Podcast with Rice Freeman-Zachery

I was so lucky yesterday to have Rice Freeman-Zachery call me for one of her podcasts!  We talked about art as clothing and all the trials and tribulations of the business, and the sheer fun of wearing art.  You can listen to the podcast here.


Rice rhymes with Lisa but I haven't learned how to put the "umlats" (is that what they're called?) over her name.


It was so ironic that soon after we hung up from talking my mail came and in it was a book I had ordered I had been told I needed to read.  It's titled "The Thoughtful Dresser" by Linda Grant.

Here's what the summary says:

"You can't have depths without surfaces," says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book.  The Thoughtful Dresser, a thinking woman's guide to what we wear.  For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women.  Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are.  How we look and what we wear tells a story.  Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility.  Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany. 

The Thoughtful Dresser celebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.

So now I've started reading the book (20 page into it) and thinking about my chat with Rice and a lot of questions come into my head and some even get answered.  Why do I want to make and create clothes?  I don't really know except it's a canvas I understand.  Perhaps because my mother made a lot of my clothes when I was a girl, adding her special designs and I remember how much I liked them.  

I know a lot of people don't understand the desire to purchase and wear stylish clothing but as Linda Grant says in her book " Clothes matter ........."  Everyone who wears bluejeans wants them to fit perfectly right?  Fashion doesn't have to mean you're out buying the latest Versace or Chanel, it does mean whatever is fashionable to you or society.  Most people care about how they look, their conception of themselves and to others.

Even most guys care.  Perhaps they wear their shirt tucked, they wear a belt or only black tee shirts.  Even if it's casual dressing there is usually something that makes an article of clothing specific to that person.

So enough with being philosophical, I will say the book is very interesting and I'll report more when I finish it.