the sartorialist, style & signs of life
I don’t consider myself a fashionista (I leave that to my super talented sister), but I love The Sartorialist. His musings on style are always interesting & fresh, and the photographs make me feel like I’m on the streets of Milan, Paris, or some other chic European city, even if the photo was taken in NYC. And I absolutely love it when the photo captures a genuine moment of exuberance, like this one.
Usually, Sartorialist sticks to fashion, so when I saw this photo, I thought she was your standard Eurogirl, radiant with style & grace.
The first thing I thought was, what gorgeous hair! I scrolled down to see what he had written about her outfit, and here’s what it said:
“I was chit-chatting with Susan after I took this picture and mentioned that I thought her hair was sooo beautiful - her best feature.
She said thanks and added that she had lost her hair once because of cancer. She now purposely keeps it long because she feels it is such a gift to have it back and, for her, a sign of life.”
And who says style has no substance? Yeah, everyone knows that beauty goes beyond the surface, but sometimes it’s striking to see the extent to which aesthetics themselves can be profound and deeply powerful. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately… Doesn’t it seem like beauty, as an abstract concept, does a lot more in the world that just bring joy to people, inspiring & uplifting them? Or maybe I’m just imagining. Hmmm… Beauty inspires, but what does it inspire us to do? Is there a point beyond the aesthetic? Maybe I’m getting way ahead of myself. I don’t even understand what I just wrote. ha!
If you’re looking for a more erudite discussion of the relationship between aesthetics & ethics, or a philosophical meditation on the role of beauty in our world, check out On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry. Scarry is an English professor at Harvard (full disclosure: we’re not fans of H-vard around here, especially not after this weekend!). In this book, she defends aesthetic pleasures, arguing that beauty renews our search for truth and justice. Crazy, right? Here’s an excerpt from the book synopsis:
Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a “surfeit of aliveness.” In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.
And if you’re at all interested in literary criticism & theories of representation, you might want to read her other stuff, too. I’ve only read On Beauty, but the rest of her work is supposed to be wonderful. and brilliant, obvs.
