5 things that inspired me this week

podcasts, books, movies, &more.

Here is a list of five things I mindfully consumed this past week in search for inspiration.

I have recently made it a priority to broaden the spectrum of content I consume as a way to diversify the lenses I see fashion through. It’s important to me to understand fashion as an organic object, of which breathes, mutates, collapses, and resurrects itself in new ways. Other mediums of art can help us assign context to fashion, or prescribe new meaning to old ways, reinvigorating the cultural channels that were once thought dead or pastiche.

So come one come all! Here are the pieces of content I have consumed this week that tickled fancy!

1. “Ballet Now” (2018)

I watched this documentary on Hulu that follows Tiler Peck and her experience being the first woman to be asked to direct, curate, and star in the Music Center’s famed BalletNOW program. With surmounting pressure to perform, Peck never breaks from her fastidious approach to this multi-disciplinary routine.

I wouldn’t describe this film as riveting, nor enlightening. However, much like personal style and fashion, dance is a silent language able to amplify the strongest messages with just one calculated turn or delicate pirouette.

Dance has become one of my latent interests, so simply watching a routine would be enough for me to walk away satisfied. If you’re searching for something more profound or narrative driven, I would skip this beat. Maybe watch Suspiria or Black Swan if you’re into a souped up Hollywood horror that fuses dance and haunting parables of body dysmorphia, pagan rituals, and psychological torment! Or perhaps, the Step Up franchise is more your speed…no shade. I love Channing Tatum.

2. “Issey Miyake Moves” (2004)

This film made my soul ache.

“Through reform and innovation, he redefined the texture and structure of fabrics through techniques such as pleating and coiling. The documentary shows one by one how the fabrics in Issey Miyake's works are pleated by hand and then baked into shape.”

In this short documentary, Issey Miyake gently folds us into his world of twists and turns, pleats and presses, to illustrate how collaboration, engineering, and creativity constitute his prolific and utterly iconic design ethos.

I was completely transfixed by the integration of alliances across many disciplines: scientists, engineers, designers, and artists work together to produce garments that tow the line between practicality and novelty.

This is a palette cleanser for any artist who finds themselves jaded or deflated in an increasingly automated world. When design realities feel flattened against the bleak reality of AI, an ambiguous economic collapse, and the homogenization of consumer spending — designers like Issey Miyake hold a light up to the endless possibilities erected from earnest imagination and honest collaboration.

Forget the spooky reality of West Village Debutantes colonizing NYC in their matching light wash jeans and white crop tops. Where there is an army of wrinkle free foreheads and clinking cosmopolitans, there is also a network of free agents seeking to revive the pulse of cogent chaos, rejecting the swaths of conformity that keep most of us blanketed in an illusive and totally boring security.

Issey Miyake’s designs act as a transmitter of this chaos…and inspires me to keep pulling at the seams of mindless compliance and submission.

3. JW Anderson on the Importance of Imperfection | Fashion Neurosis Podcast with Bella Freud

Whether you’re into fashion or not, this podcast will change your outlook on the creative industry and reincentivize your inner artist to explore, question, and probe the spaces in which you inhabit.

Bella Freud delivers tens across the board: diverse guests (who all speak with such poise and dignity it almost makes me feel shameful), impressive production value, quality of content, and the superb audio and visual experience defies the conventional podcast experience.

In her interview with Jonathan Anderson, founder of J.W. Anderson and former Creative Director of Loewe, they parse through the memories Anderson has of 1980’s Ireland, which was experiencing intense political disarray and subsequent “economic hardship, political instability, and social unrest.” He mentions how this upbringing has undeniably shaped his visual language, design direction, and ability to “see the world for what it really is.”

As always with Freud, she examines her guests with such diligent care, offering her viewers a peak inside the tender realities these individuals live. Among J.W. Anderson, my favorite episode guests include the likes of Gwendoline Christie, Haider Ackerman, and Rick Owens. Found wherever you get podcasts.

4. “A Plant Meditation to Reconnect with Nature” by Modern Biology on Substack

Have you ever wanted to hear what a red campion flower’s changing bioelectric activity sounds like? Well now you can.

Tarun Nayar, trained musician and biologist, has set out to translate “plant bioelectricity, latent electromagnetic radiation, and even the earth’s resonant hum” into musical experiences that aim to uplift, connect, and expand our consciousness towards nature. Put this on while enjoying your morning coffee and be one with the plants…seriously.

Chew on Nayar’s recent thought experiment while listening: “What would it be like to be a plant? To have green skin? To EAT sunlight?” After experiencing seven grueling months of bitter cold in the deep tundra of Milwaukee, I desperately want to know what it feels like to eat sunlight.

5. Meme, Myself and I by Cassidy George

This was a rather quick read, and moreso a directory for other written works that found themselves tacked onto my ever growing reading list. This article was a snappy review for the book The Extreme Self: Age of You published by Walther König, and summarizes its most salient points that effectively tickled my curiosity.

“The ‘extreme self’ refers to the engineered avatar each of us inhabits in any online life,” writes George. This one liner pierced the resonant air that surrounds the topic of “onliness,” delivering a deafening blow to my already amplified existential attitude towards the alter ego’s we embody when posting about online. It reminded me that we all live in this liminal space: method acting through the means of grid posting, embracing the cognitive dissonance between performance and reality, to convince even the most pathetic of onlookers that our life be of some material goodness.

Whether you think you are being “wholly authentic” by exclusively posting lo-res B-roll of truly uninteresting sunsets and unappetizing meals or fully leaning into your dystopian digital twin a lá FaceTune thirst traps and ambiguous Boiler Room sets — you are crafting a visual experience for onlookers to cobble together a perception of you that could NEVER capture your unending intricacies and delicious complexities. Something to think about there…