It’s somehow inevitable at the end of every year to sit down and take stock, pondering a bit about what you and the rest of the world went through in the last 365 days.
The happiest and saddest moments are usually the ones that are eventually recorded in our memories, because they provoked strong emotions, they gave us joy or made us cry so much that it will be difficult to erase them from our minds.
Less than 48 hours separate us from the end of 2010, a wretched year in my opinion for too many reasons.
Fashion-wise we have seen the industry touching bottom, rarely looking at the real people who actually work behind the scenes, at their rights and strikes, being too focused on creating new fake myths and ephemeral “Internet icons", paying bizarre characters (and alleged credit card frauds connected with sleezy publicists working in the fashion industry - there is enough material here for a bestseller and a blockbuster...) with very little fashion knowledge to appear at various events and catwalk shows not because of their strong and fascinating opinions, but because they simply are “en vogue” or because they own 4,000 pairs of shoes (no, Ms Dello Russo, this is not "revolution from the bottom" as you call it, this is just embarrassing).
The trend will obviously continue into the new year and, maybe, even into the new decade, though I do have faith in our collective consciences and in the gradual rebirth of a noble discontent and of a much needed sense of criticism. I honestly feel that this was the decade when ignorance and superficiality won, but winning one battle doesn’t mean winning the war.
Somehow, as I find myself wondering what I will take into the next year blog-wise, I feel it's very easy to find the final answer: art and architecture will stay, but the numerous posts on science will hopefully lead next year to further comparisons, analysis, discoveries and collaborations.
Neutrino mutations, the Gran Sasso laboratory, holograms, black holes, robots, the Cosmo Skymed satellite, the fullerene molecule, new LED applications, liminal geotextiles, 3D and stereoscopic 3D technologies, provided me (and hopefully also the blog’s readers) with interesting inspirations.
In the last few days many newspapers and sites published the best images of 2010 and, among them, there have been quite a few connected with science and technology.
By leafing through such galleries, you will discover humanoid robots and magnetic plasma peeling off the sun surface; fractals by the late mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; the Tarantula Nebula in the galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud; new images of the Orcus Patera crater near Mars's Mons Olympus; bubbles of gamma ray extending 25,000 light-years both north and south of the Milky Way’s centre; simulated black hole events; astronomers charting the positions of the 10 million stars in the globular Milky Way cluster of Omega Centauri and heavy ion collisions seen by the ALICE Experiment.
Fashion is creativity, but so is scientific discovery and there is a lot that fashion can and should borrow from space telescopes and observatories, probes, spacecrafts, Nasa missions and CERN discoveries in terms of images, colours and general inspirations. Yet I do think that fashion shouldn’t stop there, but should go further.
Rather than producing the umpteenth pair of denim trousers and the next slogan T-shirt in celebration of the latest vapid icon (I'm already cringing at the amount of simply useless stuff we will see starting from January at the various fashion fairs all over Europe…), the fashion industry should aim higher, looking at innovative collaborations with scientists, experimental textiles, installations and photo shoots (if I see another photo-shoot with models undergoing plastic surgery, pretending they are in rehab or tied to a bed and engaged in some kind of S&M practice, I will not only start screaming, but turn into a serial killer…).
In "The Light-Years" one of Italo Calvino’s paradoxical tales collected in Le Cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics – download English translation by clicking here: Download Calvino-Italo-Cosmicomics), while looking at the galaxies, the main character Qfwfq spots signs pointed right at him spelling different messages.
The first one says "I saw you" and refers to something embarrassing he did millions of light years earlier and that he wanted to hide; another sign cryptically states: "You have a flannel shirt".
Puzzled and angry Qfwfq wonders if on other galaxies they had perfected their telescopes so much and they used them to enjoy spotting the most insignificant details.
I doubt mysterious beings living on other galaxies are currently spying upon us to detect if we are wearing a flannel shirt or a stylishly expensive designer bag. Yet, so far, we have given enough reasons to many galaxies far away to laugh at our collective fashion stupidity.
A brand new year and a brand new decade starting always represent a chance to change. But is the vapid fashion industry ready to take up the science challenge? Time will tell. At present the only thing I know for sure is that there are many people out there who would be happy to see the fashion industry explode into tiny and indiscernible bits and pieces like a wildly and fantastically colourful supernova.
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