THIS FASHION WEEK, BOOK PEOPLE ARE THE NEW BLACK

Daniella Brodsky and Caravan teamed up to make book people the new black. As a stylish read, guests to the official Style 360 Spring 2011 Starbucks-sponsored EXPRESS YOUR LOVE show featuring Caravan, Boy Meets Girl, and bobi, at New York’s Mercedez Benz Fashion Week on September 14^th, received a copy of Daniella’s new novel release Vivian Rising.  The idea was inspired by Daniella’s first fashion week experience, which led her to write the successful series, The Girl’s Guide to New York Nightlife: “The energy I felt at that first catwalk show—the music, the models, the makeup, the clothes, the set—was palpable. I left knowing I had to do something creative, something great. By the time I got to my subway stop, I had the idea for The Girl’s Guide. The effect was that powerful,” says Daniella. Two great worlds, better together. The New York Fashion Awards named Caravan Best Boutique in 2008.

Caravan’s Spring 2011 Inspiration:
Caravan designer Claudine DeSola was inspired this season by photographer Robbie Bellon.
When/how did the idea strike you? The theme was love and roses came to mind.
What about the photo got you? It is literally a cloud in the sky in the shape of a heart – it was beautiful.
What were you trying to capture? The essence of romance…I’m not sure what that is sometimes but I’m always trying to seek it out.
How did you translate that into fabric, cut, color, etc.? I went for soft fabrics and romantic silhouettes with big roses and lots of color.

Fashion has always had a fierce attraction for me. I can stare at those hyper-stylized photos that say so much in one image, and take away a truckload of inspiration. The result could be merely a mood I’m left with. It could be the sense that it’s time for a certain type of trend to be whipped out of storage. Or most often it is the profound sense that some cumulative creative consciousness is, en masse, stumbling toward something a bit different. I grope for vintage items, stories, images that reflect this sensation, and I feel it enter my world in a practical way. I’ll talk to people about it, get their reactions, read up on early influences, and voila! I’m on my way to writing about a topic that feels supremely exciting and current to me. The same effect can happen with travel, any sort of art, and even food, believe it or not. But because fashion is such an everyday art, it seems to happen most often. You feel a certain way when you wear something different or new, too, don’t you? And this is no doubt reflected in my writing that day.

People often ask me to compare magazine writing with fiction writing, and aside from the economy I desperately needed to hone, it is this entrée through magazines into the world’s collective creativity that has most informed, and possibly shaped my fiction. I read, almost compulsively. I read books, magazines, newspapers, internet articles, tweets, leaflets, children’s stories, textbooks. But simultaneously, I’m scouring out-of-date library books and vintage books for topics that feel right now. For instance, I came across a copy of The Feminine Mystique. I’d never read it. When I picked it up, I got that instinctive tingle that this was relevant to today’s reader, that its views would help to shape the predicament of the heroine of my novel. How had I missed all this? It cast my own freedom, which I certainly take for granted, in a very different light. That very week I stumbled upon a newspaper article about a new book, How a Pressure Cooker Saved my Life, which revisits the questions of a woman’s role, with the modern twist that now it is socially acceptable for women to do it all, that in practicality, it’s freakin’ hard, if not impossible.

I happen to know that this tingle of recognition, this hint of being onto something, merely by happening across some old magazine from the 80s isn’t a rare phenomenon. To name just one such place, Gallagher’s in NYC—a cavernous dungeon shop jammed with stacks of old magazines—is so popular with fashion designers and magazine editors seeking inspiration, that they regularly book appointments to spend alone time there. And then we get to Fashion Week, and My God!, there are common trends that run through nearly all the collections. How does this happen???? I’m blaming this collective consciousness. When you’re so tapped into the creative side of culture—the books, the clothes, the home and food trends—you get feelings about these things. For a tactile example: I’ll look at an outfit that I’ve been wearing with a certain belt, shoes, and necklace for months on end, and all of a sudden I’m propelled toward pairing it with a totally different kind of shoe, instead of a tank a lingerie-inspired chemise, something else that in the previous few years hadn’t seemed right for anything, and now, with this outfit I would have never dreamed of pairing it with before, it’s suddenly perfect. I put it on and I know this is exactly the way I want to feel right now.

When it comes to fashion designers, fashion blogger, Alexandra Suhner Isenberg says in a very interesting article, that the heavy Japanese kimono influence from the Spring 2007 fashion week came from a case of everyone seeing the film Memoirs of a Geisha. And that a similar thing happened with the book The Rodeo Girl and an equestrian trend. If I wanted to, I suppose I could forensically go back and piece together the trips I’ve taken, the books I read, the fashion spreads I’d witnessed, and cobble a path that led me to that moment. In fact, something in the collective culture has lately been inspiring me to do exactly that. But I wonder, isn’t there something in the mystical spirit of this kind of inspiration that might be quashed in doing so? Isn’t part of the richness of the reading experience the total absorption into this world created for you to feel so real you don’t even question it?

It sounds a little nutty, but when I’m writing novels, I often feel my research materials pick me, rather than the other way around. I’ll talk with a friend and a certain topic will come up; I’ll take a different route to my destination and run into an old shop that sells items I’ve never heard of: a pajama bag, for a recent instance, which I’ll find thrilling on some primal, romantic level; apparently people in the UK and Australia have been daintily concealing their pajamas in these elegant pouches forever. What a lovely idea! I was taken in. I’ll take this new purchase, this new sense with me, listen to a story on the radio and have to pull over to take a note because I’ve put 2 and 2 together, and now I’ve got an idea. If a store doesn’t have a certain book, or the library is out of a volume I’d stumbled upon in the catalog, okey-dokey! I chalk it up to fate. I was meant to turn to this new direction. The gratifying feeling of it all finally coming together only seems to back up this hunch. Still, I might have gone a different way and things would turn out completely different, and possibly, equally as satisfying. When I look at it this way, the world seems a place of infinite possibility, really. As writers we hold a needle and thread and do our best to sew it all together in the vision that seems right to us.

If art is a mirror of our time, the more time I’ve got in the artist’s seat, the more I feel it’s my duty to experience as much of our time—and the times that brought us here—as I can. And I’ll tell you this: my writing is certainly better for it. Just try to find a fashion designer, a painter, a novelist, who feels differently. In the meantime, take a look at the collections at style.com, and let me know what kind of effect it has on you. Do you find fashion inspiring? Is there something else that gets you going?