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| http://www.stefanbruggemann.com/ |
Conceptual: n. a term used in fashion to illustrate something vague or abstract. Applied frequently when describing photo shoots, haircuts and Swedish ready-to-wear lines.
It couldn’t be helped. I was in a state of near desperation. The summer sales had started a fortnight earlier than anticipated and I had three pages of swimwear to shoot.
As I typed the brief to my team, a blinking cursor mocked the blank space next to ‘theme’. Dare I put ‘TBC’? Or perhaps, ‘we’re kind of stuck for options lads, so we’ll see how we fare on the day’. Hardly.
It was time to swallow my pride and key stroke some fashion-ese: ‘c-o-n-c-e-p-t-u-a-l’. There, that wasn’t too difficult. Oh dear, but what kind of concept am I referring to here? I glanced over at the TV screen where Carrie-Anne Moss was kicking some Matrix butt. ‘F-u-t-u-r-i-s-t-i-c…’ The mocking cursor beckoned still. Currying favour to another dimension is all well and good but fashion folk are mad on detail.
I recalled a passage from Amanda Brooks’ tome ‘I Love Your Style’ with game-like instructions on how to mix one’s fashion references. The style stratagem operates on the same principle as fashioning one’s porn name. Start with a core theme, add a celebrity and finish with one’s favourite trend. This could work. Shall it be ‘futuristic-Dolly Parton-bohemia’? Nah. ‘Futuristic-Jackie O-rockabilly?’ Too much hairspray. What about ‘futuristic-Grace Jones-tribal chic’? Eureka!
The genre mash-up evolved like the seven stages of man in my head. It was a brave new beach where cyber warrior priestesses took swimwear to a new dimension. I began to type furiously, ‘Futuristic tribal warriors...from outer space’. And with one trigger finger on the send button, I committed myself to the conceptual, the abstract, the vague and if I wasn’t careful...the ridiculous.
“So just what does a ‘futuristic tribal warrior’ look like?” enquired my sister (a.k.a. The Wise Elder) as I siphoned through bags of nearly-there neoprene.
“I’m thinking body armour, bikinis, wet look hair...”
“Ah yes, because clearly there is alien life form on Dollymount Strand,” she chided.
“I think you’re missing the point. It’s conceptual,” I offered weakly.
“Wait a minute,” urged the Wise Elder. “Are you saying that in the future we all wear bikinis?”
I was beginning to lose patience with my straight-talking sibling and confidence in my seemingly cock-eyed concept.
“Look! A concept has no apparent basis in reality or fact,” I balked. “It’s simply an imaginative construct.”
“Help me understand then,” she urged; despite my best efforts at clarification. “What you’re saying is that a simulacrum is all that’s needed to sell swimwear; no beach, no sea, no sand, no hunky extras.”
Looks like I wasn’t the only one to spill water from the bath this week. “Congratulations, you just had your first fashion moment,” I goaded with a smile.
“I’m gathering that’s a so-called ‘concept’ too?” retaliated the seer.
“No, my dear sibling. That’s a fact.”
