Introducing Fashion Week Guest-Blogger Luigi Tadini: "Is Fashion High Art?"

To explain fashion one must look beyond the glossy pages of magazines or the brilliantly detailed windows that decorate our city’s finest zip codes. When asked by PAPERMAG to chronicle my personal Fashion Week adventures, I quickly accepted the challenge. Once I started brainstorming themes for my posts, I became very reflective as to why has fashion been such an enormous part of my daily life. Beyond being a jewelry designer myself, fashion has always inspired me.

In my opinion, Madame Chanel was onto to something. Fashion is everywhere!

In a sociological arena, fashion is a reflection of where we stand in life; our ideas, our morals, our religion, our desires, our imagination. It is a snapshot of our current cultural mindset. For example: think of the corset and the burkha. The peacoat and leather pants. The mohawk and the bob. High heeled shoes and the bikini.

As you read this, images pop into your head and instantly an emotion is aroused. This fashion sense memory (if you will) has become part of our collective consciousness. The beauty of fashion, however, is the fact that these images provoke different emotions in each of us. Then could we call fashion high art?

How can we not compare the effect brilliant couturiers of yesteryears have had in our lives in the same way that perhaps Picasso, Chagall and Matisse have? The creations of Coco Chanel, Hubert de Givenchy and Christobal Balenciaga have directly affected us all and the way we dress, whether you shop at Uniqlo or on Avenue Montaigne. The precise and architectural beauty of a Balenciaga dress should be admired with the same fervor as Frank Gehry’s museums. An outrageous Galliano dress generates as much joy as a colorful and bold Matisse.

Think of all your favorite movies and how they moved you. Now close your eyes and certainly you’ll remember what your favorite gangster or Empress were wearing? Think of Holly Golightly, Lawrence of Arabia, Julian Kaye, Scarlett O’Hara or Casablanca’s Rick. All mediums intermingled.

Fashion is unique. It is a tool we use to express ourselves, the way we present ourselves to the world and the way the world perceives us. Fashion is livable art and we are all creators.

It is with this mind set (and I thank you in advance for humoring my rambling), that I have accepted the challenge of covering Fashion Week.

I look forward to seeing the world, if at least for one week, through the whimsical lenses of some our city’s finest free thinkers and I promise you to report anything worth a mention. Expect interviews with fashion insiders, amateur snapshots and daily chronicles.

So please send me your comments and opinions and I’ll make sure to post mine.

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