Throughout the years I developed an excellent resistance to huge museums which means I can happily wander around the largest museum buildings for an entire day and still maintain a blessed state of relaxation after several hours.
While huge museums do not scare me, I do have a total aversion for huge department stores.
They indeed manage to make me extremely paranoid for one main reason, I usually can't find the exit when I want to get out and end up getting lost in a sea of designer clothes I'm not even interested in.
This is why it’s probably easier to find me in some forsaken corner of the ceramic gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum than inside Selfridges, but this is also the main reason why I avoided stepping inside huge New York department stores like Bergdorf Goodman, and preferred stopping outside to take some pictures.
Apart from finding less embarrassing getting lost in the streets of New York rather than inside a department store, I also found the mansion-style commercial building where Bergdorf Goodman is located on Fifth Avenue (designed in 1928 by architects Kahn & Jacobs) rather interesting.
Anyway, architectural musings are not the main topic of this post. In fact I would like to dedicate this picture of one of the department store windows - with a dummy wearing a black tulle gown from Oscar de la Renta's Spring/Summer 11 collection (View this photo) matched with a Junya Watanabe camouflage jacket from the designer's Autumn/Winter 2010 collection - to Sarah Scaturro.
Sarah is a textile conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt and has been extensively researching fashionable camouflage, its meanings and the impact of its patterns on the wearer’s identity and psychology.
Apart from lecturing at the "Fashion in Fiction" conference she recently did a presentation at the Royal Military Museum in Brussels entitled “God is Camouflage, Disruptive Patterns in Fashion” (during the conference “Camouflage Takes Centre Stage”).
I’m not sure what Sarah would make of such an ensemble, but I guess she would come up with a very interesting analysis. I can only add that, if I'd only had the tulle evening gown in the picture when I was at university (my camouflage years...) and could have matched it with my brother's military wardrobe (that I had appropriated after he finished his compulsory military service), people may have perceived me more like a lady than like an anarchic terrorist, and maybe my beloved military beret wouldn't have attracted the curiosity and unwanted attention of a bizarre knife-carrying former Foreign Legionnaire at a Glasgow bus stops on a rainy and cold night. But that, I guess, is another story...
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