Cheryl Marie Cordeiro – Page 18 – ACADEMIC REFLECTIONS

Fashion: an expression of Hegelian geist

Posted on May 7, 2008April 2, 2018 by Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

Oyster Dress by Alexander McQueen for S/S 2003. Ivory silk chiffon and silk organza.

I’ve been revisiting Addressing Fashion by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the avatar to the left will bring you to the MM’s website) and have picked out my favourite pieces from the their exhibition, to write about in this post. This is a subconscious streaming of thoughts, as it were, back on my favourite ponder on fashion, its connection to language, inspiration, geist and towards an understanding of a people.

My favourite pieces from this exhibit were the ones with a fuller silhouette, with soft flowing volume; their diaphanous design and characteristic, bordering on the ethereal. Even the ash grey of Theyskens piece below didn’t pull down my spirits or enthusiasm for the dress.
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The evolving concept of luxury

Posted on March 13, 2008January 1, 2015 by Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

Mega Yacht Red Square Aft at Night – Image courtesy of Dunya Yachts.

The definitions of luxury

Luxury is an extensive concept which connects with extravagance, prestige and elitism (Dubois and Czellar, 2002). Some standard dictionary definitions of luxury could include:

Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort.
Something expensive or hard to obtain.
Sumptuous living or surroundings: lives in luxury.

One could see how the above three definitions found in the American Heritage Dictionary, are intertwined and difficult to separate. A very broad definition of what is luxury, from Coco Chanel reflects this interlacing of definitions to form a concept of luxury: “Luxury is a necessity that begins when necessity ends” (Gradvall, 2007). Continue reading “The evolving concept of luxury” →

Dolce & Gabanna: Lets do street violence in style, 2007

Posted on October 30, 2007January 1, 2015 by Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

A banned D&G advertisement for Fall/Winter 2006.

In a Stockholm newspaper DN October 30, 2007 were an interesting article on redefining luxury, it’s changing premises and its spreading to the middle class rather than being exclusive to the “absurdly affluent”. I can’t help seeing the new D&G advertising for their latest collection in this light. It is quite obvious that they are trying to reach a different crowd than those who bought the original LV bags of the 1920s and crossed the Atlantic twice a year to spend the summer season in France, so much is clear.

Print advertisements for Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) clothing, fashionably un-affective in expression but featuring a knifing, have been banned in Britain by UK’s Advertising Standards Authority after drawing 166 complaints. D&G explained that its latest collection was designed to evoke the Napoleonic period and that the related advertisement took its inspiration from well-known paintings by Delacroix and David. The advertisements had run in the US, Europe, China, Hong Kong and Japan without complaint. Continue reading “Dolce & Gabanna: Lets do street violence in style, 2007” →

A diamond skull is forever

Posted on October 11, 2007March 28, 2016 by Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

British artist Damien Hirst revealed his latest work of art at the White Cube Gallery in London, June 1, 2007. “For the Love of God” is a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum and covered by 8,601 pave-set diamonds weighing 1,106.18 carats. The single large diamond in the middle of the forehead is a 52.4 carat internally flawless, light, fancy pink, brilliant-cut diamond reportedly worth $4.2 million alone. Hirst financed the project himself, and estimates it cost between 10 and 15 million. The price tag was $99 million. The platinum plates were hand-lasered with thousands of holes and the diamonds, which have a total weight of 1,106.18 carats, were individually set.

When I first saw this skull I went through a myriad of reactions that went something like:

WOW! What a fantastic thing!

Oooh! How HORRID!

buuuuut…Interesting.

COOOOOL!

Well, my thoughts needed to do a really long walking to come to that fourth observation of it being cool. The obvious in-your-face impression of this piece of art, is of course that the skull as an age old Vanitas symbol that Nothing is Forever, combined with the De Beer diamond slogan that Diamonds, are Forever, Hirst manages to add some kind of cynical humour to the combination “Death, is Forever, too”.

How cool is that.

Then I started to wonder, is that observation really worth £50 million?

My mind started to ponder a much wider circle. Looking some into this I found that the original “perfectly shaped skull” had been sourced from a taxidermy shop, with an analysis suggesting that it had probably belonged to a European man who died in his mid-thirties in the 18th or early 19th century.

But don’t those teeth awfully “fresh” to be from an 18th century skull?

A really old skull. The painting “Vanitas” by, Pieter Claesz (1597-1661).

It suddenly dawned on me that I had seen such a “fresh” looking skull once before, at the desk of an engineer who designed dental equipment. “Is this plastic?”, I asked. “No, it’s the real thing” he answered and explained that it actually came from the first World War battle fields in the Flanders. They were popular with dental clinics because the soldiers had been so young and healthy when they died, that their teeth were perfect, “Look Ma, no cavities!”.

Of course this was just my mind wandering, but then again I had just been forced – due to a lack of alternatives – to read an article about a specifically bloody battle in an obscure village in Belgium, called Passchendaele. It lasted some 100 days in the autumn of 1917. And when it ended, a total of 325,000 Allied and 260,000 German young men had died, achieving nothing.
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