Vestoj

Yippie!

You can currently find the first issue of Vestoj at, amongst others, these following locations. The price is circa 150 SEK or 15 Euros:

Stockholm:

Konst-ig

NK Bokhandel

Hedengrens

Akademibokhandeln Skrapan

Papercut (which also has an online store at www.papercutshop.se)

Malmo:

Konsthallen

Kulturcentrum

As well as at Presstop and select Pressbyran and 7Eleven in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo! 

Oslo

Abookadabra

Paris:

Agora Press

Colette

Palais de Tokyo

WH Smith, rue Rivoli

Concept Style SAS/Le 66

Shakespeare and Company

Artazar

London:

Magma

Selfridges

The Design Museum (also online at www.designmuseumshop.com)

Wapping Hydraulic Project Station

Koenig at the Serpentine Gallery

Donlon Books

Compton News

Waterstones at Harrods

Rococo News

Soho Original Bookshop

Artwords

Charlotte Street Newsagent

Berlin

K Presse

Motto

Munchen

K Presse

Hamburg

K Presse

Frankfurt

Schmitt & Hahn

Dusseldorf

Grauert

Vestoj is sold all over in Germany, or so it seems from the list I got from our distributor. We’re too lazy to type up the whole list we’re afraid, but if you want to buy Vestoj in Deutschland just send us a mail with where you live and we’ll find the right location for you!

Auckland

Mag Nation

Do a good deed and get a bloody good deal at the same time – buy Vestoj and support the thinking person’s fashion magazine!

Words and Images: Ruth Hinkel-Pevzner

“

“It was hot and us kids were squashed in the backseat going to the beach for the first time. But sitting side by side was all the better to admire him close up, his big curls, and especially those new shorts of material never before seen, little loops stitched tightly together, bending bowing bouncing back as my finger ran over the softness, a delicate blue with white piping running along his brown legs rising to disappear under his t-shirt, bright white and new. And there in the corner were two little footprints, dots as his toes later marked the sand. How did he get those little feet stitched on there, so perfect for going to the beach?”

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Walter Benjamin’s 9th Thesis; Theses on the Philosophy of History

Saint Augustine

“There are three tenses or times: past, present and future. These are three realities in the mind, but nowhere else as far as I can see, for as the present of past things is memory, the present of present things is attention, and the present of future things is expectation.” 

Joan Baez

“We both know what memories can bring; they bring diamonds and rust.”  

Victor Hugo

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future in the past.”    

T.S. Eliot

“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.” 

 

The first issue of Vestoj will be themed around ‘Material Memories’ (or the past present in the future) and deal with issues such as real, and imagined, nostalgia, historicism in fashion and personal memories of much loved pieces of clothing. Because how many of us haven’t felt the twinge of remorse when we have to get rid of a beloved jumper that time has punished with one moth hole too many? Or the irrational attachment to a brooch or a pair of glasses or a coat that once belonged to someone we used to love? Or maybe the nostalgia felt for a pair of baby shoes that were yours when you were too young to even remember what they felt like on your tiny feet?

This issue of Vestoj will be a sort of account of this intersection of our clothes and our past. Our material memories, as it were. The idea is that our discarded garments reflect our memories, material memories of times past, love lost or found, disappointments endured or victories won. These lost objects of desire could then be read as a map to our past, here resurrected and brought back to life once more. For isn’t it so that through breathing life back into what would otherwise be fleeting ephemera, mere fragments, we somehow mourn times of yore yet celebrate our own history, the fact that we have lived?

1. All articles must relate to sartorial issues. We are interested in people’s relationship to their clothes, and fashion’s relationship to identity.
2. We must bridge academia and industry. We will place academia and industry side by side, and give equal significance to both. We will place the academic in an industry context and vice versa in order to increase the understanding and collaboration between these two fields. We will work for the greater good of our discipline.
3. We are as much part of the fashion industry as we are of the academic world and will work actively to dismantle any preconceived ideas or prejudice that may exist between these two fields.
4. Fashion must always be taken seriously. We must never be afraid to have pretensions. We are as interested in the minutiae of clothing as we are in the grand themes of fashion. We will see the trivial in the substantial and the substantial in the trivial, and ensure that all is given equal importance.
5. The tone must be inviting. We must never be excluding in language or approach. We will use humour to draw readers in and themes that many can relate to.
6. Text and image shall be given equal importance. We must always integrate word and picture and guarantee that there is an ongoing dialogue between the two.
7. Everything shall be questioned – nothing is holy. We must challenge the status quo. We must always ask why.
8. We must always remain independent in thought and action. We must actively encourage critical thought and never be satisfied until we have examined every theme intrepidly. We will keenly promote criticism and draw attention to the paradoxes within the fashion world.
9. We commit to always featuring what we want to show, rather than what we have been told to. The focus will always be on the garments rather than their brands. Hence we will work without advertising and clothing credits.
10. We will have an inter-disciplinary approach. We will take care to examine each theme from various angles and make certain that we represent other lifestyles and ethos than our own. 

Words: Haidee Findlay-Levin, Image: Miyako Ishiuchi

Excerpt:

“In the last years of her mother’s life, Ishiuchi photographed her mother’s feet, hands, sagging breasts, scared and aged skin crisscrossed with wrinkles – a finely woven tapestry of life. But even more telling are the images captured after her death, when the artist was driven to photograph her mother’s most intimate clothing and personal of possessions – her second skin. We are looking at a memory that has been captured and preserved in the present – the evocative traces of history that still cling to her subject.”

Words: Professor Peter McNeil, Image: Courtesy of Professor Peter McNeil

Excerpt:

“The Duke was unconventional because of his subject position. He could break sartorial rules because he was the ruler who no longer had to keep up a pre-ordained appearance. All of this was possible precisely because he was a former king, and similar eccentricity would not necessarily be tolerated in his eyes worn by others born to less privilege. He could break the rules because he was fully aware of history, that monarchs once set fashions, not followed them. ”

Words: Professor Patrizia Calefato, Image: Elsa Ahlbom Fischer & Nacho Alegre

Excerpt:

“Wearing second-hand clothing, recycling garments and styles of previous generations, listening to old music remixed into new tracks, re-elaborating lines and forms, re-living old “contemporary myths” by re-proposing them in the market and in the imagery: all of those practices constitute what is presently called vintage, reuse and revival. Revival is actually a strategy that has always occurred in the revolving of fashion, but that currently manifests itself in the fragmented, syncopated decontextualisation of signs of the past, quoted and so living again in the present.”

As told to: Anja Cronberg

Excerpt:

“Fast forward to the future. My aunt Dorothy is living in L.A. and she must be in her sixties by now. I’m in my twenties and for some reason I’m also in L.A. and so I get a chance to meet her again. And as I step into her flat the first thing I see is that she has fifty pairs of Fredrick’s of Hollywood, from the Fifties, shoes. There was one pair I just fell in love with as soon as I laid eyes on them. They were a pair of wooden mules in cheetah skin – just incredible! My aunt saw what an effect those shoes had one me and, in an act of great generosity, decided to give them to me. I still have those heels.”