The Silent Summer of Fashion

As promised, here is my report on the new fashion course at the Eslite book store. In short, I am not allowed to tell you anything about it. At the opening of the first class, the staff asked the audience to keep anything they saw to themselves because of future publication plans. And I’ll stick to that request, but that doesn’t bar me from giving you an overall idea about the first evening.
To my surprise – and to the speaker’s surprise, because she mentioned it – the auditorium was nearly full, which meant there must have been about a hundred people there, and quite a significant number of the audience were – like me – men. And you saw all age groups and styles of people, young twentysomething fashion types, middle-aged women in high-end styles, young men with dyed hair and individualistic jeansy wear, and more soberly attired office workers. I was wearing my earth-colored Joseph Abboud striped shirt and a pair of ordinary leisure pants underneath, but that’s beside the point.
The speaker for the whole series is Ma Nien-tsu, editor with Le Figaro magazine, first with the Taipei-based Chinese-language edition, and now with the Beijing edition. Without revealing any secrets, her first lecture was an introduction to the major fashion TV shows in Taiwan, the world’s top fashion entrepreneurs, and current styles and designs. Marc Jacobs featured quite prominently in the lecture, and we saw slides of several of his collections.
Ma is going to take us through the history of fashion, design, style and brands from the 1950s until now in her following classes, which I will have to miss because of a one-month foreign stay. I do hope to be back in time though for what should be one of the highlights of this lecture series, a half-day visit to a prominent fashion boutique in Taipei. But more about that in the future.
This could be my last posting for quite some time now, as I move operations to another Asian town, but without my laptop. I’ll have to make do with whatever I can get my hands on, but it’s unlikely I will be bringing you much news. What I will do though, is keep an eye out for the local fashion scene wherever I go, and report after I get back to Taipei about a month from now. I just got my new batch of Taiwan Fashionista by Enzo Ciancia business cards today, and even though I’m not completely satisfied with their look, I will be generous in distributing them during my overseas trip. So when I get back in Taipei, I can get down to make a new design for the next batch.