Word: inwardly
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Isaacs can't help his subject's unruliness, but one wishes for more interpretation and overarching narrative--a history of ideas atop the history of events. There are a couple of implicit morals. The first is that cultures that turned inward, notably China (the breakout star of the show, with an apparent big role in the sequel), have not fared so well as those that were outward looking, even imperialist. The second is that the era's driving force, for good and for ill, is human arrogance. This millennium is a graveyard of eternal empires, authoritative explanations and overreaching ambitions...
...inch of psychic space. It travels from the Kodak Brownie, the memory toy that let everyone commemorate the everyday, to the computer manipulations that turn pictures into smooth lies. This is history that gives more time to mass-market phenomena and socially concerned work than anything formalist, unengaged or inward. So LIFE magazine, tabloids and the child-labor photos of Lewis Hine are all nicely served. Minor White, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston rate less than a shutter click of mention. That's not the whole picture...
...emphasis on social practice, however, does not mean that her approach is sociological. She is interested in aesthetics, not economics, envisioning fashion as an extraordinarily democratic art, and every clothed body as a poem. She speaks of fashion as literature, "a sequence of costumes illustrating a narrative of inward events" and everyone who gets dressed in the morning as an author, which is not to say that all are equally skilled; while geishas may be "advanced poets of dress," most of us are hacks or worse...
This analogy of fashion to literature allows Hollander one of her chief weapons in her struggle to make fashion criticism as respectable an endeavor as literary criticism. She insists on the personal and inward aspect of fashion, the poetic dimension, rather than seeing, as fashion's attackers do, mindless conformity to a current mode of consumption. For Hollander, clothing is "the conductor of the most intimate and personal dispositions, not only feelings but aesthetic choices with personal historical significance--not only the wearer's immediate surrounding world but the style of his self-perceptions within...
Hata's outward and inward lives are patterned like a trompe l'oeil, one of those tricky designs in which images emerge or recede with changes of perspective. Now a contemporary American suburbia is the focus; now a 1944 Pacific outpost turns the future Bedley Run into background...