Platform shoes. Miscelánea de Mordisco Issue 001

Platform shoes
Miscellaneous of Mordisco Issue 001
Like a bad dye job, the
truth is in the roots.

FASHION MATERIALITIES: BETWEEN VANITY AND DECAY.
Rotting, fermenting, dyeing, and distilling.
Fermentation is widely employed as a means of
rendering toxic food edible, or of preserving
perishable foods.
All these techniques involve decomposition -
decomposition to produce useful things like dye and
hemp or tasty things like shrimp paste and pickles.
But there is a formal symmetry between these
techniques and rotting in a less utilitarian context,
the secondary treatment of the dead. Both involve
the three stages of preparation, decomposition and
extraction.
After washing and dressing, the corpse is stored in
a sealed jar. All these processes of fermentation or
rotting produce a strong smell, often a nauseating
smell.
Making indigo dye is infamously stinky, and many
Westerners dislike the preserved for that we
mentioned because of their pungent scent.
Like a bad dye job, the truth is always in the roots.
Those fermentation and decomposition processes
make the hair dry, transforms it to a broom. The
reality behind dying is death in form of aesthetics
programation consume.
This miscellaneous attempts to study four eras and periods of time in
which fashion has evolved and still does: era of necessity, era of
distinction, era of ready-to-wear and the era of trend(s).
Mordisco magazine offers the idea of the painful irony of wearing and
displaying fashion trends. This subject is exposed by image remixing
that questions how to make any body part to buy back their own
alienation and pain from a consumer system that has made of them
wildly profitable commodities.

BAD MOODS, BAD LOOKS
My day started in the worst way possible: I had a flight, isn’t it a reason to be in a
bad mood? I did not have enough time for packing last few days so I am in a rush.
‘I will take the basics: black t-shirts, a few pants, sneakers… I have everything’, I
thought.
When I got to the plane I was squeezed into the middle seat between two footballplayer-sized
fellows who smelled of garlic and last night’s beer. That is not the
worst… We sat on the tarmac for five hours, I just took off my sneakers.
‘Keep your shoes on, please’, I heard from behind. The cold drinks were warm,
and the staff finally decided they couldn’t serve the food as it was not suitable to
eat. They wouldn’t let us off the plane or stand or go to the bathroom as we were
waiting for permission to take off — and the air conditioning didn’t work! The two
fellows on either side turned into a bath of sweat.
Once we already took off, I was completely sleepy. This warm weather is too much
for me, makes me fall asleep immediately. At least I am not going to be conscious
of those two jerks. I am glad I am sleeping, too much boobs would have been in
the way to ignore and concentrate on the sky.
Out of nowhere, the plane took a nose dive … for about five minutes! No,
seriously, count for five minutes. That’s a long nose dive! Passengers started
screaming, luggage went flying out of the overhead bins and the lights went out. It
was scary! I do not mean the nose dive —I love theme parks and those nice rides. I
mean the whole situation in the plane. I thought: am I already in hell?
Of course, the two jocks ended being two fags. You know what they say: they can
seem to be jerks, but at the end the fags get the girls! So imagine that for five
minutes, what a torture… A few minutes after the first scream came a loud
explosion like a car backfiring.
An ordinary Wednesday with no cosmological, apocalyptic or even philosophical
pretensions may be the date when you have a plane crash. Okay, don’t worry. This
happens a lot, so those attendants know what they are doing.
Anyway, everyone was panicking, they were asking out loud: are we going to
die?!? If you ask the wrong question, you will surely get the wrong answer. ‘No,
no, no, keep calm please’ replied the assistants.
Obviously we were all dead from the start of this flight; I always have bad luck
with that kind of things. If there is any chance that someone close to me might die,
they will surely die. If not, ask my first fish. I tried to feed them three times a day
such as humans do. What happened was something between a prawn overdose
and an explosion. It is practically the same today: a plane is blowing up and I am
overdosed by this sleazy smell of sweat.

How death will come is uncertain; that it will come is certain. Death has
no obligation to serve notice. The photograph for which you impatiently
posed turns out to be the last that was taken, and the smile an
incomplete triumph over irritation at being told to smile, the last to be
recorded.
The first priority when someone dies is to identify the body. Even in cases
of death at home, some form of identity label is required so that there
can be no doubt of the identity at any stage. In some cases, but not
always, jewelry is removed.
The day I died this process was not possible. I was chopped up in
multiple pieces, my head was just rolling in the depth of the ocean. I was
something like a barbecue exquisite corpse, but it was not exquisite at
all. ‘Whose body is it? I don’t recognize myself’.
Have you ever thought in the details of how you will die?
Maybe you have also thought in how you will look like on that day.
If you are a narcissistic desperate New York girl for sure you did.
Definitely to be chopped up and destroyed is not a good way of dying,
and the clothes I was wearing were not by far my best garment. I should
have thought that the outfit I was wearing could be the outfit which
would represent my corpse the rest of the eternity. It would have been
more interesting to be kidnapped, tied or something. Come on, I am
young. This is not fair. Can I have a last desire? PLEASE!
My last desire would be become a vampire. That is the way I can cheat
death, right? At least I could live a bit more and still be dead. The only
thing I need is: just tell me, where the fuck can I get bitten?
I do need to eat

ERA OF NECESSITY: BEAR HIDES
Out of the blue, I found myself between two goth Lolita girls in a horror film
festival. The films were good, but I don’t know if I preferred to be between two
jocks smelly guys or between this two nobody—expects—me—anywhere—so—I—
wear—black—to—-express—-my—anxiety. I asked one of them why goths wear
black, so she answered: ‘It just makes people think. They see me in black, they
see the fangs, they see the contact lenses [. . .]. They say you can’t fight the
system or buck the system. Well yeah, you can, but in your own way, and you do
it in such a way that people don’t realize that you’re actually being a little
revolutionary in your own way. Fashion trends, fine you can keep them. Because
that is not me. I am always in black. It’s a strong colour, people look at it as a
very negative colour, but it isn’t, black will stop negativity. Anything light or bright
will attract negativity ’cause it is bright. It is a welcoming colour, . . . [but] Black
keeps people at a distance, it gives people the image of you know, ‘don’t
approach me, back off, leave me alone’.
I replied as the person most interested in her around the world. I just wanted that
film festival to end; what do I do here? The Craft was not even a good film at all,
but after a few more films and a long list of compliments, the two experienced—in
—not—fitting—in—Lolitas took me to a bar. O-M-G, the Bat-Bar, what a wise
name….. really!?
It was not really difficult to become a vampire. You can always find one waiting
for you in the toilet, thirsty of blood and other fluids. The only thing you need to
ask is if if they can penetrate you raw, be not too passionate and try to make is as
short as possible. And… tadá! After a few hours you become a vampire.
Wow. I am a vampire already. How did I realize about that? Well, everybody
knows vampires don’t cast in mirrors, then you have it, after being penetrated in
that toilet and wasting a few hours in design drugs, I could not see my funny face
on the mirror.
I should think now what I am going to wear the rest of the eternity —I am not going to
have any other worry. For the first time in my life I can care of my look…
The — only? — outcome is that I can’t see myself in the mirror, but I can always wear a
mask. Can vampires wear masks? I guess so, I am dead but my death is not as the
others. I am a fucking fanged vampire. I am no spectral-boo-ghoul, so I can wear almost
anything I want, right? But… I have no idea what I should wear, is this new job kind of
formal? The Lolita twins just gave me a bad quality silk cloak, I look stupid. I thought
vampires were rich! Damn.
Being a vampire is something serious, I can’t look like any other basic human in
carnival.Do I need to wear the same dirty cloak every night? Come on, there must be
something for me. Any YSL Smocking jacket or Givenchy tuxedo.

I want to make clearer something: I don’t want to wear a Halloween vampire costume.
The costume acts as a record of my vampiric transition as other. I don’t want any S
which alienates me as a superhero brand. As a freak, I could be stigmatized in this
way, but by taking control of this otherness through garments,I might assert pride of my
difference. No more spandex patriotic prostitutes as captain America or a jock-jerk
Superman, please.
I started looking in fashion coverages and in the end of the day I found myself
suggesting that a brightly colored outfit might achieve the desired result. I learnt some
fashion Do I also include a dye in my hair and a purple mohawk maybe? This is the
thing I am going to wear the rest of the eternity: needs to be outrageous.
For making a decision and carrying my bags I hired a shop assistant. Igor. A toohandsome-to-be-human
Hungarian guy. Of course he is not human! I won him in an eBay
auction, and I spent almost all I had (getting used to this Internet fashion world).
Everyone seem to be interested in having a slave nowadays.
Well, I am not interested in him. He is just some support I need at the beginning of my
new career. He reminded me to not forget that clothes are not only symbols of status,
but also create power. Oh, right, I almost forgot that he dresses up always in latex.
Clothes, my new kinky manager argues ‘literally are authority’. It lends validity to my
actions, whatever I am going to do. You don't need to be really clever: spend all the
money I can and my Mastercard stands.
The simple act of dressing makes an individual acutely aware of the ‘presentation of the
self’, giving him a heightened awareness of the methods by which we create and
recreate selves [through] the act of (re)clothing and the impact we produce in the other
people.
Fashion is, after all, a frivolous pursuit —a sign of ostentatious consumption— and to
imply that me, a vampire and his slave, are slaves to fashion would imply that he or she
is not fully committed to other values. It’s clear: as a sex-starving personality, I am not
committed to nobody.
Though as an outsider to the fashion world I may have difficulties identifying the latest
fashions, fashionistas ‘can tell at a glance’ whether someone ‘is wearing this year’s
dress’. Each year, dresses are sufficiently different from those of last year so as to be
unmistakably recognizable by the initiated as being of the latest mode.
The fashion cycle is characterized by continuity. It is a continuous process without
destination. Fashion does not evolve in the direction of an anticipated finale. It will
continue to evolve indefinitely as my fabulous corpse.
It does not progress towards an end point; he expects to live forever. Even when a
person dies, he is resurrected, just as fashion items are resurrected after they have
apparently become outdated. Like the vampire, fashions ultimately never die. Old
elements are revived and decontextualized and thereby given new life.
In order to reflect changing values, the new costumes must be distanced from what has
come before. They may be made of new materials, or incorporate subtle shifts in color
or texture. But not in animal prints, please. They are too 2000. They are outdated, no
more zebra prints, please.

ERA OF DISTINCTION: BUSTLES. FROM VICTIM TO TERRORISM.
The vampires acknowledges the power that clothes have in expressing identity, and so
embraces the idea that he can be judged according to his wardrobe. The act of dress
in identity construction is acknowledgment of objectification. 'Well, it is not like I want
their blood: I just want to sneak in their wardrobes and get their most precious clothes.
I can’t stand seeing that bitch wearing a better Gucci than mine'.
Two more minutes and the Sample Sale market will be open. Sample sales are ripe for
drama. The stakes are high; people are sweating and taking their clothes off; money is
flying everywhere. Sale 50% off in Marc Jacobs, Valentino and 70% off in Dior.
Everything a girl dreams about every night! As always, in the first line. Prepared and
not overdressed. I came with Igor so he can help me carrying the bags.
Four, three, two, one…Unleash the Kraken!
Once inside, this short woman from Second Avenue literally pushed me and ripped a
sable chubby out of my hand like a starving person at a buffet. I was about to knock
her back when I saw the crazed look in her eyes—like a charging hyena. She did not
know I was a vampire and I could just kill her at the back of the shop and get the
labels for free. You know, labels or love! I prefer the labels. I dove in and snatched it
up. She was ready to slug me and said she saw it first, but I stood my ground. Plus I
was wearing heels and towered over her. One has to protect their territory. But that’s
how I knew it was good: she got crazy over it. After all, if I try something on at a
sample sale and women aren’t running to find the same thing or are trailing me, I
know it’s not great.The price reduction is a drug and if they can’t get their fix they go
on a rampage, pulling each other’s hair and throwing right hooks, all for a beaded
top.
No emotional baggage, just big bags filled with Dior. Life’s like a runway, so what’s
all the fussing for. Shoulders pads, Kashmir gloves —need them because it’s winter and
I have hands, obviously—.
The beauty of this kind of terrorism —if you are a shop-terrorist— is that you can
succeed even by failing, you can always hit people. çIgor and me, we perform a
platform shoe routine. So even though he failed to kill a single person in sales sample,
you can always see from the heights. That makes already a distinction.
Let’s remember that you are treated as a terrorist in the airports if you wear platform
shoes. Wearing platforms shoes makes you become a suicide bomber. And you should
buy a life insurance.
One contributing factor is that people stopped flying on platforms and drove in
sneakers instead. Platform and bustles terrorists —like Marie Antoinette— always think
where to step before stepping, no one wants to get an ankle broken. The simple fact of
wearing platform shoes makes a difference in the height and you become a walkingbomb
The state of current medical practice is so bad right now that there’s not very much
worth protecting about the old ways of doing things. Nobody in medicine wants to
admit this but it’s the truth: it is better to die than to go to a hospital in which you are
going to die anyway.
So why suicide bombers should buy life insurance? Because it is not a good time for
being born, we could die at any moment.

We, fashion victims, allow a set of ridiculous in ourselves, yet compelling, rules to govern our
wardrobes, our purchases, our desires, even our own sense of self-worth. It’s these
unquestioned tenets that have helped bring us to the sorry state we find ourselves in today.
That’s why you shall pay more to appear poor, believe submissively in the fashion label’s
reach, care about Paris Hilton’s Gaultier micro-mini and want without seeing.
Everything we want itself has an identity, and aspects are transferred to the wearer’s identity
when he dons the costume. You are what you wear, so each of us is sucked into sillines’ and
immediately identified as extraordinary by their best costumes. These costumes are, in contrast
to most of civilian clothing, colorful, bold, figure-hugging, and often seemingly impractical. It is
evidence that they have been ‘sucked into silliness’. But also never successfully translate to
reality: the best garments are always too painful and not comfortable to wear.
The extraordinary look and nature of the vampire on platforms [is] contrasted with the
ordinariness the people who surrounds him. Legitimating one’s identity in the eyes of others is
always a driving force of human behavior, and it seems this is also true superheroes.
Anything less than extraordinary action would seem out-of-character for him. Dressing up,
dressing down becomes a spectacle of otherness a committed difference to the ordinariness of
the other civilians.
Vampires exist out of time. They do not belong to any particular era. In any one incarnation,
they may be grounded in a particular temporal setting, but the vampire himself is ageless and
timeless. Costumes and garments, conversely, tend to be relatively unaffected by the passage
of time. It Is static, and preserves memories of the time at which it was first introduced. It is the
nature of the fashion cycle that styles fall in and out of favor. That is an act of evolution into
eternity, although evolution is painful and expensive. and more for a vampire: To be
fashionable is to begin the inevitable descent towards becoming unfashionable. When a
character must be ahistorical, and his costume must be at least largely consistent from one
incarnation to the next, it would be dangerous to incorporate elements for contemporary
fashion. Timelessness is achieved through consistency, as superheroes tend to adopt a fixed
costume that evolves slowly and minutely if at all.
We tend to dress more comfortably when lounging alone (we know we don’t need to impress
our cats and goldfish) and put up with uncomfortable clothing more often when we dress to
impress -stiff collars for a black-tie event, four-inch
stilettos for a birthday party, control-top panty hose for an
important conference. As much as we want to stand out
from a crowd, we also tolerate pain to fit in. It’s human
nature to follow the herd. Even the most painful and
seemingly grotesque practices can become fashionable if
they are adopted by the right people early on. One must
suffer to be beautiful.
Surprise surprise: The demise of the great dance Isadora
Duncan and consummate Fashion victim was a freak
accident for sure, but It brings up an interesting point
about our fixation on dress: Had Isadora not put style first,
would she have lived to see another day?

ERA OF READY-TO-WEAR : DESPERATION
Most of us would be insulted if someone called us ‘trendy’, as if the label implies a sort
of flakiness and weak-mindedness. In fact, we consider people who are overly trendy to
be out of their minds .I have them in my wardrobe, but I don’t know when I am going to
wear them. Obviously ‘I bought them and wore once, but I am not necessarily attached
to whom I was anymore’.
I have been a miniskirt mania, the craze in shoes, armbands are all the rage, military
madness… Fashion’s perpetual reinvention of itself is an essential part of what makes me
love it (and hate it). Trends make dressing fun (and frustrating).
I have a party tonight and I realize I don’t have anything to wear.
Our impatience with fashion trends is fueled by our ever-shortening attention spans.
Today, the pace of life itself is fast. Buying gas with a credit card is too time consuming
(now we can pay with the wave of a jazzed-up keychain at the pump). With everything
arounds us moving so quickly, it’s clear that change in fashion could not continue at a
snail’s pace. Fashion may have sped up, but so has nearly everything else around us.
No matter how much pleasure we find in shopping for clothes, there is always an
underlying frustration that we can’t keep up —a steady, low-level feeling of failure from
not being able to stay abreast of the rise and fall of trends.
I stood in from of her overflowing closet and screams: I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR!
Because whatever I have is never enough. I want more, more.
I suffer innumerable Bad Clothes Days when nothing seems to look right, even though
the same clothes looked fine just a week ago. Even worse, anxiety that you will never
measure up to some indefinable level of good taste has little to do with much you
actually own or don’t own —some of the people with the largest wardrobes are still
dissatisfied when they peer into their closets every morning.
At this moment I decided to kill my poodle and do some fur with it. Oh, I did not mention
it: it was not even my pet, it was Igor’s. Although I got it for free, the fucking corpse is
stinking in my wardrobe. But when my heart was set on wearing fur because it is vogue,
I rationalized my decision: ‘It’s legal’, ‘It’s your right to wear what you want’, ‘I eat
meat; so what’s the difference? I will use a lavender breeze and problem sorted’.
My speed-chic-addiction is the crack cocaine of my fashion lifestyle: cheap, fast and
addictive. The act of consumption provides a temporary high —a fashionable new
garment injects its wearer with a euphoric feeling of pride and self-confidence.
I stand taller, smile more, go home with Igor glowing with contentment.
The pleasure of dressing up comes partly in the pleasure of acting according to a
different set of rules. Consequently, dressing up may be seen as both liberating and
restricting.
Having a wardrobe is as equivalent to a uniform, signifying allegiance to a set of
professional ideals rather than aesthetic trends. I have an specific amount of clothing
and then I have to wear those almost everyday.
'This is not what I expected. I bought lots of clothing and I still want more’.

How odd that our taste in clothes changes so frequently while our preferences in other
areas remain constant. Our favored type of partner rarely wavers (if you like tall, dark
and handsome, it’s unlikely you will drool over Mr.Short and Pasty). So why are we so
flick when it comes to fashion? In order to figure it out, it’s important to understand its vital
component —the trend.
Everyone remembers leaving denim, on denim, on some more denim stupid trend or T-shirt
with dumb sayings —those should never be worn intentionally. But it wasn’t until recently
that garment gluttony became so universal among average people. The result? When we
are so swept up in following every trend, we never develop our own personal style. One
gets the feeling that the trendsetters of yesteryear, like Coco Chanel, Lady Diana and
Grace Jones, were fully aware of how to use clothes as an extension of their personalities.
‘Reinvention is Madonna’s look. Imitation is ours. I am a vampire, but I am not into
hardcore metal music. Madonna’s fan for ever. Sorry not sorry’.
Scrapping our own eccentricities in favor of fashion monotony can only lead us down as
dangerous path —a path where creativity suffers. When we fail to nourish our own
personal sense of style and instead, mechanically follow the current, we put ourselves in
danger of forgetting what makes fashion fun in the first place —experimentation and
originality.
All of that is nice, yeah. But well, let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke. In
terms of fashion, that means it’s time for a promotion. It is sad that I am so focused in
fashion that I forget about paying the bills, the rent and find something to eat. The blood is
so out now. I need to cook, I don’t have a personal buffet. But if I am in a rush, then I get
some caviar sandwich or ask for some pasta in the Italian restaurant is downstairs. Not
having sex makes me feel other kind of hunger.
I am glad I have something to blame for my self-absorption other than me. I blame
fashion! Still, my self-sacrifice leads me nowhere more frequently than it leads anywhere.
‘You will be happy when you have dropped a size, and repeats the message when you
are a size smaller. If the day comes when you can squeeze comfortably into her desired
size… Will you be content, look lovingly into the mirror, and never view yourself as
imperfect again? Not likely’. Instead, the yardstick will merely be adjusted and a new
standard set, forever unachievable in the long run. After all, a person whose goal it is to
waste way to a mere nub of a human being, all bones and skin and zero meat, can never
be guaranteed happiness. ‘You will start to skip breakfast to balance out the calories you
consumed the night before after eating a second chicken leg for dinner, or overexercising
with Igor to reduce fat.’
When suddenly your Mastercard does not work in a shop, when you are not able to make
money and then you buy clothes when they are already out, death as the trends must
come to an end. Its time has simply come.
The death of the poodle spent on this cheap fur I will never wear somehow doesn’t weigh
as heavily on my minds as $12 squandered on a passionfruit martini we order then spill all
over the floor (the humanity!!!!!).
THE end OF A TREND