fuck fashion

My CoP project this year was kick started by my listening to Grayson Perry's 2013 Reith Lectures. The entire series makes for good listening, but there's something in Democracy Has Bad Taste that really resonates with me.

"With being fashionable comes the inevitability of becoming unfashionable"

This summarizes a lot of of the mixed emotions and struggles that I have with illustration as a discipline. So much of, certainly, the contemporary work that I see out there is trendy. Trend-driven. And boring. And vacuous. It has nothing to say about the human condition, or any of the most interesting and difficult questions that hang over us. Fashion is, by nature, cyclical. So does anything that is fashionable spend at least 50% of its time being irrelevant?

I'm becoming increasingly aware of how emotionally charged my practice is, and can't help but wonder if it's going to hinder my progress on this course. It's weird - the happier and more invested I'm becoming in my practice, the less happy and invested I'm becoming in the mechanics of this course. There is still so much 'figuring out' I have to do about the world.

 I don't want to make fashionable work.