Legally Smelf

slut-kissgirl:

ournirvanaspirit:

Kurt + Shirts he wore

Why do I own like half of these

(via sombre-mais-beau)

humalien:

The Carol Christian Poell wardrobe mobilizes another figure, in opposition to the shell: skin. Taking, for example, the form of the veined shirt from “Selfsame” (2009), which consists of two surfaces of layered fabric, between which vertical threads of a darker color are let loose, following the body’s motions as would veins rolling under the skin.

The “Off-scene” collection (SS 2008) proposes a series of garments equipped with reversible parachute lining allowing one to cover the shell, as a slough still attached to the body.

Skin is complementary to the skeleton and symmetrical with the shell. It is an envelope, where the skeleton is structure; yet at the same time it opposes the skeleton and the shell, because it is malleable, supple, plastic. But it is also a “paltry cast-off”, fragile, fleeting, transient, mortal. Thus to the shell and its solidity answers the skin’s frailty.

Poell’s bestiary, after using insects, then evokes reptiles. Let us note how disconcerting, even disturbing, those references are, assimilating human beings to non-vertebrate species which moreover suffer from a bad reputation across the Judaeo-Christian western world. As to the effects manifesting the fragility of the skin-cloth, they associate it with an epiderm not only vulnerable, but also diseased or painful.

“Metamorphosis/Anamorphosis” from fashionologie

humalien:

Against the cliché of a garment fitting the human body, Poell invents a new garment, a body in itself, an autonomous form, with which one must compose, and against which one will eventually fight. This conception presupposes a first, anatomical, inversion, as well as a generic displacement. While the skeleton is internal to the human body, it becomes external in Poell’s interpretation of a garment, changing its nature to become an exoskeleton.

Movement is also altered. To wear Carol Christian Poell is to experience The Metamorphosis, when Gregor awakes one morning, after a night disturbed by confusing dreams, to find himself changed into a monstrous insect. The instant following this discovery are difficult, as he has to learn how to move into this new, unknown, body, and, at the same time, still his. In that sense, this metamorphosis differs from those nourishing the western imagination, from Lucius’s metamorphosis into a donkey (Apulée) to the Beast changing into a bear (Cocteau), since it distorts the structure of the body in itself, and rests on an inversion between the inside and the outside: the endoskeleton reversing itself into an exoskeleton. At the cost of a radical transformation of the way he moves, Gregor, as a Carol Christian Poell wearer, will soon become one with his new shell, which will show him, after the pain, a path to new pleasures, at the same time Dionysiac – the victory of the material upon the spiritual – and Judaeo-Christian – crucifying the flesh.

“Metamorphosis/Anamorphosis” from fashionologie