Lyudmila Alyabieva, Editor-in-Chief of Fashion Theory, about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, the chief editor of the Theory of Fashion magazine, a teacher at the British Higher School of Art and Design and the Brand Management in the Fashion Industry program at the Higher School of Economics has shared his stories about favorite books.
In our family, reading has always had a special relationship: parents believed and taught me to believe in his supernatural power. In childhood and early adolescence I was a drunken reader. I still remember how I skipped school to finish reading War and Peace. And there were periods when I could not read anything for a week. Everything somehow changed by itself, when I unexpectedly for all and for myself decided to enter Istfil RSUH. I carried full bags of books from the Noginsk City Library, where I went weekly on my city trip on a tram. I read Marlo, Shakespeare, Heine, Novalis, Hoffmann and everything that I could find by following the shelves, no matter how trite, in alphabetical order.
We lived in a two-room apartment: parents, grandmother, my sister and I were a huge Airedale, given to my older sister after the release of "The Adventures of Electronics." Mom was a dressmaker, and in one of the rooms was something like a workshop - the corner in which there was a sewing machine with an ironing board. Mom sewed the day away, and at night I laid out my precious library finds and read, wrote something out. At some point, my mother's threads, which dotted the floor and which, I confess, I hated sweeping, and my lines (read and written) are intertwined, and I will start to do what I do now.
It seems that I made the final choice in favor of philology thanks, no matter how pathetic, to the Shakespeare sonnets, which I first read in Marshak's translation, and then in the original, and realized that Shakespeare Marshak is one story, and Shakespeare, or rather Shakespeare ( or old Marlowe, or Ben Johnson, or ...), is completely different. It became interesting to me to understand language features.
The next stage - the transition from philology to fashion-logic - occurred after defending a master's thesis; however, even in graduate school, I began to be interested first in the literary way of life, the social and economic context in which literature lived, and smoothly from pantheons and canons and literary fashion the study of the phenomenon of fashion in all its diversity. In many ways, by the way, this transition helped me to make the book by John Harvey "People in Black", one of the most powerful, in my opinion, works on fashion, and it was written by a philologist. Harvey helped me come to terms with his scientific windiness.
I read in foreign languages all the time. Strictly speaking, "fashion studies" (English fashion studies) as a scientific discipline originated in an English-speaking context, and the main body of specialized literature is written and written in English. Since the language of the new discipline is in Russia at the stage of formation, and far from everything has already been found "successful" words, you often find yourself thinking that it is easier to speak / write / read / think about it in English, but I am sure that this is temporary phenomenon.
I read constantly, however, more at work, that is, articles and books that are devoted to fashion, costume, cultural studies. It is rarely possible to find time to read something that lies outside the sphere of professional needs. The pile of books (real and imaginary), set aside for later, to "read in retirement", is growing every day. Magazines (journals, not magazines) always read. In addition, I try to keep track of all the innovations in Russian, English and other available languages - I usually go to the websites of publishing houses that specialize in "my" literature, and collect the harvest.
John harvey
"Men in Black"
One of my favorite books in the series "Library of the journal" Theory of Fashion "." “People in Black” is an example of how “fashionable studies” are enriched by powerful injections from other disciplines. Written by an English philologist, Harvey's monograph is a fascinating journey into the world of literary clothes, after which you will no longer be able to read literary works without distinguishing between colors and cut, without peering between folds and frills. Harvey spreads a black canvas in front of the reader, turning it one way or the other, turning over the most different meanings of the cult black. So masterfully with color, in my opinion, works except that the historian Michel Pasturo, who writes the cultural history of different colors: blue, black and green.
Elizabeth Wilson
"Dressed in dreams: fashion and modernity"
The book Wilson was published back in 1985 and is considered to be pioneering among the studies on the phenomenon of fashion. Deep and ironic, this book forms the core of my “fashionable” library, and whenever any pundit speaks about the dubiousness of fashion studies as an independent scientific discipline, I mentally return to Wilson and my favorite: frivolous "fashion - is nothing but a pose, and the most frivolous of all that I know of."
Caroline evans
"The Mechanical Smile. Modernism and the First Fashion Show in France and America. 1909-1929"
I was looking forward to the release of the “Mechanical Smile”, the second after the legendary “Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness” (2003), a book by St. Martin’s professor at the Central College of Art and Design Carolyn Evans. Reading everything Caroline writes is infinite pleasure from a text that is clever, never let go for a minute, always opening up some incredible perspectives in the field of fashionable studies. Mechanical Smile, a wonderfully illustrated book of album format, which I’m reading with pleasure at the moment, is dedicated to the erotization and commodification of the female body in modern culture (using the model body as an example) and the formation of fashion shows or dummy parades, as they were initially called.
"Flavors and smells in culture"
I was lucky to get acquainted with this unique collection at the stage of its formation, and I even took part in it with the translation of the recipes of perfumes and toilet waters of Victorian England, which I was lucky to find in the library. The two volumes contain materials that from various sides approach the study of this seemingly ephemeral and all the time elusive substance, like smell, which is an integral part of our everyday experience. Smells are as historical as the perception of color, so that in the end, each epoch determines for itself how happiness smells.
Samuel pepys
"The Diary"
I came across Samuel Pips’s Diary when I was engaged in coffee shops and what changes occurred in the structure of city life in London in the 17th century with the arrival of coffee and such a completely new form of sociality as visiting coffee shops. Pip carefully describes everyday life, not only his service, but also forays into taverns and coffee houses, dressing rooms and rich heart life; He is very attentive to the smallest details of material culture, his chronicles are a real time machine, which makes it possible to fully feel that he is a Londoner of the Restoration era.
By the way, about coffee, which from the very beginning was opposed to beer and wine and positioned as a drink for sober, rationally minded people: when Pips decides to seriously pursue a career in order to improve his financial situation, he abruptly switches from pubs to coffee shops, rightly believing that The tavern is good for a reckless youngster, but it is completely unsuitable for a mature man who needs a sober head to think well when making vital decisions.
William Wordsworth
"The Prelude or Growth of Poet's Mind"
A lot of memories are connected with the appearance of this book on my bookshelf. The 1945 edition of William Wordsworth's poem Prelude, or the Formation of a Poet’s Consciousness, came to me from my good friends Shila and Alan Makkeev, who more than once received me in their cozy and incredibly warm London house near East Finchley metro station. It was the year, it seems, in 2000, I was just finishing my PhD thesis and came to London to work a little in the British Library, where I regularly went from day to day.
A part of my dissertation was devoted to Wordsworth, its formation as a professional writer (relations with publishers, colleagues, and participation in parliamentary campaigns on the reform of copyright law), so I took a little volume in a mystical way, as a kind of source forces, to which sometimes it is enough just to touch in order to start some kind of hidden generator.
Virginia woolf
"The Room of One's Own"
I have a special attitude to the essay genre, to the English essayist tradition - very special, and to the essay Wolfe - just reverent. If it is very simple, then “My room” is about the hard female fate, or rather, about the hard fate of a woman who, for some reason, decided not to do embroidery in a corner quietly, but with literature. It is in this essay that Wolf comes up with Shakespeare's sister Judith and tries to imagine what her fate would have been like in the 16th century, if she were as gifted as her brother. It is in this essay that Wolfe tells the story of Jane Austen, who usually wrote in the living room and listened to the creaking of the door hinge all the time and rather hid the sheets before anyone entered. And as if she even insisted that the door should not be oiled, so as not to be caught writing novels.
Julian barns
"History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters"
This is the first time I read this book in Inostranka as a student. Barnes proposes his own version of the story of the flood, and this is from several points of view. One such point of view is the point of view of the tree beetle, the free-rider, who had unauthorized climbed Noah’s Ark. The chameleon Barnes turns out to be an even bigger chameleon in “History”, changing masks, juggling with genre forms and narrative languages. There is everything that I love so much: irony, playing with the reader in hide-and-seek, when you diligently solve riddles, catch author's hints, or it seems to you that they are copyright and that hints, because in the end Barnes is not going to take you out the labyrinth created by him and to administer the court with the last author's word, because ultimately "the story is not what happened. History is just what the historians tell us."
Iris Murdoch
"Black Prince"
From this novel began my acquaintance with the work of the writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch. It is possible that I decided to read it because of the obvious reference to Shakespeare's "Hamlet", which, as a failed Shakespearean, could not leave me indifferent. It seems to me that in this novel Murdoch managed to maintain a balance between literature and philosophy, not to go into schematism and allegorism characteristic of many of her later novels. "The Black Prince" is a real strawberry glade for philosophical and philological interpretations. I still remember my youthful delight at the question, raised by Murdoch about "degrees of freedom", external and internal, to which she will return in one way or another in all her novels I honestly read every one after the Black Prince who has fallen in love with me.
Charles Dickens
"Cold House"
I had a Dickens period, when I re-read, it seems, everything that was at hand, including letters, articles and various differences. In The Cold House, everything seems to be typical of Dickens: litigation, mystery, gloomy London, and then in the end a completely unexpected Christmas outcome, but for some reason this particular novel pulls me to reread first of all when the reason you want to relive the Dickensian moment.