Depth & Image...singing n posing

all pics in this post by KinMeng, taken at The Attic, Nov 29, 2006 @ Doreen Tang's recital

One of my favourite magazines...and I don't have many favourites really, is the Australian Vogue. I started reading it years ago because it was the cheapest Vogue. Nowadays I hardly miss any issue, not for price but for the articles and columns. I usually buy it now for the writing.

This month's Australian Vogue, page 134, Role Players (Vogue Comment):

"Now, rather than put the time and effort into becoming a cultivated person, people have discovered it's a lot easier to cultivate an image," says Ariel Leve, whose Cassandra column appears in London's The Sunday Times Magazine. "The skill has become about conveying depth, as oppose to achieving it."

It's an old topic but it never failed to rouse some brain activities for me every time I read something about this topic.

This time round, reading this article just got me thinking about my increasingly fashion-inspired lifestyle...as I become more involved in giving others fashion tips, publish fashionable articles in my blogs, become more knowledgeable in shopping, am I also becoming more and more shallow?



Some of you may say that dressing up or grooming is healthy, it reflects healthy self-confidence level, etc. But aren't these the same `crap' sold to us by the billion dollar beauty n fashion industry? They are selling us an image, luxurious lifestyle that...don't cure cancer or save dying children.

I remember Goddess said this to me when I asked about my obsession with fashion,

"As long as fashion is not all that is about you..."

Sure, I have my music.



Meanwhile, a bit more from the article from Vogue,

"Okay, but how can a whole generation of intellectuals and philosophers (today's Simone de Beauvoirs) and activists (our Aung San Suu Kyis) fail to have registered on our role-model radars? We want to be like Sienna Miller not the late Susan Sontag, Jennifer Aniston not Mary Robinson. "Popular culture tends to stress miraculous or specular transformations, the idea that you can be chosen out of an ordinary life to become something outstanding," says Dr Catherine Driscoll of the gender and cultural studies department of the University of Sydney. "That's as true of fairy tales as it is of Australian Idol or plastic surgery narratives."


As I walked out of Scoop earlier with my latest bargains of dresses, I decided I had to read up on the physchology of shopping and variety in wardrobe for women. I need to find out more (beyond what I have been telling myself all this while) about the thrill of buying clothes...and dressing up.



Surely I can aim to be those few, new breed of our society, beautiful, stylish AND brainy couple with talents, talented singer :)

Who says I can't? I'm about to brainstorm on what to wear for my next gig, while I memorize all ten new songs in a language I don't use everyday...