posted
Well, this thread grew legs in my absence. There is a limit to how many points I can respond to and still get some sleep tonight, so I'll give some thoughts that I have on the subject of fashion generally instead. I hope they're of interest.
Can we have a definition of fashion? Its a term everyone understand and has an opinion on, but which is never really explained fully.
Fashion is dress subject to rapid and constant change. It is therefore one of the forms of creativity that is paradigmatic of the modern age. Whether we are talking about the large fashion houses and their brands, or high street stores, the rapidity of change, and the variety of choice we have with each change, is really quite remarkable. Was it Karl Marx who characterised the 20th century as a time when "all that is solid melts into air"? So it is with dress. Just when you think you've got it, it changes again.
Fashion is a discourse. The language of clothes is a communicative structure we all inhabit. Even if you are unfashionable, or antifashion, you are still occupying a position within the fashion system. A pair of nondescript five year old slacks from Marks and Spencers say as much about the wearer's demographic group, belief system, etc, as a pair of bootcut tweed trousers or a pair of 7FAMK jeans. ( I assume we're all familiar with that acronym now? )
Fashion is an extension of ourselves, and the surface upon which the world projects its ideas onto us. It is a boundary, but an inherently unstable one. Think about tattoos, or piercings, for example. Are they an addition to the body or an extension of it? Where does the body end and fashion start?
I appreciate London's position, about the link between women's historic exclusion from the world of science and letters and the association of fripparies and shallow pursuits with the female sex. However, I cannot support that view for two reasons. Firstly, it assumes that these fripparies are of no consequence, when I hope the points I have outlined above show that they are indeed consequential, sometimes quite profoundly so. OK, so the consequences are neither achievement nor goal oriented, (themselves rather masculine traits) but instead are processual, negotiable and fluid. Secondly, it assumes that an interest in these pursuits is used as a tool of oppression by men and, further, that women are complicit in this. On the contrary, I'd suggest that these pursuits are a valid mode of expression that is readily available to those excluded, for whatever reason, from other discourses (political, scientific, etc) by a culture that has been shaped by several thousand years of patriarchal ideology.
Fashion as art. There will be many people who don't get this idea at all, and that's OK. What I would say is that fashion is a triumverate creative process. The designer is creative when they design a garment. The wearer is creative, when they choose what to wear and put together a style of their own. And we are creative in the ways we interpret the clothes we see on others. An example of someone who employed all three strands of this creativity at once is the performance artist Leigh Bowery. And if you want to really want to refuse the idea that fashion can be artistic, if not art, please look at the work of the surrealist designer Elsa Schiapparelli before you make your mind up on this one.
quote:Originally posted by ally: Fashion is a discourse. The language of clothes is a communicative structure we all inhabit. Even if you are unfashionable, or antifashion, you are still occupying a position within the fashion system. A pair of nondescript five year old slacks from Marks and Spencers say as much about the wearer's demographic group, belief system, etc, as a pair of bootcut tweed trousers or a pair of 7FAMK jeans.
It says something about their place in the fashion system, but I don't agree it tells you so much, necessarily, about their demographic group... and arguably nothing about their belief system.
For a start, you could own both the 7FAMK jeans and the nondescript old M&S ones, and you could be wearing the latter because you'd been decorating, or were just going to buy milk. Your belief system and demographic wouldn't have changed depending on which pair of jeans you had on.
Secondly, I suspect these garments cross several demographic groups. 7FAMK is available on ebay, for instance, for a lot less than £150. People on a lower income can save for more expensive garments. Working-class girls might have more aspirational dress sense and care more about the status-charge of brands and labels than do middle-class girls with more cultural security and self-confidence. Brands slide down the scale, losing their cachet (Burberry) and instant-celebrity shows catapult people with no class and money to a level where they have no class but much money.
I suppose an outfit could reveal someone's belief system, but I wouldn't guarantee that at all.
quote:What I would say is that fashion is a triumverate creative process. The designer is creative when they design a garment. The wearer is creative, when they choose what to wear and put together a style of their own. And we are creative in the ways we interpret the clothes we see on others.
By this system, everything is a creative process, if an object becomes "creative" when people view and interpret it. As everything we encounter is interpreted, and everything we see involves a process of making meaning/making sense, nothing would be exempt from this. A landscape, for instance, becomes a creative process in this system because in looking at it we gauge distances, perspectives, planes, colours, and make sense of what we're looking at.
I think this is taking it a little too far, if the act of viewing something, in its meaning-making, dignifies that thing with the label "creative" -- even if no creative talent has been involved in its production or use.
I would love to have some regular from HB Fashion read this thread and comment. I can't PM them for obvious reasons, and I wouldn't want to start some sort of interboard ruck, but I think it would be interesting to see the response from one of the people who celebrates this kind of fashion-discourse on the HB forum.
quote:Originally posted by ally: Fashion is a discourse. The language of clothes is a communicative structure we all inhabit. Even if you are unfashionable, or antifashion, you are still occupying a position within the fashion system. A pair of nondescript five year old slacks from Marks and Spencers say as much about the wearer's demographic group, belief system, etc, as a pair of bootcut tweed trousers or a pair of 7FAMK jeans.
It says something about their place in the fashion system, but I don't agree it tells you so much, necessarily, about their demographic group... and arguably nothing about their belief system.
For a start, you could own both the 7FAMK jeans and the nondescript old M&S ones, and you could be wearing the latter because you'd been decorating, or were just going to buy milk. Your belief system and demographic wouldn't have changed depending on which pair of jeans you had on.
Secondly, I suspect these garments cross several demographic groups. 7FAMK is available on ebay, for instance, for a lot less than £150. People on a lower income can save for more expensive garments. Working-class girls might have more aspirational dress sense and care more about the status-charge of brands and labels than do middle-class girls with more cultural security and self-confidence. Brands slide down the scale, losing their cachet (Burberry) and instant-celebrity shows catapult people with no class and money to a level where they have no class but much money.
I suppose an outfit could reveal someone's belief system, but I wouldn't guarantee that at all.
I think an outfit can speak volumes about a person. Clothes are a part of a quite complex system of identity, so a pair of nondescript M&S trousers will be worn, and interpreted, quite differently depending on the wearer. My point was that clothes tell you an awful lot about a person's social and cultural identity and location. It is precisely the issue of branding/insecurity that allows you to identify the working class girl from the middle class girl with more cultural security and self-confidence. I was not suggesting that one can make a blanket association between expensive clothes and wealthy people. My choice of examples may have misled you here.
I often conduct an exercise with my students, where I get them to guess what newspaper a person in an image would read, what radio station they listen to, where they went for their holidays, etc. A whole character, and usually a fairly accurate one, can be built by assessing someone visually.
quote:
quote:What I would say is that fashion is a triumverate creative process. The designer is creative when they design a garment. The wearer is creative, when they choose what to wear and put together a style of their own. And we are creative in the ways we interpret the clothes we see on others.
By this system, everything is a creative process, if an object becomes "creative" when people view and interpret it. As everything we encounter is interpreted, and everything we see involves a process of making meaning/making sense, nothing would be exempt from this. A landscape, for instance, becomes a creative process in this system because in looking at it we gauge distances, perspectives, planes, colours, and make sense of what we're looking at.
I think this is taking it a little too far, if the act of viewing something, in its meaning-making, dignifies that thing with the label "creative" -- even if no creative talent has been involved in its production or use.
I think that the process of interpretation, of reading, is a creative process, albeit one that is qualitively different to the process of creating an object, an artefact or an image. If we do not accept that interpretation is a creative process, we are left with the understanding of the viewer, or reader, as being someone inherently passive, who accepts what is put before them rather than actively engaging with it. I should have qualified what I'd said by saying that the creative process of interpretation takes place in an encounter with "man-made" (for want of a better expression) artefacts, rather than the natural world.
quote: I would love to have some regular from HB Fashion read this thread and comment. I can't PM them for obvious reasons, and I wouldn't want to start some sort of interboard ruck, but I think it would be interesting to see the response from one of the people who celebrates this kind of fashion-discourse on the HB forum.
Why not post a link to this thread, or get someone else to do it?
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quote:Originally posted by ally: I think an outfit can speak volumes about a person. My point was that clothes tell you an awful lot about a person's social and cultural identity and location.
I think they can do. I also think they might tell you volumes of misleading information.
quote:It is precisely the issue of branding/insecurity that allows you to identify the working class girl from the middle class girl with more cultural security and self-confidence.
I think a working-class girl with desperate aspirations could be wearing precisely the same outfit as a middle-class girl with cultural comfort. You might say that you could read the difference in the way they carry themselves and their outfit, but obviously two very different people from different social positions could end up wearing the same combination of clothes... and I would say they could also be wearing them in the same way. I suggested that items cross those kinds of boundaries, through people saving and through second-hand sales.
There are, of course, distinctions between suits, but I expect that, say, a £200 Next suit could be worn (with the same shoes and hairstyle) by a whole range of men with very different demographic positions and certainly with different belief systems. The clothing would not necessarily allow you to read off a great ream of information about who they are.
quote:Why not post a link to this thread, or get someone else to do it?
OK, someone else is welcome to do it but I don't want it to be obvious that "this is Kovacs off of TMO linking to my own thread" -- as it would be obvious.
quote:Originally posted by ally: I think an outfit can speak volumes about a person. My point was that clothes tell you an awful lot about a person's social and cultural identity and location.
I think they can do. I also think they might tell you volumes of misleading information.
quote:It is precisely the issue of branding/insecurity that allows you to identify the working class girl from the middle class girl with more cultural security and self-confidence.
I think a working-class girl with desperate aspirations could be wearing precisely the same outfit as a middle-class girl with cultural comfort. You might say that you could read the difference in the way they carry themselves and their outfit, but obviously two very different people from different social positions could end up wearing the same combination of clothes... and I would say they could also be wearing them in the same way. I suggested that items cross those kinds of boundaries, through people saving and through second-hand sales.
There are, of course, distinctions between suits, but I expect that, say, a £200 Next suit could be worn (with the same shoes and hairstyle) by a whole range of men with very different demographic positions and certainly with different belief systems. The clothing would not necessarily allow you to read off a great ream of information about who they are.
This is perfectly feasible. However, shared the cultural codes that make it possible for us to understand our world make it a rare event. While there may be the odd instance where we misread the visual language, and draw misplaced conclusions as a result, on the whole, the wearer, the clothes and the viewer will "work together" to create a stable and unchallenging connection. Where this connection is disrupted, it can be quite subversive. The transsexual's attempts to "pass" as a member of their assumed sex, and the confusion that can create in peoples minds, might be an example of this subversion in action. On a day-to-day basis, though, the information you get from reading a person's clothes is more often accurate than misleading.
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quote:Originally posted by ally: On a day-to-day basis, though, the information you get from reading a person's clothes is more often accurate than misleading.
So you're saying that assumptions about demographic and belief systems, based on seeing a stranger's outfit, are correct more than 50% of the time. I'm not sure about it. We would have to carry out some research. You may say "O it's been done!" but I say we would have to carry out some research.
I'm really not convinced that it's rare for people from different demographics, with different belief systems, to buy and wear the same outfit. How many copies of a top does Top Shop ship? Isn't it in the millions? Isn't it likely that two girls with very different political beliefs, incomes, cultural capital, backgrounds, aspirations could be wearing the same top and trousers from the same shop -- that, say, Kate Lawler and a girl in an office down at my local industrial estate could both have bought them?
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: So you're saying that assumptions about demographic and belief systems, based on seeing a stranger's outfit, are correct more than 50% of the time. I'm not sure about it. We would have to carry out some research. You may say "O it's been done!" but I say we would have to carry out some research.
More or less, yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.
Who's "we" by the way? I'd be more than happy to contribute to an exercise that would support my point. I think I'm right, but if I'm proved wrong it means I'll have to rethink, which is no bad thing.
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posted
We = you and I. But I have to admit I'm not actually going to do it. If you carried out this research with 100 strangers, making assessments on various aspects of their lives (inc. demographic and belief system, as the latter point is contentious in my opinion) and then asked them to confirm details about those aspects of their lives... and if your results showed you were "correct" (which would have to be defined... would you have to be broadly right, or precisely right?) over 50% of the time, then I will say you seem to be right on this occasion!
posted
ally, as a matter of interest, do the images you provide your students with include any fashion "curve balls" or do the pictured individuals always conform to what one might naturally expect from their outfits? Kovacs has suggested examples where to two varying characters could wear the identical outfit; are these kind of discrepancies accounted for in the range of images you provide for visual assessment?
Also, would it be possible to post the images here for TMO to play Man in the Crowd with them? Or would that be too much like a busman's posting break for you?
posted
I think not, senor K, but thanks for the challenge. Instead of me getting cold with a clipboard on Oxford Street, why don't you read Alison Lurie's The Language of Clothes instead? Or, we could agree to differ. Whaddaya say?
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posted
Jonesey had a good idea. Why don't you try it online, just for fun? It might not prove anything but it could make us all think about the issues.
Note that I am not entirely disagreeing with you Ally, nor am I at all resistant to the idea of a "language of clothes" -- I have at least read Barthes! -- I am only disputing whether this language always gives us an accurate account of the person "speaking" it, hem-hem, or whether it can't often be ambiguous or misleading.
I am happy to agree to differ on the extent to which clothes can clearly reveal a person's ideological beliefs. I still think a bit of a visual experiment might liven up what is already a good, but text-heavy thread.
quote:Originally posted by jonesy999: ally, as a matter of interest, do the images you provide your students with include any fashion "curve balls" or do the pictured individuals always conform to what one might naturally expect from their outfits? Kovacs has suggested examples where to two varying characters could wear the identical outfit; are these kind of discrepancies accounted for in the range of images you provide for visual assessment?
Also, would it be possible to post the images here for TMO to play Man in the Crowd with them? Or would that be too much like a busman's posting break for you?
I don't do pics on tinternet 'cos I'm technostupid - sorry.
In answer to your first point, I do provide students with more challenging images, usually of people who look slightly androgynous, or I show them the Coober Pedy scene from the Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, to make the point that if there is a slippage between what you see and how you understand/interpret what you see, it can be confusing, disrupting, challenging, and so on. The example of two people wearing exactly the same outfits? Clothes do not function on their own. There is always interplay with other factors. If you think that what I'm saying, that for the bulk of the time you can gather a quite sophisticated level of information from a person's dress and appearance, is fundamentally wrong, why don't you try it next time you're out? Look at what people around you are wearing. You'll see what I mean. If you don't I'll buy you a pint at the next meet.
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I would love to have some regular from HB Fashion read this thread and comment. I can't PM them for obvious reasons, and I wouldn't want to start some sort of interboard ruck, but I think it would be interesting to see the response from one of the people who celebrates this kind of fashion-discourse on the HB forum.
I could post it there quite easily but I'm not going to do so. As you rightly identify, it could well cause a ruck and I can't be arsed with that today, frankly.
There seems to be an over-simplistic assumption about the "sort of people who celebrate this fashion-discourse" running through this thread. Many of us (us being mainly, but not exclusively, females) have a degree of fluency in it, but we speak other languages as well.
Going back to the original question - about the rich tapestry of the language.... I imagine that lots of the HB regulars would have a lot to say about the language used in fashion - it changes along with the looks. At the moment it's about (this is just my take)
Antiqueness and authenticity - lots of vintage words - tea dresses and shrugs, snoods and capelets
Luxury expressed through food - chocolate, butter-soft, caramel, biscuit
BUT you'd have to ask the question in the right way. Imply, as this thread does at times, that you're engaged in an anthropological study of more trivial beings, and you're not going to get very far.
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quote:Originally posted by kovacs: I am only disputing whether this language always gives us an accurate account of the person "speaking" it, hem-hem, or whether it can't often be ambiguous or misleading.
Of course, it can be ambiguous or misleading. The thing is, when it is ambiguous or misleading, it is usually challenging and disruptive. (See the examples on my earlier post) On the whole, communication, whether verbal or visual, tends to be clear and unequivocal.
I will do some homework and try and work out how to post pics on TMO.
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quote:Originally posted by ally: Of course, it can be ambiguous or misleading. The thing is, when it is ambiguous or misleading, it is usually challenging and disruptive. (See the examples on my earlier post) On the whole, communication, whether verbal or visual, tends to be clear and unequivocal.
I don't think that on the whole communication is usually clear and unequivocal, partly because of intention and interpretation, as already discussed above, and partly because of the individuals (lack of) ability to communicate.
I would also argue that ambiguous clothing choices are not always challenging or disruptive, at least not consciously. It may be challenging to the viewer, to see something they can't define/didn't expect, but it can't be the case that this is the intention of the wearer. I agree that sometimes this will be true, but I think it would be a mistake to suggest that someone who has made an ambiguous (to the viewer) clothes choice is necessarily being deliberately subversive and/or challenging.
edit: to post images, you need to upload them to the internet somewhere, then in your reply here click on the 'image' button and type the url of your picture into the box that pops up.
quote:Originally posted by ally: Of course, it can be ambiguous or misleading. The thing is, when it is ambiguous or misleading, it is usually challenging and disruptive. (See the examples on my earlier post) On the whole, communication, whether verbal or visual, tends to be clear and unequivocal.
I don't think that is true at all. It's a common notion in cultural studies, which includes your study of fashion discourse, that texts can be interpreted in a vast variety of ways depending on cultural background, interpretive community and so on.. (I simplify, because I'm sure you are more than familiar with all this.)
"Visual communication" would include propaganda, feature films, advertisements, right? "Verbal communication" would include the reading of a poem. It is not the case by any means that these texts tend to carry a direct unequivocal meaning from the producer through the object to the receiver/consumer/viewer.
You could fill a library with research that demonstrates the way meaning is read in different ways by different people, from the same text. They all think the meaning they got out of it was "obvious" and common sense. Often it is not just different from the next viewer or reader's interpretation, but different from the meaning the producer intended.
So it would be very surprising if fashion was the one form of visual communication that carries a clear, unambiguous message through this system, with the intended meaning being transmitted exactly as the producer of the garments or the wearer of the outfit intended and being received and understood in that way by the person viewing the outfit.
Your examples of fashion language being disruptive or surprising are all about transsexuals, as though the only way we can read an outfit and get it "wrong" are when we try to read codes of gender off it. So you're saying that we can't look at someone in an outfit and judge their class, education and profession wrongly? Or that this might happen but it's very rare? I honestly don't agree with that. I think it could happen quite frequently. Of course I can think of examples where dress does indicate clearly someone's job and enables me to make fairly safe guesses about their personality, but I think a lot of the time it's not that obvious.
To return to my earlier two examples, about suits and Top Shop outfits. Around Charing Cross at midday during the week you will see thousands of men wearing similar suits. There will be incredible variation among those men in terms of their job, their voting intentions, their sexual orientation, their family status, their education. Yes, you could pick out clear examples where, for instance, one guy has a cheap tie and badly-cut suit and you might guess correctly that he's a young man in his first office job, or where another is wearing a suit of good material with silver cufflinks and nice shoes, and you guess correctly that he's a successful member of the board. But I would say those are easy extremes. There are masses of people inbetween from whose outfits I don't think you would be able to make many guesses about their demographic or "belief systems".
If you hang around outside Top Shop at the same time you will see thousands of young women in similar outfits. Yes, one of them might have a designer bag and another might have big Argos earrings, and you could point out that despite them wearing the same top, we can read off certain probabilities about their demographic. But those are, again, obvious and extreme examples, and I think there are a lot of people between those two poles who would not be giving away a lot about themselves through their outfits.
OJ, your points about the specific strands of discourse running thru the Fashion forum at the moment -- vintage and "food" -- are fascinating. I agree that anyone coming from one forum and seeing a bunch of people on another trying to analyse them and the stuff they say would be likely to take offence. But if they could get over that reaction, I think the input of an intelligent HB Fashion contributor on this thread would be valuable.
posted
Darryn: Feel free to stick the image upload link in the TMO menu structure if you want. There seem to be quite a few people asking about it these days.
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posted
Sorry if all this has become irrelevant over the last half hour...
ally
Firstly, I'd point out that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your suggestions that dress and appearance can provide all kinds of information about the wearer. This is an interesting thread and, like Kovacs, I was trying to keep it unraveling at an interesting pace by throwing some questions into the mix. The only difference being, I'd happily admit if I don't know what I'm talking about or when I am wrong. But I digress. I already do look around and attempt to read the text of strangers from their clothes. I think most people do. In fact I'd suggest that many do it automatically and subconsciously. I can just about cast my mind back to lectures on semiotics and recall blurry bits of Barthes so perhaps I attempt it on a more conscious level, but I do think everyone does it. So there's no need to buy me a pint, but thanks anyway
It's a given really that people make judgments about, and gather information about, people from their outfit. I don't think they need to understand how they do it. The person wearing the clothes doesn't need a particularly sophisticated understanding of the language of fashion and clothes to subvert expectations. I'm thinking of the shoplifter who wears a suit and carries a briefcase to appear respectable or the dustman dressed in a suit for his daughter's wedding. Obviously the interplay between clothes and other factors could hold the answer to reading someone from their outfit but how important do the other factors have to be before they become the essence of the interpretation and the clothes secondary?
For instance, if my Daily Star reading dustman is dressed in the same suit as a privately educated, middle class, Times reading businessman, I might note that Dusty's tie isn't knotted like that of someone who wears ties frequently. I might observe that he has rough, dirty hands, that he looks uncomfortable in a suit, and deduce that this isn't his everyday attire. Fine, some of these factors can arguably fall within the realm of clothing, so I'm still largely gathering information from this person through his outfit. However, if I need to bring into play things like his accent, location (he's wearing a suit but he's at the British Legion), what car he's driving, what he's drinking, then we've moved beyond reading him from his outfit and on to a far broader level of interpretation. If Dusty's standing next to a girl about 25 years his junior, who bears a striking family resemblance and wears a wedding dress, if he holds a bunch of flowers and is covered in confetti then I might reasonably conclude that Dusty's wearing a suit because it's his daughters wedding and that he probably isn't a middle class businessman.
I don't think I'm making much sense and can't really dedicate the time this thread deserves, so to spare you any more meandering bollox, I suppose my question is really, when you talk about the interplay between clothing and other factors, what other factors are you talking about? And at what point is clothing just one of many signifiers you're using to draw information about an individual.
quote:Originally posted by jonesy999: like Kovacs, I was trying to keep it unraveling at an interesting pace by throwing some questions into the mix. The only difference being, I'd happily admit if I don't know what I'm talking about or when I am wrong.
b-but that happens so rarely with me I do try
I agree with many of your points above: ie. I think there are a host of other factors we would usually have to recognise and take into account before we could confidently read off someone's demographic and certainly other aspects about them, like "belief systems". I agree we can read a certain amount from dress, and everyone can come up with blatant examples where it's easy (most obviously, uniforms) but I think there are more cases where it's harder to get a clear, detailed and deep reading just from someone's outfit.
posted
On a lighter note, I am tempted to either....
a) List what I am wearing and ask Ally/anyone what they can surmise about my socio-economic group etc. from that.
or
b) Ask the same question in reverse. From what you know about me from my posts here, can you surmise what I would look like.
This doesn't just apply to me obviously - I mean to anyone here present.
I think B would be more interesting, but probably more difficult. A might be slightly creepy ?? But probably no more so than the HB what are you wearing thread.
eta: Come to think of it, it all depends on "how" you describe. Most of the posts on the HB thread rely heavily on brand names and fellow users' shared knowledge about merchandise currently in the shops. Whereas I would probably be more descriptive and possibly leave out brands altogether.
posted
I get the impression that OJ has a critical enjoyment of fashion -- a level of cynicism combined with a genuine pleasure in clothes, their connotations, the way they're discussed and described.
I'm not sure how this would manifest itself but my guess would be that you would go for expensive pieces when you knew it guaranteed quality, detailing and investment, combined with some elements of more ephemeral, high street fun trends, but not a wholesale "look" that would risk putting you in a bracket or risk making you into a clone of a social type or celebrity. I would guesstimate you at late 20s.
I expect I am just being flattering and that this tells everyone more about how I want my favourite forumette to look
quote:Originally posted by OJ: Most of the posts on the HB thread rely heavily on brand names and fellow users' shared knowledge about merchandise currently in the shops. Whereas I would probably be more descriptive and possibly leave out brands altogether.
i think i see what you mean. i would describe my outfit today thus on handbag:
black capsleeved stretch cotton tshirt teal-blue kneelength light cotton skirt with small knife-pleats at waist and plastic bead belt black schoolgirl knee-socks black ballerina-esque flatties
dont i sound fash. on here, i would point out that everything i am wearing today comes from primark with the exception of my bra, and that in fact the whole of the rest of my outfit put together cost ten pounds less than the bra did. i would feel compelled to add that here. on handbag, i would keep it quiet.
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posted
on here everyone has said that teal is a shade of green. now maybe im colourblind, but i disagree. the skirt i am wearing said it was 'teal' on the label, and it is definitely more blue than green. i suspect conflict about whether the shade known as teal was green or blue is the reason it is called teal. is it blue? green? blue? green? neither and both. its teal, motherfucker.
i dont suspect i would get far on a handbag fashion thread using the word motherfucker either.
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posted
Actually that looks a bit bright, like an ill advised bridesmaids dress. I think this is better teal.
In case anyone was wondering at my teal obsession then I am trying to pass the time as I cleverly managed to forget to add a crucial ingredient to my experiment thismorning. So I cannot do any work until 6pm. Posts: 2793
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quote:Originally posted by kovacs: I'm not sure how this would manifest itself but my guess would be that you would go for expensive pieces when you knew it guaranteed quality, detailing and investment, combined with some elements of more ephemeral, high street fun trends, but not a wholesale "look" that would risk putting you in a bracket or risk making you into a clone of a social type or celebrity. I would guesstimate you at late 20s.
Er, not bad. And I guess being about 6 months off 30 is about as late in your 20s as you can get. Doesn't really give an impression of how I do look though - not that that's a criticism. I just think it's very difficult to deduce.
Discodamage's look on the other hand is telling me....
- She's not brand driven? Could be a No-logo reading leftie. Or might not be...
- She's quite feminine but maybe with a sense of irony (schoolgirl socks, ballerina shoes)
- She's younger than me. Maybe early 20s (again schoolgirl socks)
- She doesn't feel the cold or isn't in the UK. T shirt and cotton skirt in this weather???
- She doesn't work in a formal City or law type office environment. Perhaps a student or in a creative field. But probably not an ultra-creative field as her look isn't all that pretentious.... (unless that T-shirt is by an obscure japanese designer and the belt is home-made from lacquered liquorice allsorts)
eta: Teal is a blue based green. Anyone got the pantone code for that?
posted
Well, according to this site, teal is hex code #008080. That means there is no red in it, and equal parts of blue and green. So yes it is both blue and green.
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If you carried out this research with 100 strangers, making assessments on various aspects of their lives (inc. demographic and belief system, as the latter point is contentious in my opinion) and then asked them to confirm details about those aspects of their lives... and if your results showed you were "correct" (which would have to be defined... would you have to be broadly right, or precisely right?) over 50% of the time, then I will say you seem to be right on this occasion!
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
I do try ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
![[Mad]](mad.gif)
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