
14. When the newspaper reported the car accident in Blue Ridge, it told how the children affected were ages three and five, and how it was the five year old who was dealt death upon impact; the three-year-old, immobility.
We learned the rest through gossip.
We learned, for example, that the person responsible for the crash was a teenager seen drinking at a bonfire that evening—a bonfire from which I, too, drove home. We heard that he was driving 30 above the speed limit, and that he ran a red light a few miles back, a red light where a police car was stationed. The officer, it was suggested, must have seen who it was in the red truck and decided not to bother turning a siren, because the driver was a good kid from a good family, and because all boys deserve a little fun now and then.
15. In a town where so much of our identity depends on us vs. them, public opinion is easy to gauge. In the case of the fatal car crash involving a local teen, the most important evidence for many in the town was the other car’s license plate. After being un-crumpled and spread flat across the D.A.’s table, the town on the license plate was a town not *here*.
The Orlando family involved in the wreck requests the trial be moved elsewhere. They refuse to return to this town.
The lawyer representing the local teen will not allow it. He says, “Jury of your* peers*.”
16. Old teachers bring food to the Callihan house as though it were a funeral. Mrs. Callihan, with a rubber band wrapped around the waistline of her skirt, listens as these women explain how her role is crucial. What a shame, they say, how tragedy can tear apart a perfect family.
“We are all mothers,” they say.
They talk with Mrs. Callihan about the good times—how they knew her son. If they had asked me, if Mrs. Callihan needed my stories as she did theirs, what would I have said?
Perhaps I would have told about feeding fireflies to a found bullfrog, about watching its belly pulse light and dark, light and dark, beneath the cover of my hands, before her son appeared with the three-pronged gig. Or about the time he stood behind me on the bank of the rock quarry and promised, “You jump, I jump”—the day I tasted the lime of the water, turned red, as he ran to the road for help.
17. Jim Callihan rode his horse hard, with spurs. When he had the choice to ride Dollar at full gallop, or wait behind for me and Ranger, he chose to gallop. I could tell what he was thinking by his speed around the trail.
I once rode upon Jim washing blood from a gash in his leg. All he said, the water separating at his knee and rolling downstream, was, “Dollar finally grew a pair.”
Dollar was taking water beside him on the bank, mud splattered along her underside, more his equal in that moment than I would ever be.
18. “John Wayne never stayed in jail,” said my friend, Jim, the third time I visited.
He had been in jail for two weeks, was growing impatient.
“John Wayne killed Indians,” I said, checking for remorse in his glare.
19. In the weeks following the accident, the defendant’s family received photographs of the two children, the victims of the crash. The boy, now paralyzed below the neck, is pictured swinging from monkey bars. The girl, now dead, is with her mother, kneeling in a bed of flowers.
The defendant’s mother had been reading self-help books that instructed her to save reminders like these, to place them conspicuously. This way, the books explained, their family can come to terms with reality.
It makes me wonder what the people who write these books have been through. What have their sons done?
20. I have heard that people behind bars often ask why their friends haven’t visited. My friend, Jim, asks what people are saying. It’s the first real conversation I’ve had with him since the accident that got him here. I expect him to open up, to confide in me the feelings he had been suppressing—the guilt, the sadness of it all.
“It could have been me,” he says instead. “I could have* died* in that crash.”
He asks what I thought, when I first heard the news. I tell him that I was worried, that we all were. What I don’t tell him is that the first thought that crossed my mind was: Good. Now he’s the fuck-up.
21. Autumn in Blue Ridge is for apple festivals. For final bonfires burned over raked leaves, for people in flannel shirts, whose truck windows remain closed.
It’s for the forgiveness of summer’s transgressions.
Or forgetting.
Even now, I can’t remember. Those nights of early summer, the nights spent in lake water, did the fish bite because they were hungry, or because we were where we shouldn’t have been? Were their intentions as harmless as we thought, or were their teeth marks evidence of our intrusion?
22. The town doctor is the father of a friend. He tells me a story about a woman he treats. This woman has been bitten three times by brown recluse spiders. After the second bite, she brought over friends to search the house. These friends opened her crawl space to find it laden with pearl-shaped eggs. There were so many spiders, said the friends, it looked as though the wooden beams were moving.
This woman called for an exterminator. When the poison had settled and she was allowed to move back in, she again checked her crawl space. What she found was not what she expected. Three hundred dollars worth of extermination had killed every* other *bug in the house, leaving carcasses scattered across the floor of the crawl space, dragged home by the spiders. She had provided them a feast.
23. The Associated Press picked up the story: the first time Blue Ridge has ever made the news. The story of Jim Callihan ran in hundreds of newspapers across the nation. In each article, pictures of the town were included—of the lake, the mountain foliage.
This fall has been the busiest the town has ever seen.
This is that story.
Poetry • Fall 2009
Far back before the sun
made any sort of difference,
and the icicles hung like knots
in the light-grains that housed us,
I was unafraid to take your hand,
unaware of the future we unzipped
like a winter coat in late March,
thinking not so much I was touching you,
but somehow touch, and thus entering
some kind of experience. But it was remarkably
just like any other object, for something
with so many nerve endings.
Even your eyes, glowing in the halo
the sun praises from the atmosphere
in a still and timeless ring of dawnanddusk,
spin through it like a pair of fading globes.
Poetry • Fall 2019
At some point
I had a swollen muscle
)or a body
that pretended to be
one swollen muscle)
Loaned to me by a tuft of sugar cane
I don’t know how to hold sweetness
or vastness the right way
Like a poacher caressing dirt
before cutting for some long absent bone
What I’ve been able to hold has long
been lost in a hole of the white
porcelain of one whole universe’s heirlooms
Cartography is just the
impulse to jump
off of things
The righteous have since discovered
a black hole with its maw wide open
Who can compete
with that kind of devotion?
I certainly can’t
My stomach
Won’t hold any more of
The universe’s ash
I’ll cough it up in the yard
Next to the ire and the musk
and the citrus tree
While the man across the street
gives audience with pillaging eyes
At my wither
at my pinked failure
Who will hold my hair
when that love escapes
my mothering tendon
Who will hold me through
All my wretched
Poetry • Commencement 2011
In the ninth year,
a high, bright room
received the secret wheel.
Outside, near the sky,
a tangle of trees,
the sound of sea.
The spinster,
her hands showing
wet, bloody with light,
shuddered.
Beneath her weight,
the stool was still.
She dressed the distaff,
hairs hanging off
like cornsilk, unspun—
a pale, worsted pistil,
which she twisted
into tufts
of fiber, pinned
to the spindle: speed
made a swatch
of her fingers,
braided, unbraided—
almost touching
the warming thread.
Being lulled,
I looked below
to her naked feet:
to where they beat
time against the treadle—
patter-pattern
without sound.
The wooden machine
sloughed off the skein.
I bore it to the basin:
crushed cochineal,
incarnadine.
Dripping, it dried,
caked with color
like bloodcrust in hair—
I evened the line.
Slowly the twine
whispered and wound:
a sphere.
In this way
I gave you
a light burden
to carry unclothed
into the tunnel—
you will want
to find your way back.
Poetry • Spring 2010
Myself am green in this:
the moon let some light
intensely on the grass.
The knots on the trunk would make a face on it,
if one were further in.
When clouds, the moon’s amok,
becomes less relevant,
and cannot hold much.
What I think of is how,
when the light is switched off,
the last thing seen (a lamp)
flashes on your eyelids.
What I want is a chair to sit,
of which I am very certain.
Features • Fall 2008
I was eighteen the time I wore an ISSEY MIYAKE dress, and it immediately struck me: there was too much fabric. The sleeves were three times the length of my arms—the neck, intended for a giraffe. It fit me like a glove, but it flowed past the floor, pooling around my feet. But procuring some scissors, the shop girls explained: “Make of it what you want.” They pointed to some lines deftly hidden in the fabric. “There are many options.” And just like that, the consumer becomes the creator and the boutique becomes a personal workshop.
An inversion of the consumer-creator relationship and a reconsideration of the place of technology and engineering in fashion design, the dress was a product of the now famous collaboration between Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara.
Viewed today as the Godfather of Japanese fashion, Miyake already had world renowned for his groundbreaking designs. Miyake created the ISSEY MIYAKE design studio in 1970, and spent the following decades challenging the conventional shapes and European traditions of high fashion. Miyake demonstrated particular interest in the intersection of fashion and technology, most notably with his launch of his Pleats Please line in 1993. A production technique that uses a special heat press technique to infuse simple, colorful fabrics with shape and texture, the results are light yet defined, free-flowing yet highly constructed. Further, the polyester clothing requires minimal sewing and corresponds with Miyake’s mission for beauty and function in innovative form.A-POC, which stands for “a piece of clothing,” and rhymes with “epoch,” is the latest technologically-driven line from the Mikaye-Fujiwara collaboration. , Fujiwara and Miyahi’’s collaboration, and their technologically inspired designs and production lines, respond to timeless a question for the fashion world: the delicate balance between high art and a commercial success.
Fashion has always toed a fine line between its dual identitiest’;it is pulled towards the two poles of ready-to-wear street clothes and haute couture. For many designers, the answer comes through the creation of two lines. Designers will show their hand-made high fashion on the runways of Paris and Milan, and spread their names with special, factory-produced collections for lower-end merchandisers. Yohji Yamamoto partnered with Addidas, John Varvatos with Converse, Isaac Mizrahi with Target. These partnerships allow a designer to meet the demands of a more consumer-minded business as well as maintain the freedom of high fashion expression.
The answer for Miyake and Fujiwara, however, came not from the production of two lines, but from use of a new means of production. Merging computer technology with the creativity of the consumer, the design duo founded A-POC—“A Piece of Cloth,” and rhyming with ““epoch.”” A revolutionary design technique, A-POC transforms a single thread into clothing sans coudre. The designer develops a pattern program, funnels a single thread into the knitting machine and presto—out comes a tubular piece of cloth, size and shape dependent on its intended use. Sewing is superfluous. Reliance on sweatshops disappears, as do long hours of hand sewing in Parisian ateliers. In a way, then, A-POC piggy-backed on the work of Miyake’s earlier work, using technology to bring new vigor and innovation to the fashion industry.
Yet despite the use of machine production, A-POC defies the tedium of the mass, factory-produced clothes. It is the consumer who adds the final artistic element, who becomes the final designer. Cutting along faint lines embedded in the production of the cloth, the customer chooses sleeve length, garment length, neck style and more—transforming a long tubular creation into a functional piece of clothing. With a pair of scissors, then, mass produced clothing becomes a custom-made dream.
The power of this form-function solution brought the duo much acclaim, and shifted Fujiwara’s career notably from the textile engineer to the fashion designer. In 2006, Fujiwara became the Creative Director for ISSEY MIYAKE, Miyake himself moving on to new pursuits, and in this role, he has continued the MIYAKE tradition of fusing technology and fashion. Preferring to focus on the new, the original, Fujiwara rarely takes inspiration from the past. His shows are never send-backs to the 1920s flappers nor an homage to Versailles circa Louis XIV. He emphasizes what is new, different, and possible in the modern age. His philosophy is simple: “I do not believe that any discussion of art is possible without bringing technology onboard.”
And even in his most recent work focused on nature, Fujiwara has maintained this dependence on the mechanical and the industrial. Exploring the ways in which technology mimics, preserves, even enables the natural, he illuminates the connection he sees between the typically opposing forces. Last month in Paris he showed “Color Hunting.” In preparation for this show—the Spring 2009 collection—Fujiwara took over 3,000 color swatches to the Amazon Rainforest, aiming to capture the exact, quintessential shades of the jungle. For Summer 2008, Fujiwara was captivated by all things Wind. “To observe the wind is to be aware of nature, to think about the flow of air that envelopes us and the environment in which we exist,” the ISSEY MIYAKE Team explained. The collection thus included clothes unconventionally intended not to protect a person from the elements, but to enhance a person’s interaction with their surroundings.
For both collections, technology was the bridge to the successful partnership between fashion and nature. For “Color Hunting,” Fujiwara identified the natural hues he desired—creating some clothes to achieve the natural element—but he also experimented with the transformation of these colors in the urban landscape, capturing the effect a glass prism or metallic reflection create. To truly create the effect of Wind, Fujiwara partnered with Dyson—the high-tech British vacuum producers. Together the duo built an enormous cyclone to simulate the many forms of wind—mechanically engineering the very natural environment he hopes his clothes will enhance.
For some designers, their fashion shows seem an opportunity to shock and stun. Twice a year, the runway creates an opportunity to smile smugly and say, “Oh yes, I dared.” We love them for it. We love John Galiano for filling Parisian Vogue with models garbed as pirates. We love Marc Jacobs for throwing Grunge-wear in the face of New York’s most fashionable elite. Their dedication to the fabulous—even the absurd—is captivating. It frees us from the daily convention of what one wears.
But what’s interesting about ISSEY MIYAKE is that despite the utter originality of his work, Fujiwara is far from smug. He intends neither to shock, nor stun. Instead, he is eerily nonchalant about his originality, matter of fact, even. Whether by recreating the natural through the mechanical or by creating an entire evening gown from a single thread, Fujiwara will defy every fashion convention in existence all while suggesting that the convention never existed. He makes his innovation seem apparent—obvious creations the circumstance. His models add to this effect. Awash in perfectly engineered color-hues and surrounded by yards of free-flowing, crafted cloth, they seem entitled to the ingenuities enabled by modern engineering.
In conjunction with his participation with Harvard’s Project East fashion show, Fujiwara spoke with The Advocate, and he spent considerable time discussing the place for innovation. His design philosophy helps explain the aura of nonchalance: “Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing,” Fujiwara explains. New thinking and new designs come from precise situations that demand solutions. In a complex society of evolving desires and circumstances, innovative design is but a necessary reaction—a simple, inescapable reality.
***
Harvard Advocate: Issey Miyake is famous for his integration of design, technology, engineering and fashion, and you clearly greatly influenced this practice. Can you describe the relationship you see between fashion, technology, and directed research? Why is this important in fashion, and how do you imagine it will influence the future of design? How or does the relationship with technology morph fashion from the world of art into the world of science?
Dai Fujiwara: During the latter half of my research aimed at creating the A-POC brand, I came to embrace a vague image in my mind. Using the flow of a river as a metaphor, apparel is located in the downstream sector of the textile industry infrastructure. Apparel designers must wait for the items produced upstream and there is no great need to worry about how materials used in fashion are made. This approach and thinking had become fixed in the industry, and I was beginning to grow fed up with it.
Computers offer the convenience of guaranteed information operation, with costs remaining low [as well as] the ability to turn out highly adaptable items despite being created through automated mass production. I did not see much evolution in production lines controlled by machines, or in the production methods that required human hands.
Thus, just as I came to the conclusion that production lines not controlled by machines and production methods not requiring human hands were in fact necessary for fashion, I felt that the conventional image of the river had become hackneyed. Much like fish swim from habitats in vast ocean realms to congregate in plankton generated at the boundary line between warm and cold currents, new visions are being drafted and implemented in the midst of capitalist society – the scene of complex interactions between money, people, commodities and now the Net society.
Naturally, it is impossible to discuss fashion outside the realm of clothing, it is also true that it is no longer feasible to ponder fashion solely in terms of clothing. When, at crucial turning points, new information, new commodities, new images and new characters emerge, people will demand those new elements, along with other information, things and images. I believe that creating methods to initiate these new flows is extremely important. I also feel that proposing such changes from the viewpoint of fashion is an effective means of corroborating the performance of potential catalysts. Within my work at present, I strive to fully embrace these concepts.
It is difficult for individuals to generate turning points. However, it may be possible to bring about new movements by joining with different partners or consolidating different categories. If the time can be found to unravel circumstances or situations already in existence, and then find compatible partners to mutually discuss the world around us, our actions and discussions will lead to new ideas and movements.
In the same right, it is also necessary to forge the future of design. A vast array of accountability derived from the structure of society has spread to the design domain, prompting the need for capable designers to respond to this need. Based on the belief that easily manageable solutions are necessary, the A-POC design concept was launched Though it is my impression that there is little change in the scope demanded of fashion design, I can only conclude that the design clout of organizations unable to create items from the stance of environmental engineering will inevitably weaken. Design, by definition, is the work of formulating certain balances, coordinations and other elements. There is thus a need, I feel, to clarify what specific balances need to be struck. For the very reason that diversity is expanding within the sphere of fashion, the demands of design are much greater. Because the social responsibility in this area is in another increasing trend, it is clear that the sphere of design (referred to as balancing abilities here) is expanding and it will be vital to mount effective responses to social demands.
HA: With the continued collaboration of fashion designers and various technicians—from within and outside the world of design—how do you envision fashion’s place within society evolving? How do the technologies now available to fashion designers change the identity of high art and more consumer fashion?
DF: It is impossible to truly discuss the diversity demanded in fashion in terms of a system that looks to Paris or Milan as the pinnacles. Each new logistical revolution in today’s Web society raises momentum explosive to fashion, threatening the status of the conventional collections (twice yearly fashion markets).
Within the Web society, the demand is for “graspable clothing.” This refers to so-called “real clothes” – that is, apparel which easily appeals to consumers and is readily understood by purchasers. In a world that now expands across borders of time and distance, such fashions are beginning to take on the power to change values and thinking. I believe that this impact is also being felt at the “fashion week” events in New York, Milan and Paris – forums for showcasing new creations.
There is also the concern, however, that on the flip side of excessive demands for easily understood results, the overall scene will become tedious. When proceeding with a focus on creation in an era in which both information and commodities have begun to take on their own values, it will likely become difficult to continue to hold up both sides of diverse and “graspable” clothing.
Basically speaking, I believe that fashion must be allotted a major degree of freedom within the world we live in. In the quest for freedom, failure to resolve new issues characterized by strong demands for social qualities will render it impossible to nurture the freedom that everyone recognizes and wants. In that sense, fashion designers who continue to exist in environments of freedom while fulfilling their social responsibilities may very well represent the “new cool.”
With regard to high art and consumer fashion, while the ability of designers to make ready use of technology may place major restrictions on their work, it will also become easier to successfully benefit from cost balance and quality guarantees. Likewise, while the use of technology by designers signifies the transition into work with a high degree of social impact from a management standpoint, it also means that designers are taking on heavy social responsibilities at the same time. If this foundation can be mobilized to render new proposals for consumers through the act of supplying the world with clothing, it will also come to wield great clout in society.
HA: Last year you teamed up with Dyson to create “Wind” as an element of the Spring show and this year the colors of the Amazon influenced your show. Please comment on the relationship between nature and fashion. What is the role of nature in your work? How has your relationship with and your vision of nature changed over the years? How do the natural elements of the show connect with your more technological leanings?
DF: Any worthwhile discussion of nature is incomplete without the inclusion of technology. It is patently clear, therefore, that technology has become indispensable in sustaining the Earth, as we know it. These influences have already been internalized in the realm of fashion as well.
HA: Conventionally, nature and technology seem as opposing forces, and yet both greatly influence your designs. How do they come together in for you in design? How do they complement one another, oppose one another, etc.?
DF: Please conceive that nature is you, yourself. Technology, furthermore, is also encapsulated within your being. While as you say, nature and technology appear to act as opposing forces, in reality they exist in a mutually complementary, give-and-take relationship.
HA: Academy has routinely placed fashion on the sidelines of scholarship, and yet museums and design forums are increasingly acknowledging the place of fashion as a historical artifact and commentary. How do you see fashion and design as a social commentary? Do you have advice for scholars on ways to study and analyze these artifacts?
DF: In recent years, the reality that fashion differs from its conventional image as an extravagant and festive celebration, and is in fact one component of the overall social fabric, has come to be understood through the lens of economic angles. Someday, perhaps, an economist specializing in fashion may be honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences!
HA: Would you like to share anything more on your design philosophy?
DF: Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing. Rather, I believe it is people who sense that the old ideas and thinking no longer do the trick are the forces behind such evolution. Toward that end, to enter new realms through the medium of design, I believe in the need to create, through your own effort and volition, specific opportunities for encounters which demand decisive situations and events. Once you take part in something that needs change, you have put yourself on the path
2026