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Good morning all! Through following the 99% Invisible #podcast I recently discovered #ArticlesOfInterest (focused on fashion, trends etc). I know nothing about fashion, and would have said I'd have little interest in it. But the story-telling is *so* good. Season 3 is one long story about a particular trend, but it's also about politics, culture and the conversations we have with each other through the way we dress. Here's a link if you want to check it out: https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/american-ivy-chapter-1
I'm not going to spoil the content, but one of the things that really resonated with me, was the idea of how fashion represents an explicit choice about the way people signal who they are. How we fit in with the crowd, or stand out from it. And how decisions about that are shaped by wider cultural, social and political forces. It's something that struck a chord because I thought about it quite a lot in my world-building for #TheSeventhColour...
The world in that book is a post-Tolkien fantasy world. Yes, there was magic once, and dragons and orcs and elves and dwarfs. But those are all long-gone. The dragons were wiped out in war, the elves went into the west millennia ago, magic faded, the dwarves disappeared. I wanted to explore what that world would be like: a world where everyone knew that magic used to make some things possible, but also knew, with certainty, that the magic was gone...
It struck me that a society burdened with that knowledge would stagnate. You would know that flight was possible, for example, but without magic you would know it was unattainable. It seemed to me that a society like that would continue to evolve, slowly, but to a point before the various #Revolutions (industrial, political etc) that characterise our own recent history. The society would reach a certain point, and then stop moving forward...
Looking at this from a UK perspective, it struck me that this point of stagnation would occur at around the time of the Georgian era, the time of #Regency. A time on the cusp of change, but where society was focused to an extraordinary degree on fashion. The era of Beau Brummel, where a person's moral worth might be assessed by their attire. And the more I read into that era, the more I saw echoes of the world I was trying to build...
A world where any creativity, and innovation, was channelled into devising or keeping up with ever changing fads and fancies. Where this would be the way in which people found, signalled, and lost, their place in society. As I say, I know precious little about fashion. So it was never a central part of my story. But it was an idea that stayed with me - and so it was great to encounter the same ideas, unexpectedly, in a podcast about 20th century US/global trends and the way they are shaped.
@WordDruid Aren't those podcasts good? I've enjoyed them very much. i also love 99% Invisible because it talks about the stuff we usually don't even notice, though it is a big part of our lives.