I dream of a style that is resonant and intelligible across different cultures, but itself embodying cultural versatility. One that is unbound by any one culture, but afforded a mobility between two or across several. If a national identity with its own unique aesthetic can be formed, it seems logical that a transnational one exists or can at least be imagined. In other words, if by definition transnational identity is between departure and assimilation and about elusiveness and contradiction - can a markedly transnational style be possible? Marketable even? To dress the part of a global cosmopolitan is pretty easy, but no one brand explicitly markets that. Every one makes its place of origin known, such that chances are besides knowing any given brand's name, you also know where it comes from. This is the power of branding, and it also strikes me as the earnestness and pervasiveness of national pride. Transnational identity has yet to be fully understood or even seen as legitimate in the political sense, much less digested and evolved as culture. There must, however, already be a common, hybridized albeit even paradoxical aesthetic voice that threads through this globalized space that runs alongside this stream of people shuttling back and forth. The market is there and maybe one such aesthetic already exists (I already have my suspicions), but it has yet to be fully severed from its origins and made conscious of as a distinctly transcultural object, as a transcultural brand. For now though, beyond only just learning to understand the transcultural experience as an insoluble melancholia and perpetual longing, I can only hope to know it further by dress. Perhaps only then can I truly know my own condition, when I can call it by its name and recognize it by sight. For now though, I cannot fully dress the part.
ts.
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