Skip to main content

The real does not efface itself

Search This Blog

My book

Get link
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

My book Contemporary Indonesian Fashion. Through the Looking Glass is published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts. It is available for pre-order
Please see here

Get link
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Grey hair : what few people will tell you

My hair. Jumper from The Bias Cut Photo: Katie Frost I recently came across a couple of magazines with beauty features on how to care for grey/white hair. I welcome that, (naturally) grey hair is still not quite accepted as a colour, though the 'embrace your grey' movement has come a long way. So it is heartening to see that discussing grey hair is no longer about how to hide it nor is it confined to publications for seniors, such as Saga magazine. Grey haired models are more visible - only last week I modelled for a known sports/dance wear company, based in the US but selling globally. For that job having grey hair was not the only requirement; the ability to move was equally important. But the presence of an older model such as myself amongst the much younger fitness models, some of whom former athletes, showed the good will of the company and their effort to be inclusive. Older women, after all, can be seen in gyms and yoga studios; fitness is encouraged among t

Sex after 50

Between myself and Unbearable Lightness we are beginning to sound like a broken record, always trying to explode myths and combat prejudices about the older body. Every time I think there is no longer any need to raise the issue I am proven wrong. I was teaching second year undergraduates yesterday. I co-teach with other colleagues. The way it works is one of us lectures for one hour to a class of 70 plus students, then we split the class into small groups and we take the students in separate seminars. Seminar means that we use the ideas put forward in the lecture for discussion but each one of us taking the group will add something - no seminar group is exactly the same as the one going on in the class next door even though the issues discussed are pre-set. I usually get some powerpoint slides by email the night before my colleague delivers the lecture, so that I get an idea of what she is going to say. I also go to the lecture - with great effort and much muttering under my

'Classically ageless': unpacking a classic myth.

Me and model Alessandro Manfredini . This is the time of the year when agelessness, perhaps with a touch of tokenism, is featured in magazines. For some years now Vogue has had an annual issue dedicated to agelessness, this year it was the one that came out in July with Renée Zwelleger, now 48, on the cover. I feel ambivalent about this idea of 'agelessness'. On one hand, the notion of agelessness taps into our classical cultural roots - classical art and classicism are after all, by definition ageless - on the other, it is a euphemism for 'near-youthfulness' or 'youthfulness' which is what classical art, after all, eulogises. The 'ageless' women we are prompted to regard as aspirational tend to be the ones who have made a success of having been able to defeat the 'ravages' of time - we truly need a different vocabulary to talk about older age, the words we use to discuss it are so loaded! Very occasionally magazines will sh

Powered by Blogger

Alex B