Epilogue: The meaning of dialogue
- You can read the interview here. (It’s written in Korean but I believe your Chrome will translate it.)
After receiving an interview offer, I kept thinking of words such as interview, conversation, and discourse. The thought lingering in my head was that chances to document anecdotes about fashion were rare. Of course, famous designers and fashion houses will organize their archives on their own. Still, stories of relatively inconspicuous people practising their styles, such as newly emerging brands, students, and freelancers, are often volatilized. Well, everyone’s starting point is different. Nevertheless, all of them go further from their current position, so it is also significant to record starting point and the journey as well as to record from the top.
Of course, Margiela brought the ‘making’ of fashion to the surface by revealing the seam and by showing unfinished clothes, handed over the right to decide the design to the wearer, and made the existence of the wearer come to the fore. It made it possible to expose those who had been relatively bypassed in the industry. However, since the fashion system still fuels the consumption of images, most of the time, communication is done only through the eyes. Even trends getting shorter and shorter are sometimes tricky to follow with the naked eye. Again, in this situation, it is unreasonable to share stories and leave records by speaking and writing. In this way, to drift into ever-changing trends and fashions, we are only looking at images tailored to your screen size and format, missing the story beyond that.
As the situation becomes more solid, as mentioned above, in fashion design, it is rare for producers, conveyors, and consumers to pursue communication through text. If you are chased by several projects and collections every year, even the moment to look back on the process is precious, but wouldn’t it be more challenging to organize it in the text? Furthermore, fashion ‘design’ usually has yet to have a specific client to whom it is commissioned, so it is rare to persuade the other person understands the outcome directly. However, fashion designers also have the bases and pieces of knowledge to explain their work. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that you have to infuse your collections and clothes with a story as Alexander McQueen did or that you have to set a specific theme for each season and stick to it. However, the designer wants to say that even if he presents a simple white T-shirt, they are revealing a T-shirt in which their own judgments and decisions, such as the weight of the fabric, the sewing method, and the location of the product tag, are intervened.
Clearly, communication through images is the essence of this industry, but that is why texts that explain the value of a brand, the attitude of experts, and the process of work in unambiguous language are essential. However, it is difficult even to grasp the context between clothes and fashion, fashion and society, and individuals and clothes with just the texts I read yesterday and today; thus, I have tried to continue writing about fashion. (Obviously, this problem is primarily due to my lack of competence, and there may be a variety of other causes, including linguistic and geographic asymmetry.)
Nevertheless, the articles, which I have never ‘professionally’ handled, I am writing on this platform are not based on any system or contract and are just extensions of thoughts that come to my mind at the moment, like a diary. I was grateful just for reading these articles steadily and even sending a request for a discussion. However, as the interview continued, I gained sympathy for the need to have a conversation about fashion rather than discovering ‘Muyo Park’ as an individual. Also, looking back, as I emphasized the necessity of writing in fashion earlier, I needed an opportunity to encounter writing and an attempt to read myself from the perspective of fashion.
In conclusion, this interview provided an opportunity to contemplate the relationship between fashion and text beyond Muyo Park’s personal discovery and ceimou’s brand archive. So, this conversation connected through the studio that is steadily practising fashion in the industry and the person who is looking outside the industry. Finally, you who read this article, I hope you will participate together and convey something more than the meaning of the words floating on the screen.
Sincerely,
Muyo Park朴無要
Instagram@parkmuyo
