Between The Preface and The Meat

I've been asked several times to explain what Tom Peepington is really about, and for lack of no sure, pithy response, I end up saying that it's a "style blog." Hence, the sidebar subtitle which is meant to be more tongue-in-cheek, than it is literal. Tom Peepington is a "style blog" insofar as it is certainly about and around the issue of style, but we are not style informants. This blog does not care to report that Prada is coming out with a line of skirts for men for Fall/Winter 2010. Instead, we are more concerned about the social ritual of dress: how we approach the problem of dress and what affects personal decisions of dress; how clothes make us feel; how we feel our feelings in our clothes; and how we understand our bodies in clothes. So hypothetically, the men's Prada skirts are interesting to us, and how the skirts might change the way they move in them, or how might it change or altogether eliminate the masculine bravura -- hypothetically. Because even still, we are not reporters of trend du jour, the fleeting ideas for this or that season, or even the issue of name brands and brand egos and empires (...yet). Tom Peepington is about looking at the on-going undercurrents of the dress ritual.

Consider all these posts thus far a preface. And even this post as a preface. Or a footnote, even. You can skip it --but it is the bed of material we are departing from. These images we've posted thus far, and will continue to post, are those we've grown up with and are growing up with. They affect the way which we dress and judge others, but are also visual representations of social patterns that we see emerging - which we have not articulated or perhaps even fully comprehended yet. We are delivering to you a slow build up to a greater project with text. And so a preface, albeit just visual, is crucial nonetheless. Perhaps it is in the way that these images are so suggestive and thus limitless and cryptic in meaning that they are the only things that have gone up so far. They seem completely full of possibility for excavation, and I think this is the reason why we -and perhaps by "we," I am neither speaking for Mae nor Kate, but myself -- I have stuck so earnestly to them, faithfully clinging to these vessels of overflowing potential. I've had writer's block. I'm paralyzed by this fear of doing these loaded ideas injustice, of putting them away in the box they don't belong in, or one that's too small. So without further or due, here begins the second phase of Tom Peepington - existentialism and clothes. No, wait, just kidding. Sentiments behind Clothes, and Clothes as Sentiments.

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