I wore two of my new 1750 circa French waistecoat suits today. They are STRANGE---I admit, but they WORK--dominating eyes in any room I enter and holding attention. PLUS the right sort of very ELEGANT ladies, young and sleek, stop and talk. The suits are complicated and therefore I should have worn simpler shirts with them---but I will learn in coming days.
The colorful shirt detracts from the colorful suit---too much too much-ness. Many of you are surprised that I have a top on my head--having never actually seen it before due to the hats I like and wear nearly all the time. So here is my head---it HAS a top!!!
The back of the suit is ridiculous---(emphemizing perhaps). I dislike it intensely. But with a darker shirt--dark blue at lead--the effect is better.
The shirt by itself is gorgeous.
This is a second, purely purple suit--purpley purple. It really photographs as a deep color and it has deep deep coloring. Gorgoues
This is a design feature I forgot I had---the fake vest fastener part is REMOVEABLE = global warming may need it removed, and when removed it leaves a lovely waistecoat curve of two jacket sides that do not meet.
This, unlike previous posts for the most part, is a recent design, done New Year's 2014-15 about four months ago. I cannot, in all honesty, remember what I was thinking when I did it.
Actually, all the kimonos and obis used are ones I dislike and if I am right, I was trying to do something more interesting than throwing them all away. IF I COULD make something out of them, worth wearing, not necessarily grand or wonderful, then as long as it was a bit better than sheer trash, I could get value out of designing them.
I ended up getting TEN of these today from Vietnam. First, my producer ladies did a PERFECT job of fit and finish---every slightest suggestion was perfectly interpreted and executed. Amazing.
Second, since the materials were rather boring, the worst in my furugi collections, I spiffed up the other non-material design elements. When I have great kimono and obi materials, no need for fancy smancy shapes. But here, I felt the need for embellishment, a la the adolescent crap that Louis the 14th at Versailles mistook for beauty---glitz and more glitz, symmetry and more symmetry, a 12 year old's idea of beauty--really does make me vomit.
So the jacket above is toward that vomit-genre of design pioneered by stupid genetically deficient kings of France a couple of hundreds years ago. Notice the Star Trek Next Generation Lt. Warf shoulder extensions! Nicely outre!!!! Notice the stained glass curved section on the lower back---what in the world is THAT?
This suit is particularly disturbed by the stupid kimono patterns here and there on it----rather unfortunately, junking up what might have been a clean design. FORTUNATELY the other 9 suits are without that crap.
The suit it VERY comfortable to wear and perfectly shaped, fitted, and sized. I wore it to Omotesando today and it was so powerfully confusing that people did not know how to react. I imagine that like the initial reaction to Picasso's Des'moiselles D'avignon (self flattering lie therefore).
The vest in front is NOT a real vest. The buttons do not fasten anything--they are there to distract from how ugly my face is. The vest is joined in the center with a gold zipper--very convenient. The vest-like things attach just inside the lapels on either side. When it gets warm I just leave it all open, unzipped. It is sleeveless because I assure you all that not one sleeve will be left on earth by 2030. It will be too hot everywhere all the time. The entire suit is all silk---and Japanese silk if by far the most lasting and lovely in Asia. Too bad the people who make it are so stubborn and suicidally bent on old robes and Rome. Got their heads in some self worship our lovely past spot and cannot see the trees. Idiots. Nice for me---I can buy unmatchable materials nowhere else available on earth and one by one no longer being made at all. Tomorrow I will wear a better one of these TEN suits---and you will see the difference.
This is a 35 year old suit--one of my very first. It combines two obis---one a black silver pattern the other an orange and chartreuse pattern. The shapes down the pants leg are TRUE RANDOM, computer made random curves intersected at random displacements and angles. We found that TRUE RANDOM shapes catch attention first when competing with pseudo random curves drawn by humans and with non-random shapes. The brain likes a bit of noise it appears.
This is the back of the jacket (duh) and has a V shape--at the time I was looking for ways to make my fat-ness less prominent. Last year I lost 24 kilograms and now a year later I am still slowly losing weight but 18 kilograms less than my max as I gained some from weight-lifting. (Bench press 140 kilograms on good days). The V effectively all look slimmer than they are. I like the slight dis-symmetry of it.
This is the front of the jacket. NOTE the V shape again for the same purpose, tho now unneeded. The shirt is lady's swimwear---stretch chartreuse--one of my favorite shirt materials. I had six made 30 years ago and 3 are still in their original packaging waiting to be used. I found you cannot rub this material while washing--you have to soak it without friction the way you treat delicate wools in the same soaps as wools. Stretch shirts like this that breathe are super comfortable. The necktie was hated by the Chicago Bulls of the Michael Jordan era, as were all my neckties. Heaven help me if I tried to get them again--I looked thru 25,000 neckties pages on the web a few years ago and found nothing that was not perfectly PERFECTLY AWFUL---god help us all if the rest of our civilization is headed where our neckties have arrived.
