Sometimes I’m puzzled by the different ways people think about objects and I wonder if being materialistic has to be innately shallow.

I grew up watching my mother dream up, sketch, draft and construct women’s apparel. I grew up surrounded by my stepfather’s parents’ beloved and unhinging antiques. I’ve never been disparaging of object obsession. Each trinket, jacket, shoe, desk: all seems endowed with significance, whether sentimental or ontological (or both).

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle describes being as a pointed trajectory (teleology), like the development of an acorn into an oak tree. I’m no expert in the question of being, but I do wonder how this idea of becoming relates to the construction of our most beloved and important objects. How does a design, and its eventual construction, marketing and distribution, become your favorite jeans? And how does that purchase become part of a temporally specific aesthetic movement (um, a trend)? And then, after all that, how do we use these objects to construct new meanings about ourselves, our surroundings, our background – anything!

I don’t want to make these things seems precious, but to somehow allow them to be meaningful nonetheless. I think it’s ok if we like our stuff (a lot).

So get ready. We’ll run around town looking at some of our favorite lines, and hopefully discover some new ones, checking out designer’s studios and everything that goes into the transmission of their idea into your zeitgeist. And we might pick up a few items in the process.

Set, go!
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To see more from Zinzi Edmundson, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/zinzi/

Published on 3 November 2009 | 3 |