marketing and design aesthetics

Marketing and design aesthetics
“I open a fashion magazine; I see that two different garments are being dealt with here. The first is the one represented to me as photographed or drawn – it is image clothing. The second is the same garment , but described, transformed into language…” Barthes 1983 in Eds Linda welters 2007: 87).
Barthes writes that there are three main structures for a garment, real – the actual garment, understood in terms of its physicality how and what it is made of, iconic, a visual representation of the garment either in the form of a drawing or photograph, and verbal a written description of a garment. These distinctions help us to understand the representation of a garment – how -intrinsic to the actual garment we wear - the way it is photographed and described comes to form an essence of what this object is, its sense of being in the world, and how we understand and place it.

How do I find and understand a timeless, elegant, poetic, narrative feel in the way a collection is represented through language and image?
In the issue of November 2006 we see a photo shoot entitled Clean Slate. It contradictory. On the one hand the images create a feeling of timelessness, with the subtle colour tones the clothes seem a part of the landscape they are photographed in. yet the words say something different “intriguing textures and crafty layering add a cool modern feel to grey. This season’s most enigmatic he”. The words ‘cool’ and ‘this season’s’ all seem to suggest a passing trend, something of the moment, not timelessness, not something to treasure and keep, just something to wear this season and then throw away.

I looked at Toast, their aesthetic of their Autumn/inter catalogue seemed sympathetic to the design philosophies within my own work. The front page of the catalogue reads “Autumn Winds and other stories”, we’re being told a story, about a lifestyle implicit to the clothes being sold. On the second page we see a landscape and the story continues the words are poetic, descriptive, evocative, like a memory, “this is where we were. Carpathian peaks, high hamlets, meadows, forests. The crispest air… bear prints in fresh snow…”. Do the clothes in this collection embody these memories? If we buy them will it be as though we went on the journey too?

Garments with poetic names such as falling leaf top are described as “sheeny, smooth, drapey crepe de sheen”. A luxurious, sensual description, yet also simple language, like a friend, everyday. The photo shows a simple, homely, rustic kitchen. A shaft of sunlight shines onto an apple being chopped. If we buy this top do we also appropriate the imagined poetic memory of that moment? Would wearing this silk top feel like falling leaves?

Later in the catalogue another scene is set, the words sweet dreaming glow in white on an inky sky silhouetted with trees and a rooftop. It brings to mind a fragment of poem by Sylvia Plath
“the wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing
Memories growing, ring on ring…” (from Winter Trees Sylvia Plath 1962 257)

On the next page, having been lulled into a poetic reverie we see a dimly lit image in tones of blue shadows. A figure sleeps with a ginger cat. We are sleeping, we can imagine the feel of the cat’s whiskers on our leg. We can imagine the feel of the “smooth cool cotton lawn” on our skin. We imagine – this poetic imagery seems to merge with us as though becoming one of our own memories. Aristotle says ‘…memory belongs to that part of the soul to which imagination belongs; all things which are imaginable are essentially objects of memory…’ (Aristotle 1996: 159).