El arte de la alta costura : Moda y belleza en la era del capital

McQueen drank the blood and horror of London's Gothic culture; Galliano embraced the frivolous courtly masks that flooded 18th-century Parisian theaters; Saint Laurent plucked from the grand Hollywood cinemas a modern woman who would now be avant-garde, clad in an ambiguous and captivating tuxedo. Capital burst onto the scene at that moment, and, like good or bad, divine or profane, the West democratically categorized art in the name of consumption: what is design when it avoids looking to the absolute? Does the essence perish before utility? Have supermodels killed beauty? In this laconic and forceful essay, Clara Zamora Meca restores clothing creation as the work of the artist in the face of its crude distortion and commercial homogenization. Her words open the door to a world where, far from obeying consumerist needs, ingenuity strives to satisfy a yearning for immortality through the creation of a garment. Haute couture, which reached its creative peak before sinking into the smooth, radiant jaws of the market, when pure fantasy permeated glossy paper and wasn't yet blurred in the virtual world of screens, finds in these lines an invitation to be reborn, to clothe souls instead of bodies.