Interviews|September 2024
Charlie Porter on the non-mystery of fashion
If getting dressed every day has inspired some introspection, it is with good reason, and you’re not alone. The work of fashion journalist Charlie Porter builds, in fact, on the idea that what we wear and how we wear it are inherently tied to the way we live. Awareness of this notion may spark beautiful dialogues and insights about who we are as people, allowing us to feel more in tune with how we choose to show up to the world – and ourselves.
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Known to be among the most respected voices in fashion journalism, Porter has been a menswear critic for outlets like The Financial Times, The Guardian, GQ, or i-D for over 20 years. The publication of What Artists Wear, in 2021, and Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, last year, made him an established author and thinker within the field. Curious about his fascination with fashion and culture, we spent a day together in his London flat to learn more about what he thinks of fashion writing, what he wears, and why he wears it.
‘Many people are scared of fashion, and I think it’s because there are two ways of seeing the word. There’s ‘Fashion’, the noun, which is the name for the fashion industry, which many people feel very separated from, isolated by, rejected by. But then, there’s the verb, ‘to fashion’. Every single human, every single day, fashions their body. It’s an action that everyone does.
I think once you start seeing fashion as the verb ‘to fashion’, it actually opens it up because it allows us to consider how we fashion our body, what we’re doing when we fashion our body, what messages we’re sending out, what other messages we could send out, and it might start to loosen up this anxiety and fear that people have of fashion if they think about the actual agency they have within fashioning their own body.’
His view of his role as a critic sits on this dichotomy of meanings. Fascinated by fashion, he has chosen to place himself as an observer rather than an imposer of taste. ‘There is a kind of judgmental place the writer puts himself in, recommending something. It’s a very kind of didactic position. The thing about the music I like is, I don’t really care if anyone else likes it. I know that I like it, and that’s all that matters. I don’t have any kind of zeal to make other people like the things I like. I want them to like the things they like.’
It is the idea of fashion as an interdisciplinary matter with cultural significance that underlines his work throughout the years. ‘The secret of fashion writing is that it looks like it’s fluff, and it can just be fluff, it can just be the surface layer – but if you choose to do so, underneath the surface layer, you can write about all this stuff that people don’t necessarily realise is there. Fashion is a place where you can write about the way humans are, which also relates to the way we wear clothes, because we put clothes on our body and then we live our lives and the clothes are witness to that life we live.’
At ARKET, we consider the making of garments meticulously. In dialogue with Charlie, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to ask what he appreciates in clothing. ‘What I appreciate in a garment is to do with the tension of the garment, and the tension of a garment means many different things. There’s tension within the garment, in the weave of the yarn, the way it’s stitched together, the way it’s held together. I appreciate a tension that is physical balance: it can be the weight of a fabric, the choice of a fabric, or the way fabrics are put together. But then, by tension, I also mean the way that a garment is cut, the way that it’s put with other pieces, the way it sits – it could be harmonious, or it could be that the garment has something that is very off that I find interesting. And that tension is intentional: someone has chosen for it to be this way.’
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How do you relate to getting dressed on a day-to-day basis?
‘I’m lucky in that I work for myself, and I work with myself. I don’t have to dress in a particular way for anyone. My first thought is function, with clothing. But function in clothing can also be pleasure. So, the function of a particular garment can be because the colour of the garment gives me pleasure, and I see it in my field of vision, and therefore, its function is to please me. So, it isn’t necessarily just how we consider functional garments in terms of utilitarian pockets and stuff like that. The function of a garment could be to confuse me, even, if it’s something like a garment with radical ideas. It could be that I’m choosing to wear something that tries to shake me up a bit, that I want to wear something to provoke myself or provoke other people. But again, they’re all functions.’
‘There’s such mystery around fashion, whereas, actually, we all know what we do, we all know how it’s done. There’s no mystery around fashion at all. And if we realise there’s no mystery, then we could completely change our relationship to our clothing. We can feel happier in the clothing we wear, we can move away from anxiety around clothing – we can feel happier about how we dress and change the way we shop. If we can relax and form a new relationship with clothing, if we can understand clothing, we can get over this sense of embarrassment we feel and actually get on with living our lives in clothing with a healthy relationship with them, and therefore, a healthy relationship with ourselves.’
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