Endogenous Fashion

September 20th, 2011

 

I have been meaning to post about Bart Hess‘s video “Grow on You” for a while now. The video conjures up an ambiguous dimension between chicken pox and high fashion, disease and design. It elicits thoughts about something we may call pharmaceutical or endogenous fashion: fashion that is swallowed as pills and surfaces to the skin from the inside, exuded, sweat out; fashion that emerges when you get goosebumps, or when you blush; fashion that itches and burns, tickles and  swells. It is not uninteresting trying to imagine a world without clothing, one without the words “skirt”, “trousers”, “hat” or “glove”; one where warmth, protection and comfort are not dependent on exterior, foreign agents, but grown within and through the body itself.