Monday Muses - Puddles

Guess this would be the first post for my 'Monday Muses' series. So before we start I'll try to write a brief introduction to what this series looks at (without making this sound like a director's handbook of course).

Uno. Monday would be the time I upload my post, pretty self explanatory.

Dos. My muses are mostly my friends, colleagues, anyone I've met who embodies a certain character to their style of clothing. Hence 'Monday Muses' was born (cue the Powerpuff Girls theme song).

Here's a quote by Rita Felski (from Cool Moves: Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics; 'The Invention of Everyday Life') at which I base my series on, da da da dummm, “As bodies are massed together in big cities under modern conditions, so the uniform and repetitive aspect of human life become more prominent”.

Well we can all agree to this in some sense, the clothes we wear are one of the components that subscribes us to the mass culture. Might it be a patched jean jacket, or a rad choker, we create trends and those that surrounds it. Then this whole circuit of culture repeats, creating uniformity and repetition. But of course this whole sceptic idea about the commodity culture can be loosen up. I suppose this makes me an idealist but I like to think that there are other dominant factors out there that precede the commoditized definition of our generation’s culture, or more selfishly the definition of me.

Bear in mind this is only an acute ‘theory’ of mine (I’ve put it in quotes because this is nothing more than an unexplainable intuitive belief, it has no spine or roots to its understanding).

So with this series I will explore Michel De Certeau's liberating proposition known as 'the art of making do'. This basically looks at how there will always be resistance and an independent approach as a response to our commoditized culture. As mass culture cause repetition, repetition causes patterns, then patterns cause habits and habits form tactics. I fancy how De Certeau defines us as “silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality”; it gives hope that our creativity and identity is immortal in a rapidly changing culture and society. And this is what I'd like to explore, the portrayal of one's unique identity through composing their own style of clothing. How an element so dominant in the mass culture could actually dispose the whole idea of uniformity itself. We will always be poets of our own acts, even if absolute originality hardly exist in the poems we write.

Well....I've completely failed in trying to be brief. Scroll down and see what's up!

Qian Cheng Yi - Bachelor of Arts, Anthropology and Creative Writing, University of Melbourne, Australia

"Comfort without doubt is the priority of my style. Most of my clothes are quite simply designed with a few or no patterns at all (such as stripes) in black, white or dark colors. I'm not really sure where I got my inspiration from though. I'm a lazy person and I always try to find a way to look good with the least effort, and of course basic colors and stripes are never wrong."

Cheng Yi's Wearing

Blouse: Uniqlo

Sweater: Zara

Coat: Topshop

Jeggings: Uniqlo

Sneakers: Alexander McQueen