Avengers Assemble
Dir. Joss Whedon
4/5
After five quasi-prequels of varying quality and as many Samuel L. Jackson post-credit cameos, Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Avengers Assemble finally arrived late last week. I had spent the days leading up to the film’s New Picture House premiere watching its constituent preludes, worried that I would perhaps be disoriented or disadvantaged by not having seen any of the movies tied in to Marvel’s comic book behemoth. Of course, I needn’t have fretted. Like all of its predecessors, the plot in Avengers Assemble is pretty much irrelevant; what matters are its snappy dialogue, thrilling action sequences, and the self-deprecating sense of humour that has become a staple since Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. These elements, combined with Whedon’s deft direction and a constantly rotating cast of charismatic heroes, ensure that Avengers Assemble more than lives up to its extraordinary hype.
The premise is predictably simple, but unquestionably effective: an international crisis (something to do with a glowing cube) requires a team of dysfunctional superheroes to unite, put aside their differences, and save humanity, in between throwing one-liners at each other. Each of the six Avengers is (re)introduced in their own vignette, before being flung swiftly together to begin bickering and knocking seven bells out of each other, with both forms of engagement proving equally entertaining. Robert Downey Jr.’s wonderfully dry Tony Stark was unsurprisingly the source of much gleeful tittering from the wildly enthusiastic audience at the NPH, but Mark Ruffalo also deserves credit for his role as the affable Bruce Banner, whose internal battle with his Hulk alter ego provides the film with its closest thing to a serious character study. The whole ensemble is aided greatly by the choice of Tom Hiddleston’s demigod Loki as the film’s terrifically brooding antagonist. A snarling, spiteful, vindictive villain, his thespian malice is perfectly suited to the impeccably caricatured comic book world Whedon and Co. have constructed.
Admittedly Avengers Assemble has some problems: it’s over-long, and though the script hits far more than it misses, there are a few jokes that don’t quite make the grade; however it’s undeniably refreshing to see a superhero movie that is so endearingly unpretentious and self-aware. It consistently takes itself just seriously enough for you to give a damn, before producing a brilliantly bathetic moment of slapstick to restore the natural order.
Ultimately, Avengers Assemble delights in revelling in its own absurdity. It’s the anti-Dark Knight: loud, brash and hugely entertaining; a superhero movie that doesn’t bother to burrow into the psyche of its characters and recognises that it doesn’t need to. With the conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s sober Batman trilogy looming large among the summer’s blockbuster releases, Avengers Assemble is a timely reminder of the fun there is to be had when a superhero movie acknowledges, and embraces, the genre’s clichés.
Cabin in the Woods
Dir. Drew Goddard
4 out of 5
The Cabin in the Woods is a bit of a bastard. It’s as if Office Space and Saw had a love child which, in turn, had a love child with early nineties reality TV show Takeshi’s Castle. You’re not quite sure where it’s going but you have such low expectations of slasher horror by now that you welcome each double bluff, each trick of misdirection. The Cabin in the Woods is a horror film which succeeds in being incredibly funny and scary (no prizes for first place there), but it’s also a movie which you can feel looking right back at you. It knows how to manipulate you, to horrify you, to move you to hysterics, and it lets you know it’s in control.
The ‘every minute a twist’ storyline sees two aging pencil pushers giving cinema’s least helpful establishing duologue about some bio-chemical industry before we are flashed with the blood red block capitals of ‘THE CABIN IN THE WOODS’. It is an opening which contains more light banter about ex-wives than it does mortal dread. The next scene is one which can be deemed lightly the ‘assembling of the meat’. Each youthful lamb to slaughter is given a quirky and semi-typical introduction. We have the jock, the slut, the geek, the fool and the “virgin”. All road trip to a remote cabin and meet an ominous semi-psycho along the way. So far so slasher, but that’s where things get weird.
To avoid spoilers it would be helpful to speak in metaphors. The movie formula becomes a little like the Big Brother house if it were operated by Derren Brown, like Friends if it were directed by Eli Roth, like the video game The Sims when you’re feeling a little sadistic. It’s a guilty pleasure. But this pleasure is lauded. The office working pencil pushers are grinning with you, their job to watch the typical Hollywood youths approach their doom, adding another cinematic layer. Remarkably though, we root for both worlds. The slippery nature of the story, offering up information little by little, means the audience can’t take sides between the snide office comedy and the terrified teenagers and impact is lost from neither.
This movie throws out horror references like sweets at Halloween. We get a little bit of everything; from The Shining, to The Dawn of The Dead, to The Evil Dead, to Friday the Thirteenth, to The Ring and even We Need to Talk About Kevin. The picture is a miasma of ‘what if?’ situations, most of them involving machetes, clowns, claws and brain matter. But more than this it is a comment on the direction of slasher horror pictures. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon use the split narrative to point a finger at the ridiculous needs of the slasher movie viewer. They questions the audience’s carnal desire to view death, a desire that must be balanced with the pretence of watching a realistic drama in order to preserve the illusion of good taste. It’s a point well made, but perhaps one made a little late in the game, the heyday of slasher horror flicks having ended at least a decade ago. But this is still a small price to pay for a film in which someone says; “I just dismembered this guy with a trowel. How’s your evening been?”
For future viewers, a little advice: go in expecting the expected. And pay attention to everything you see in the basement.
Pottermore – The Name of the Game
We play videogames everyday, but only a few of us actually realise it.
J.K. Rowling has helped develop what has been dubbed a ‘website’, an ‘interactive reading experience’ and – most ambiguously of all – a ‘project’. It’s called Pottermore and it give you a chance to relive the Harry Potter experience again by going through a visual representation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (with the later books being added some time in the future). The ‘project’ presents you with a selection of multi-layered visual images allowing you to examine them at depth or remove and activate or pick up objects shown on the image, triggering an event or adding them to your ‘trunk’.
I hope some of you have had the chance to play Pottermore before reading this article. If you have, I hope you will agree that while it is still in Beta testing mode, it’s a lot of fun and an intriguing prospect for the future of interactive entertainment. I hope you will also agree that while it is an ‘interactive textual experience’ it is also, very clearly, a videogame (‘computer game’ if you’re European or just a bit old fashioned). If you have ever played Myst you will feel right at home with Pottermore – just don’t tell J.K. Rowling that. You see, Rowling has used just about every other word available to her to describe this… thing… other than the most suitable – videogame. This is something that is not exclusive to Pottermore, however. It’s a phenomenon that’s really coming to a head right now in publications related to the videogames industry – while the medium continues to advance in terms of interesting new intellectual properties and modes of play, the term ‘videogame’ still seems like a dirty word.
The reality is more people are playing videogames now than ever. If you don’t think you play videogames, chances are, you’re not wholly correct. The internet is intrinsically linked with the kind of algorithms that make up videogames – in a sense, the integration of social media into web browsers (the stupid ‘like’ button seemingly somewhere on every web page these days) has turned web browsing into a type of videogame. There are clearly defined ‘rules’ to this digital interaction and working within those, you attempt to ‘affect an outcome’. Sets of rules determining an outcome is a typical definition of videogames used by the ludologist, Dr. Jesper Juul (yeah, ludologist is actually a thing now…)
It seems, however, the marketing boffins at the helm of S.S. Potter are savvy. While I could talk until I’m blue in the face about how every man and his dog (or bearded dragon – look it up) plays video games, the fact is, people still don’t think they do. The majority of consumers in the UK and the US (I’m less certain about this elsewhere) would not think of themselves as ‘gamers’ or in any way related to the culture of videogames. The rise of the Wii, iPhone gaming and those Zynga cash farm things have ensured that the most profitable target demographic for a games company is middle-aged stay at home wives (Source: The ESA). These consumers dedicate a considerable amount of time to gaming but do not classify it as their favourite activity. They certainly do not identify with the so called ‘gamer culture’.
Yet this seemingly harmless gaming without gaming has the potential to do more damage to the industry than is apparent on the surface. A recent Endowment from the NEA (American National Endowment for the Arts) had handed out just under $300,000 dollars to various companies to stimulate the creation of games that teach users ‘about the arts or social issues’. Now, that’s great, and congratulations to the companies who received the money – I’m sure their new climate change videogames will be just as good, if not better, than the several already created by the prolific game scholar Professor Ian Bogost at the Georgia Institute for Technology. But the question must be asked, what is it about existing games that they think is lacking this quality? The recent Playstation Network Okabu couldn’t have been trying any harder to teach its users about climate change. The 14 year old Final Fantasy VII was pretty heavy handed in its ‘industrialisation is killing the planet’ allegory.
The fact is videogames are full of cultural relevance. They are imbued with meaning through our interactions with them – that’s the point. There isn’t anything to World of Warcraft bar an extremely loose reading of Tolkien recalled from memory, made into code. But players dedicate hundreds of hours a year to its world, making it into something with its own unique histories and events that are almost entirely unknown to the outside world. You cannot make a game with a huge amount of cultural relevance because games are an ‘emergent’ or ‘procedural’ medium. They evolve out of player interaction and turn into something incredible – that’s what makes them incredible. The healthy attitude to take to games is one which has only recently come to light and which is born out of the groan inducing question ‘are video games art?’ The question cannot be answered, of course, but an opinion has been offered from Richard Terrel: ‘If videogames are not art, then they are something better’. This, I believe is the correct attitude to take to videogames. If we stop viewing them as the medium on crutches, the one that needs start up grants because it’s ‘not quite there yet’ and just accept that what has been produced is something as incredible as you’ve heard it is, we might begin to have a healthier attitude towards their existence. At the very least we might start using their name.
Girls
The new HBO series is splitting critics opinion. Is it a little too close to home?
I first started watching the new HBO sitcom Girls because it was described as being “like Sex and the City but scruffier.” I love Sex and the City. I also love television programmes with kooky typography and a jaunty indie soundtrack, so within seconds of watching the YouTube trailer, I was sold.
The show revolves around the life of Hannah (played by Lena Dunham, director, writer and creator of Girls), a twenty-something college graduate, living in New York City with no job, no money, and a terrible sex life. In the first scene of the pilot, we see Hannah being told by her parents that it has been two years since she left college, and they are no longer going to financially support her. Hannah is outraged that they would cut her allowance off, crying, “I could be a drug addict! Do you realise how lucky you are?” before facing the fact that she will have to quit her year long, unpaid internship and actually get a real job.
Meanwhile, Hannah’s flatmate Marnie (Allison Williams) is coming to the end of a relationship with her sickeningly sweet boyfriend who she can no longer bear to even share a bed with, and yet refuses to break up with. And then there’s Jess (Jemima Kirke), the token misunderstood Brit who has just turned up on Marnie and Hannah’s doorstep armed with a cigarette and a whole lot of emotional baggage. The first episode continues on this tangent with a number of female crisis chats conducted in bathrooms and a farcical bender on opium tea.
Ordinarily, this kind of graduate age sitcom would be right up my street, but something wasn’t quite right. Five minutes in and I was already irritated with the protagonist Hannah. From her total reliance on her parents to her inability to stand up to anybody, you are left feeling not only unsympathetic towards Hannah, but downright irritated with her lack of gumption and self-worth. Behind the quick dialogue and deadpan jokes, Hannah’s life is essentially a mess; a string of embarrassing blunders from the workplace to the bedroom make for both compelling yet painfully cringe-worthy watching. Yes, it’s funny at times and the characterisations are spot-on, if a little exaggerated at times. However you sit there wondering whether someone of a supposedly higher-than-average IQ really can put their foot in it this many times in one day.
There is also a lot of sex. Now I’m no prude; I enjoy a good Samantha Jones, Sex and the City quip as much as the next person. However, when your male housemate recoils in horror on hearing the sounds that are coming out of your laptop early on a Tuesday afternoon, you know something is awry. The prolonged sex scenes are so uncomfortably real and awkward that watching borders on becoming unbearable at times. Is this a sign of television breaking the boundaries in its depiction of modern sexuality or just another way of shocking the audience into submission? How much more realistic can television sex scenes get?
In just two twenty minute episodes, Girls has covered: casual sex, boring sex, anal sex, abortion, substance abuse, stealing from one’s parents, exploitation of young interns and STIs. It literally couldn’t be more chock-a-block with “contemporary problems” if it tried. Some critics are describing Girls as a post-feminist depiction of modern life, where we finally see young women in charge of their own careers and sex lives. All I see is an incredibly depressing take on the lives we could be leading post-graduation. It’s all a little too close to home for my liking.
Antigone
3 1/2 out of 5
Touching, powerful, dark: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone is quintessentially great theatre. So when staging this play in its original language, the University’s French Society certainly had a lot to live up to. Did they succeed? Almost.
It’s a play that explores the very nature of tragedy itself. The audience is told within the first moments of the play thataAntigone, daughter of Oedipus and the fiancée of the crown prince, will die at the hands of the king, her uncle, Créon. It’s a powerful set-up, and has real potential for pathos.
That emotion is captured perfectly by Fanny Restuccia, whose Antigone is every bit the sad and mournful little girl. Moritz Kleine’s Créon could at times be too aggressive, and failed to properly gain the audience’s sympathy, but overall he was accomplished and believable. The interaction between the two sang, and they quickly drew the audience into their world. The supporting cast was a mixed bucket. The nurse (Jodie Drummond) was perhaps the best, a perfect blend of the glassy-eyed old woman and the obsessive busybody. Camille Bigot, who played a sweet young boy fated to deliver the horrible news of Antigone’s death, should also be proud of her touching performance. But Laura Francis, who played Antigone’s sister Ismene, seemed to forget that this is a tragedy; her flirtatious performance was absurd.
Questionable too was the performance of the palace guards. It didn’t help that two of them were women, and dressed as women, which made ridiculous their long speeches about brothel houses and how to hide their money from their wives. There’s nothing wrong with cross casting if the role allows it, but it didn’t work here. The director’s decision to make them into a comic interlude worsened the problem. A little humour can work in tragedy, to break the tension. In Hamlet, the prince of Denmark is such a brilliant character precisely for his many monologues poking fun at everyone he can. But here, it got old fast. A description of a dead body unburied and slowly rotting should not be delivered flippantly, with a silly grin.
There were technical difficulties, too. At the start of the play, three characters entered far too early, then just sat there, making the audience feel uncomfortable as we waited for it to start. Whenever the actors messed up a line, the subtitles (mercifully) provided for non-French speakers made the audience all too aware of that fact. The wings never fell silent.
But this was still an impressive play. The costumes were simple but effective and the actors made good use of the Venue 1 stage’s depth. Both stage and costumes alluded to the classical origins of this story without being crass about it. The producer’s decision to keep props to a minimum prevented distraction from the drama. And the pathos generated was vast. If some actors could be accused of forgetting this is a tragedy, the death toll by the end should have been enough to remind them.
Perhaps this was not a tour de force, but it was not terrible theatre either.
A Dictator’s Perspective
KIRAN KISHORE fills us in on what it really takes to put on a show like Around The World Of Dance
I felt lightheaded with pride when three audience members declared that ‘Around the World of Dance’ was the best thing they’d seen in St. Andrews in four years. Then again, maybe the light-headedness was due to sleep deprivation or post-traumatic stress disorder. But reader, if you had to run a society, organise costumes, choreograph ten different dances, teach them five nights a week, and negotiate logistics, you would be reaching for the Paracetemol too. So here’s a review with some insider perspective, showing what goes on behind the scenes of a successful production.
To me, dance is an intrinsic part of culture, and it seemed a shame that our incredibly talented, international student body had nowhere to showcase their skills. As a dance teacher, I also wanted to give my students the opportunity to perform. And so, three years ago, ‘Around the World of Dance’ was born and has since grown to include styles from Guadeloupe to India.
The word “Dictator” is printed boldly on my Ethnic and Interpretive Dance Society hoodie – an apt but necessary title, if I say so myself. My greatest challenge in this role was to set up initial contact with around fifteen acts and to stay in touch with them over the course of the year. This involved contacting people over and over again, using email, Facebook, and even calling and texting as the big day came closer. My vice president once joked about setting up a separate account just for the emails she received from me – later, I think she slightly regretted not doing it.
Behind every successful director (read: dictator) is a dedicated and proactive team, and my committee was indispensable. Together, we did everything we could to make ATWOD 2012 bigger, better and most of all, more fun. We enlisted even more dance societies and individual performers, making full use of St Andrews’ diverse population. This took care of the bigger and better part, but how could we make it more fun? Zumba instructor Anna Des Clayes suggested we bring in actors to play world travellers who would accompany the audience around the world of dance. This idea blossomed into writing a humorous, over-the-top script featuring stereotypes and actor-dancer interactions, including fake Indian accents and James Bond allusions.
On the day of the show, three girls spent the entire day running up and down stairs, making sure that everybody knew where to be and when to be ready. Our dress rehearsal involved shouting from the stage up to the lighting box, as we figured out the ideal lighting for every number. Our voices cracked after two hours and little stars danced around my head as the lights flashed on and off.
Next to the hours spent in physical preparation for the production, it was constantly in the back of my mind. There were numerous occasions when I was working hard in the library, but had a sudden thought about things that needed to be done for the show. Have the programmes been printed? Do I know everybody’s technical requirements? Emails and texts were frantically sent to make sure that everything was organised, as I lost my academic train of thought.
After the show was over, something strange hit me: post-production blues. With the final bow, it was suddenly all over and I no longer spent my days running from one rehearsal to the next, organising costumes, answering phone calls and uploading song files. But then I realised that this foreign concept of free time could be used productively, and so I chose to remedy my PTSD and sleep deprivation by electing next year’s EidSoc committee, handing over the reins to a new team whom I know will do a fantastic job. And then I took a hot water bottle, a cup of tea, and settled down with a 1922 edition of Persuasion.
Homeland
I’d had my eye on Homeland before it had premiered in the States and way ahead of its acquisition by Channel 4. Having been spellbound by Band of Brothers for most of my teenage years, I’ve always kept track of Damian Lewis’s IMDb page to see what the redhead was up to next. If you too are aware of his work, you’ll know he rarely disappoints.
Lewis plays Sergeant Nicholas Brody, a Marine held captive by Al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Nazir. Having been missing-in-action, presumed dead, a stunned Delta Force team find him during a raid of Nazir’s compound some eight years later. He returns home to a hero’s welcome, but not everyone believes his story. Claire Danes’s Carrie Mathison is the CIA agent who, after being told that “an American prisoner of war had been turned”, begins to suspect that Brody might not be all that he seems.
And so the first season begins. It is difficult to discuss Homeland without giving away a one of the many crucial plot twists. To say that this show will keep you guessing is a bit of an understatement. Whilst this could be frustrating, it is in fact mesmerizing and gives you a clue as to why viewers and critics alike are raving about this show.
Homeland is not flawless. Whilst Carrie is clearly excellent at her job, one does have difficulty believing that the CIA would have missed her pretty violent mood disorder during recruitment. Carrie is cold at times, clearly lonely and certainly paranoid, all of which makes her a difficult lead character to warm to.
But perhaps that is the point. Without Carrie, you are left with Brody who, despite his more agreeable personality, seems to be hiding something. The writers have given the viewers quite the conundrum. Do we side with the pathologically unstable yet brilliant CIA Agent or the all-American hero who might just want to blow everyone to kingdom come?
This is just one of many questions thrown at us from episode one. The writers have been too busy constructing a maze of lies, deceit and deception to give us more of the answers we crave. The rather unsettling, yet admittedly enthralling, realisation that has now set in is that, whilst the plot has moved on at near breakneck speed, we still have so far to go.
The brief glimpses in to the characters’ past are often the most interesting and revealing moments within the show. The ‘flashback’ is one of the primary narrative tools used by the writers, and for the most part they are done extremely well. If anything they help define the show’s individuality as it was always going to have to battle with the likes of 24 in the minds of the viewers.
Homeland is not 24. It is better than 24. And that comes from somebody who has watched every single episode of the latter. I don’t know if Homeland will stretch for a marathon eight seasons but it will definitely have a second season. And the even better news for us poor, worried and stressed students is that all twelve episodes of season one will be waiting for us on 4oD by the start of revision week.
The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan
The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan
George Steiner
New Directions
£15.99
‘When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer?’ This sentence, written by George Steiner in 1963, is probably the most concise summation of his body of work. No one has been more intensely eloquent about the ancillary function of criticism: ‘The critic lives at second hand. He writes about.’ But this is Steiner’s rhetorical game: lower the expectations of your reader, then instantly awe them by raising the stakes. In other words, tell us that criticism is a sham for secondary minds, then subtly awe us with your extraordinarily first rate mind. My bet is that Steiner has pulled this trick enough to know what we’re thinking: he’s not really writing ‘criticism’ then, is he? Well, no. He’s not.
Steiner’s new book, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan, is described as his ‘magnum opus’ on the dust jack, but since Steiner so brilliantly writes the same book over and over again, this one seems hardly better than any of the others. If anything, its definitive quality is its overwhelming mood of resignation in the face of technology (‘a technophobic consciousness such as mine’) and, though I didn’t think it possible, an even more pervasive note of the elegiac throughout. Steiner’s work has essentially been one long, (more or less) joyous eulogy for the western canon. At times he has proclaimed a unique and fanatical faith in the humanities, but more often he has lamented their current state. One of the last lines of the book refers to “the humanities” in quotes, as that institution which ‘so bleakly failed us in the long night of the twentieth century’. “the humanities”, apparently having forgotten their etymology, can no longer be referred to without quotes. Statements like this, along with the ponderous stylistic gravitas of every sentence Steiner writes, do nothing to illuminate his erudition or brilliance. Instead they tend to encourage the image of Steiner as your peevish luddite Grandfather, cantankerously moaning about the volume of the radio as he tosses another iPad into the River Cam.
But this is an old image. Steiner was an elder before his time (regardless of age, priests of high art must feign a demeanor perilously close to senility). And his acute perception of the essential meaninglessness of the academic factory’s monograph machine is something more people should have listened to. Yet, one problem with Steiner’s new book is that while it claims to be about the intersection of philosophy and poetry, it is more often about philosophers and poets. This wouldn’t have been such a problem if it were announced as such, but his stance often seems to assume that a discussion of the friendship between Paul Celan and Martin Heidgger, followed by a few pages of surface level philosophical discussion is a summation of the subject. Much of the book impressively rests on Steiner’s intuition that
‘All philosophy is style. No philosophic proposition outside formal logic is separable from its semantic means and context…the Platonic dialogues and letters are performative literary acts of surpassing richness and complication.’
In other words, Steiner sets out to mark the place where philosophy and poetry are ‘litigious’; where they come into meaningful and productive quarreling; to argue that philosophy is as much style as poetry is thought. ‘There has been no greater ‘wordsmith’ than Plato’, he remarks, thereby claiming a rigor of philosophical thought for all poetry, and a necessary stylistic virtuosity for all philosophy. Often he succeeds in drawing these lines. But problematic here is the common critical assumption of the ability to really know what is and is not deliberate in the writing of poetry. As Don Paterson astutely noticed, a critic will often assume something was done with long deliberation, when in fact it happened instantaneously; on the other hand, things that took years to do may look like they took minutes. This tends to happen when you chart the decision making process of something you’ve never done before. Steiner doesn’t quite do this, and he is absolutely correct that the points of intersection between philosophy and poetry are absolutely everywhere. But this is what makes it problematic: they are often so thoroughly amalgamated, dispersed, and pervasive as to be inaudible. Contrary to critical intuition, those who may seem less philosophically versed may simply be less explicit about it. The book is dedicated to Durs Grunbein, the brilliant and celebrated German poet who has also written a book on Descartes. Steiner’s method demands the kind of confirmation that Grunbein’s publishing history provides, and when explicit evidence of the ties between the two fields is absent, it tends to look less impressive.
The end result of all this is a brilliant book that is at times extremely taxing to read. Steiner’s assumption tends to be that Great Poets are people who read Great Philosophers. I couldn’t agree more (although this method leaves out just about every everyone but Durs and Geoffrey Hill). I would only suggest that Steiner looks for confirmation of somebody’s essential Greatness based on explicit manifestations of who they have read. I wonder whether he has considered those who aren’t so keen on telling him.
Fashion Faux Pas?
ALEXANDRA DAVEY investigates fashion for the older generation
The Topshop flagship store on Oxford Street in London is a kind of hell: gargantuan, sprawling and teaming with Lilliputian people still young enough to seriously ponder the purchase of harem pants, pastel shades or something with fringing. Every time I set foot in that shop, I get a creeping feeling that I’ve graduated in absentia from trendiness and indeed from Topshop against my will. Ageing, with its stealing steps, has stolen any enjoyment that shopping in the high street behemoth once held. After all, a twenty-two-year-old doth not a job get clad in the calypso-prints-meets-sportswear-sweats collections Topshop are pushing at the moment. In short, it makes me feel old.
Fashion is, of course – by definition – young. Fashion is supposed to be fresh and new, every season. It’s meant to be fleeting, synonymous with reinvention, reincarnation and rebirth. The world’s top models are scouted as though fresh from the womb, some barely into their teens before they’re racking up show-heavy fashion week rosters. But what happens to our relationship with fashion as we get older? What does a stylish woman wear when she’s past the Topshop phase in life? And – gulp – does fashion cater for women once they’re past what is conceived to be their clotheshorse prime? The simple answer is probably not.
Olivia May, a soon-to-be fashion design graduate of Middlesex University, has approached her final year project with a collection that aims to address that cavernous gap in the market. “I wrote my dissertation on ageism within the fashion industry, so my collection just stemmed from there,’ explains the 22 year old, who has just found out that she will be showing her designs at Graduate Fashion Week in June.
“In my research, I looked at a fashion blog called Advanced Style, which contains photographs and interviews with fashionable older ladies. I found them a true inspiration and wanted to make a collection for women like them. Older women have the confidence and grace that younger generations perhaps lack. They know their bodies and what suits them, and they dress so well.”
May names her style icon as 90-year-old Iris Apfel, an American fashion darling and former interior designer. “She piles on tens of necklaces at a time, along with thirty bangles – and she’s not afraid of colour. Iris is definitely someone I would love to wear my designs,’ she explains.
The models in May’s show, Daphne Selphe (83), Jan de Villeneuve (68) and Pam Lucas (62), looked as though they were styled with Apfel in mind, clad super-stylishly in floor-length pink knit dresses, thick, graphic black-rimmed glasses with a sixties vibe, and a tasselled jacket that May cites as her favourite piece: “It took so much work, probably made up of about 150 tassels handmade by myself and good friends!” The collection is a long way from the M&S fleece, orthopaedic sandals and fusty colour palettes usually associated with the over-sixties. In other words, May’s models looked cool, a fusion of classic and contemporary.
It’s a look that’s been stealthily making its way into the mainstream, Topshop-type market over the past few years: for Autumn/Winter 2010, Louis Vuitton showed models as old as 46 (gasp) attired in full-skirted dresses with cinched in waists that were evocative of fifties fashion – “a bit old fashioned, I know,” designer Marc Jacobs commented at the time, a little apologetically. Christopher Kane showed shoes that looked suspiciously like the old aged pensioner’s poolside footwear of choice in his Spring/Summer 12 collection, and then there’s the Duchess of Cambridge, recycling her mother’s much-worn pieces for public outings (she donned Carole’s royal blue Reiss number to give her first speech) and bringing nude tights back into the realms of social acceptability (just). It’s easy to forget how fashion’s very essence owes everything to its fore-bearers, and yet it offers them so little in return.
It seems fitting then, that the next generation in fashion design are looking ahead to future – older – generations, considering that it’s those older generations that are constantly serving as inspiration for our everyday style. “I would love to go on and do an MA in printed textiles, and in the future it would be amazing to start my own label,” explains May. “I dream of owning my own boutique that would be a comfortable and enjoyable shopping experience for my older clients.”
As Iris Apfel famously quipped, “Getting older ain’t for sissies.” Many of us fourth years, with graduation nearly upon us, will bitterly attest to the truth in such a statement. It’s nice to know, then, that with style pioneers like May, at least our fashion future isn’t looking so out of focus after all.
Radlands
Radlands
Mystery Jets
Rough Trade
3/5
What do you do if you’re a band from the mid-noughties heyday of British-indie-pop-mania trying to remain relevant in the twenty-ten climate of British-indie-pop-dementia? An exodus to America is one option and this route has been taken by Mystery Jets, who have fledged their insular Eel Pie Island nest and have trekked the Deep South of the US with guitars on their backs to record their fourth album ‘Radlands’ in Austin, Texas.
On first impression it would seem that the Mystery Jets troupe aren’t all buckets and spades about their holiday destination. The titular song opens with the lyrics ‘I’ve heard there’s a place where we go to die. It’s a terribly overrated horse-shit shaped hole in the sky’ while a guitar hook that sounds more like the theme tune for an industrial estate in Romford lingers in the background. The chorus kicks in and the guitars charge like an Eric Morricone spaghetti western score alongside a canter of drums, giving the album a more solid grounding in its attempted imitations. There is indeed an worthy Americana twist to some songs that could fool even the most steely of cotton-eyed Joes but at times the hangover of Brit-Indie spoils the line dancing with a pummelling of power chords and whooping choruses.
From the proggy junkyard sound of their debut ‘Making Dens’ to the poppy sheen of ‘Twenty One’ and the synth driven dreaminess of ‘Serotonin’, Mystery Jets are a band who haven’t been ashamed to change their spots from album to album. It comes as no surprise that their latest offering is as musically distant from their origins as it is geographically removed from their homeland in South West London. But in the Texan desert where they recorded ‘Radlands’, the bands roots are still evident as tumbleweed rolling about an alien landscape in which they don’t seem entirely comfortable, leaving their once vibrant sound dried out and a bit lacklustre.
