Cultural Horizons

So my cultural horizons have been expanded in two significant directions this last week. First I have seen an opera for the first time. Secondly I have read cover to cover "Men's Fashion in the Twentieth Century" and discovered a whole new topic I have never considered before.

The opera was three and a quarter hours long, and was vast in scope. I lost track of who was who and what was going on somewhere about a third into the first act and never regained it until the very end where there was a huge choral piece about how Russia would never be conquered.

It was a form of music I was completely unfamiliar with. The bar structure appeared to change frequently (2 beats, 3, beats, 4 beats in the bar). There were no repeated phrases and the vocals did not seem to work on a clear meter: rather it felt like prose squashed up and extended to fit in with the current bar structure. It was certainly an experience, and recognising several students helped to pass the time when I didn't have a clue what was going on.

I was reading the fashion book in an attempt to discover what men were wearing in Mussolini's Italy as part of my assignment for Andy. But as it happens, the author of the book did not consider the fascist style to be worthy of bringing to our attention. Nevertheless, I found myself drawn in very quickly into the book, reading about the styles, from the top hat and tails "uniform" at the turn of the century, down to the fragmented nature of post-modern society. There have been fashions - particular cuts, shapes and sillhouette's popular down through the decades - but the thing I find most interesting is how much more difficult the authors were finding it to capture the mood of clothing fashion in the 80s and 90s than they did in the earlier years. It seems that with the seasonal changes in fashion and the in built obsolescence that the fashion industry perpetuates have made us all far less stable in our choices of clothes. We will now experiment and try out different styles, each trying to find our own look. The key thing seems to be individuality, while before the key concept was conformity to a norm. This is something I quite like, for clothes can reveal so much about a persons character, or at least the character they imagine themselves to be. Of course, the more unusual images are only available to the more affluent member of society, but even the poorer of us have a tendancy to create our own identity with accessories and styles.

It's always intriguing to come across something which I've never looked into before, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.