It’s no secret I’m a bit of a bookworm. I’m not by any means a fast reader, but I do enjoy consistently having a book to read each night and sometimes during the occasional less-harried day. This past month I consumed three books which were all great, but there was one that really exercised the hell out of my brain – Slaughterhouse V. For those of you who are not familiar with Vonnegut (this was my first time reading him), his writing style is entirely different than any author I have ever really encountered; he is blunt, honest, and yet somehow still poetic. I was drawn to the book by its strangely dark title for what turned out to be a somewhat humorous, ridiculous plot. Hint: it features aliens, war, and time travel.. not something I would generally be attracted to, but ya know what? You really got to me, Kurt.
The part about it which has my mind in a vice-grip that I still can’t shake two books later is a skill that the extraterrestrials – the Tralfamadorians – had. I convinced my friend Franchesca to read it just so I could have someone to discuss it with because it felt like such a revelation: the aliens could see in what they referred to as four dimensions (this doesn’t ruin the plot at all, no worries). Obviously three are the same as those that we use, and the fourth was time. They could see across TIME. JUST IMAGINE THAT. For one second, seriously. Let it sink in. What if we could literally look across time as a landscape and a. know that we couldn’t change anything that was bound to happen, and b. only choose to look at the good times if we pleased.
For me this is like, holy mother of philosophy; I don’t even know how to begin to describe the depth of that theory. And then, beyond the mini-explosions that were going on across the surface of my brain, I started to think about how this could apply to our lives. As the citizens of Earth and not Tralfamadore, can we really look beyond the bad things that have happened in our past, even in the world’s past, and peer through a metaphorical window back at the good?
I say, the answer is yes! And the resounding hallelujah of a response is fashion. When we flip through the pages of magazines, think back to stereotypes of previous decades, or watch the latest trends parading down the street on the bodies of teenage girls, there is always an inescapable air of the positivity and successes of past. The cycle of what is in style always comes back around to show-case the sartorial inventions of yore: for example, I currently favor a lot of the stylings that my great-grandmother was on the forefront of back in her day (subsequently we look like twins when we go to lunch). And to me, that is what fashion is about. We remember what was good about an era – the glorious flappers rather than the depression, the high-waisted bell bottoms over the wars and protests. The clothing of a time period is both its own social commentary and fond remembrance.
Maybe that’s why Slaughterhouse hit me so hard, and maybe that’s why I sometimes like to dress like a 94-year-old lady.
GS
Gap Sher 