Creepy + Clever
A grab bag of cobwebs, loose flesh, and beetles.
Hello and welcome to any new subscribers who may have found themselves stumbling into my creaky little corner of the internet since last week’s NYFW coverage! I am thrilled and honored that you’ve joined me. If you are, in fact, new to me, my name’s Em Seely-Katz (ESK is great, too), and I’m a fashion writer, editor for publications such as Magasin, and doer-of-whatever-keeps-me-fed on the side (always looking for any kind of work, btw!). I care about accessibility in fashion in all senses: size, cost, and theory—I don’t believe (contrary to some loud members of the internet community) that clothes are intimidating or require deep, philosophically salient consideration to be brilliant or beautiful, though pontification in good humor and small doses can, admittedly, be fun.
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THANK YOU for being here, and I am always available @that.esque on Instagram for sartorial scandals/situations/summons. Here is a little preview of what’s below the paywall:
J. Kim has always been a little wacky with it, but I’ve genuinely never seen another designer deploy fabric tubes quite this wild an unsettling, especially in such an earthen color that only serves to emphasize the animalistic/insect-like/carnivorous plant-esque vibes of this eerie top. I hope the label continues to make ineffably disgusting pieces like this and I mean that earnestly—we have enough hot girl fodder, designers should be vying to innovate the next popular phobia.
See, Julian Dimase gets it! After designing prosthetics like Anya Taylor-Joy’s for the latest Mad Max, the brilliant Dimase’s logical next move was to make cute little going-out sets that look hewn from bunched-up flesh. I can’t explain how much this thought process tickles me, and think more hair/makeup/prosthesis artists should follow suit—remember when I jokingly predicted uprooted-human-hair-as-accessory multiple times and then it manifested as a genuine trend? I think wearing foreign flesh (especially in tones that mimic the wearer’s own) is the next body horror frontier. As I wrote years ago:
“[Artist Paul Thek’s] relationship to bloody, visceral imagery was not intended to shock, but to detach and re-contextualize: “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers” was Thek’s reaction when he visited the Capuchin catacombs, which are decorated with decaying corpses. He picked up what he’d thought was a piece of paper — it was a human thigh. Thek said ‘We accept our thing-ness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.’”
Dauphinette has such a genius sense of humor—this dress combines a Tracy Turnblad (Waters’ edition) sense of insouciance (see below) with a lavish, luxe sensibility. I wish the beetles extended down the skirt a bit, but I always love seeing the experimental pieces this label concocts and really enjoy how they post process pictures and keep us updated with their collective thought process.
