The evening at which I painfully realised that fashion was actually not my cut of the cloth, by Lauren De’Ath.
What people need to firstly understand is that I like clothes; aesthetically and visually they give me great pleasure: the drape of an expensive silk; the lustre of a piled velvet. Je les adore! Fashion on the other hand is an entirely other box of tricks- I find the whole mutable industry hysterical. I worked at a Fashion Week once- hysterical; I interned at Vogue- hysterical! But I kept asking myself: what was next rung of adventure on my sartorial ladder?
The answer came at about 4pm on a Tuesday afternoon over free drinks at The Hoxton Pony, a friend who had worked for Jonathon Saunders for all tally of a week and claim to Saunders fame was having sewn a single button to his Spring/Summer collection, had managed to accrue two tickets to the after show party. With London Fashion Week already fast disappearing into the retrospect of 2009 I jumped at the chance to schmooze with the proverbial cream cakes of the fashion world. (And, of course, be mildly amused by the whole thing).
NW1 didn’t stand a chance, I thought; wearing ripped tights (no fashion statement intended) and an ill-fitting ruchéd velvet dress I descended, the ever sceptical scenster, into the London underground for Marylebone. The Osnaburgh Terrace, a grand white pillared building, was Saunders’ statuesque venue de choix and hosts Relative PR had gone to great lengths (and heights) to ensure the walls, flagstone stairwell and several ominous, random glass counters were sufficiently adorned with white orchids and flickering candles- the whole thing was highly atmospheric. Waitresses floated about with trays of attractive, and more significantly free, cocktails and flitted past very occasionally with small but delectable dishes of food; refined versions of British classics from what I could tell, mini roast beef with bird egg-sized potatoes and so on.
Wallowing in glorious pretension I turned to see Jodie Harsh and her giant blonde weave enter the room only to then sashay away, hair towering over all else. Whilst my friend was talking Saunders with her fellow interns I retired to the sidelines to people watch, a far more satisfying activity than attempting to engage in chit-chat; something I am self-confessedly crap at. O, there’s Lulu Kennedy in white PVC! Clever. Ah, and there’s performance artist Theo Adams, aka The-O... I prefer him in drag. O and there’s Roksanda Ilincic and Richard Nicoll, how I love them! I was forced abruptly back down the earth soon after,however- someone was trying to make conversation. Damn. So, what did I do? I wrote. Did I work for Jon? O no, I’m a social leech, I’m with Lucy. Did I see the show? No, unfortunately, I was getting drunk in Shoreditch courtesy of a darling French barman. Several painful moments later, said raconteur with clumpy mascara was sufficiently full to vomitation from my verbal diarrhoea and sort of wandered away, perplexed. I am hideously awkward sometimes.
My next call of duty was to investigate the dance floor. The DJs from Ponystep were playing and apparently this is impressive in these circles... Everyone under the age of 25 and with a social life knows better, me thinks. Outside of their usual clique, however, the boys were spinning at their very best and on a dance floor filled predominantly with interns, we all danced to painfully cool electro dub-step, Lady GaGa and I’m quite sure, if my then Martini-soaked memory will allow; Britney Spears (can you have set without Britney, bitch, these days)? Thankfully not. We partied into the night, shoes were removed, drinks downed, shapes were thrown; but no-one fell and no-one was secretly sick in the corner because Fashion is pristine. The only controversy, mild as it was, was Vogue’s Fashion Editor, Harriet Quick, smoking on the dancefloor. Yes, that’s smoking indoors.
We rested off our foot-ache on leather sofas, next to a fabulously elegant set of drag queens in 1940s garb. A photographer darted about like a crack of tiny thunder, immortalsing the young, old, beautiful and remarkable things of fashion; and we just sat and watched it happen. Apparently Victoria Beckham designed all of her own collection; is really involved in the process; knows her dart from her seam and all that; better than that Moss for Topshop. The barman put petals and a spritz of perfume in the drinks. The Ladies were full of men. Are gladiator sandals really in fashion? Strangely, there was a little girl running around...
With a smoking area full of trannies; a dancefloor full of smokers and a liver full of, what was maybe gin, by midnight I was desperate for a change of scenery. Procuring two more free alcoholic gems from the bar I suddenly decided I didn’t want to drink anymore; poured my drink out the window, leaned out as far as I could to see where it had landed (hopefully not on Harsh’s expensive fake hair) and then returned to dissuade my friend from indoor-smoking à la The Quick with a stern, “You are not Jonathon Saunders and you do not work for Vogue!” All around us the room was clearing as the final chords of Joy Division faded into the night, the lights were turned on and the party, it seemed, was over. Out on the street it was back to reality, back to KFC and back to the N15 bus home and with my heels stowed safely away in my bag for my “reality” flats, I returned home to lie on my floor and muse over my first ‘fashion party’.
And what of the moral of the story, dear reader? Well, alcohol is not the answer, that’s for sure.
-Pegasus magazine, 2009-
Thursday, 10 March 2011
I.am.Robot
It would seem the virtual is frazzling our wires in reality. Lauren De’Ath asks could myths about a Cyborg Nation really be true?
Questioning the detriments of technology in mainstream modern society is nothing new; after all it seems fairly Orwellian and is something of which Daily Mail ethics consistently remind. Sociability is apparently down and kids have been out taking murderous inspiration from video games and slasher movies for years we read; nothing new there. However, new investigative science is now asking just how safe is a society that breeds walking digital sponges?
It was the stuff of science fiction. Straight from the pages of Orwell; from the delirious mind of Russell T. Davies or pure Matrix reloaded. But now we have proof: tech culture is killing our brains. For years, as we sat transfixed before the television, we had our mothers whimpering beside us prophesying some ridiculous ailment called ‘square eyes’. Pfft, what of it? CITV was on, mum. Then later, we were chastised for an overzealous mobile phone usage; Chinese kids had forgotten how to use their forefingers in an age of texting thumbs and radio waves were carrying cancer straight to our brains. But- but, my I-phone?! And so life continues.
We are exposed to over 3000 commercial messages a day via various media outlets (Bluetooth, spam email, Internet pop-ups) and now new science is calling a truce to our somewhat overwhelming contact, claiming our brains are reaching critical mass. Funny, how our mothers always know best. For although we can now access information better than ever before, more importantly now that information can access us.
Years later CITV is no more, yet poised as we are on the threshold of tumultuous socio-cultural changes, Stanford science historian Professor Robert Proctor has come up with an ingenious new phrase to summarise society’s big problem. He calls it ‘agnotology- the study of culturally constructed ignorance’. His theory for human “down-culture” is simple apathy- we just don’t care. And, nor is it, he says, necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it is an instinctive coping mechanism as a relative system overload has left us bereft. But he is not alone in his studies of how digitization has pushed us to our limits and nor is he the first.
It all began way back in 1997 with our Nokia 210s. Microsoft researcher Linda Stone was mulling over what was then a very primitive human -technology affiliation; one that was enchanted with downloading ring-tones, ‘cool’ screen-savers and calling taxi-dad when you were stuck on the wrong side of town. Having worked for a multitude of computing companies, Stone was amongst the first to see how twenty-first century mod-cons could turn sour. “We were in the sweet spot of it,” she says, when we catch up with her (over smartphone email, of all things), “delighted with these devices that offered convenience: ‘I'm lost, I'll just call them on my cell phone,’ or ‘I'm running late, I'll just text and give them a heads up.’”
Noting the growing dependency on the new best friend permanently attached to our ears, she coined the revolutionary phrase, Continuous Partial Attention. It was a phrase that alluded to a society that never shut down, socially or mentally and had resulted in an extreme form of multi-tasking to cope. “When I talked about CPA in those days, I suggested to audiences that, for the moment, we were excited by this opportunity to be connected anywhere, anyplace, anytime. But ultimately… we would grow weary of this.”
And, of course we did.
Aside from a more complex relationship with our mobiles, a barrage of social networking sites suddenly meant we had an online presence, a presence accessible to anyone and even more alarming- one locked in cyberspace. It was a menacing component of modern connectivity when Facebook announced ownership of uploaded content, likewise an account could never de deleted should you wish, just made dormant. In short, you could never leave and never die. It was a revelation that shook the world. Furthermore it was revealed in 2008 that you could actually develop something called IAD (Internet Addiction Disorder) of which Facebook was the most common addiction. Symptoms included withdrawal symptoms, anxiety attacks and obsessive thinking about what could be going on online, etc. It was proof enough that our dependency on the Web had spiralled out of control.
The fear that we will become unwitting androids is one that has long plagued sociologists, but whilst this was all rumour and superstition, could science have accidentally stumbled upon proof of our living a logged on half-life? Linda Stone namedrops something called ‘email apnea’, a temporary absence of suspense of breathing whilst on email or mobile, namely we are quite literally ‘plugging in’ to an online moment. However, the question is, once we become an avatar how much of us is actually human?
David Giles specializes in media psychology at Winchester University and through his own studies of social networking sites (SNSs) he has deduced a striking theme that isn’t far off of actual science fiction. He explains that, “SNSs are a means of replicating yourself and leaving part of you behind, possibly forever and leaving all this material online in photos, personal preferences, blogs etc. is a small step towards immortality. Most SNS homepages only get seen by a few hundred people at most, but I also think that people still have, to some extent, a belief that everyone is logging on and looking at their websites. Thus they believe that simply having a website is a step towards immortality.” Perhaps, like Cypher in The Matrix movies we find that life is easier as an avatar, continues Giles: “We have the capacity to be the better person online; we can edit, delete and ascribe a personality to ourselves that might not be strictly true, but better.”
In the late 90s, before mobile technology and widespread computing had frazzled our brains, future talk of a cyborg globe all seemed something of a distant hallucination. We probably reacted as if Mum had just tried to change over our cartoons: ‘don’t overeact’! Comments Stone on our overzealous technological presence, “What we're seeing today is a shift into an always on mode. Even when we hope to take a break for a meal or a movie, an evening or a vacation, we find ourselves checking emails and texts we find that we're not able to break away. We're like the hamster on the wheel. In motion. Staying in motion. This contributes a lot of wear and tear on the body and the psyche.”
Our online issues became the stuff of widespread debate. New words such as ‘mouse potato’ and ‘stress puppies’ became commonplace in beehive offices to describe an unprecedented wave of net-addicts and Hulk-like work ethics. The first foray into future forecasting our descendents began in 2006 with the release of Mike Judge’s cult movie Idiocracy, a satire set in 2505AD that ran with the tagline ‘The Future is a No-Brainer’. It saw a prospective world where the inhabitants of Earth were so thoroughly inbred, lazy and addicted to token pop culture they were facing extinction.
Then in 2008 Atlantic journalist Nicholas Carr asked the question on the tip of everyone’s lips, ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ It was a pertinent point at a time when contemplative intelligence was radically being swept under the carpet to make way for prospective hardships; a looming recession caused by, what’s that, a lack of attention to detail. Carr later went on to dedicate an entire book on the subject of ‘Shallow Thinking’ in 2010. It went on to great critical acclaim. Meanwhile, author Susan Hill hit back at online reading, identifying it to be the sole cause for her sudden lack of concentration. She polemically quoted: “Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted. Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready-meals and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition.”
Continues Stone, “CPA is an attention strategy, however there are times when it is a terrific strategy for an activity, other times when it's not. Because we are working so hard at trying to stay on top of everything, we shift into a ‘fight or flight’ state: a state of vigilance. In such a state, we are more likely to have inattentional blindness, where we see only what we are looking for so vigilantly that we miss everything else.” We have simply lost our capacity to commit to one thing for a period of time and information overload is the reason why.
Of course, these theories have been consistently challenged, overruled and deemed timely fear-mongering. One such techno- optimist Jamais Cascio through his work via the Institute for the Future and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies defends the computing age as the very proof of our supposedly flagging intelligence and says we are developing new parts of our brain as we go. “It's happening all around us,” he says speaking on behalf of trend agency Pew Research, “Across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence: it's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines. We are developing fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge."
However, the fact cannot be escaped; that whilst we have developed in and rather established new areas of digital intelligence, it is rustling a few feathers as it goes. The computing age has led to a systematic dependency on digital medias in just about every area of human life, a lack of social skills and many argue, a cultural time bomb waiting to explode.
Furthermore, there is the flipside to this so-called social erosion; with any information available at the flick of a button, perhaps, query some, we have become so fearful of being incorrect, what we know and can know becomes endless. In agnotological instances, even simple debates we once thought we knew the answers to have become clouded. Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. We assume that surely knowledge can only increase? Well, apparently not. According to Proctor, when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed and ignorance increases. To quote Farhad Manjoo in his book ‘True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society’: “If we argue about what a fact means, we're having a debate. If we argue about what the facts are it is agnotological Armageddon; where reality dies screaming.”
Of course, the fear for many is that we cannot undo what grave cultural mess we have gotten ourselves into; however the solution, according to Linda Stone is far more simple than one could have ever supposed. In a society where we spend over 30 hours a week logged-on, plugged-in and absorbing, scientists are studying the benefits of something called Earthing.“Nature is the antidote,” says Stone, “In grass, earth, trees, water and sand; we're more likely to breathe fully. We're more likely to feel replenished.”
Strange that after all our technological accomplishments, from television to mobiles, to think that there would indeed come a time when we would rely on the age old saying that, sometimes ignorance is indeed bliss.
Questioning the detriments of technology in mainstream modern society is nothing new; after all it seems fairly Orwellian and is something of which Daily Mail ethics consistently remind. Sociability is apparently down and kids have been out taking murderous inspiration from video games and slasher movies for years we read; nothing new there. However, new investigative science is now asking just how safe is a society that breeds walking digital sponges?
It was the stuff of science fiction. Straight from the pages of Orwell; from the delirious mind of Russell T. Davies or pure Matrix reloaded. But now we have proof: tech culture is killing our brains. For years, as we sat transfixed before the television, we had our mothers whimpering beside us prophesying some ridiculous ailment called ‘square eyes’. Pfft, what of it? CITV was on, mum. Then later, we were chastised for an overzealous mobile phone usage; Chinese kids had forgotten how to use their forefingers in an age of texting thumbs and radio waves were carrying cancer straight to our brains. But- but, my I-phone?! And so life continues.
We are exposed to over 3000 commercial messages a day via various media outlets (Bluetooth, spam email, Internet pop-ups) and now new science is calling a truce to our somewhat overwhelming contact, claiming our brains are reaching critical mass. Funny, how our mothers always know best. For although we can now access information better than ever before, more importantly now that information can access us.
Years later CITV is no more, yet poised as we are on the threshold of tumultuous socio-cultural changes, Stanford science historian Professor Robert Proctor has come up with an ingenious new phrase to summarise society’s big problem. He calls it ‘agnotology- the study of culturally constructed ignorance’. His theory for human “down-culture” is simple apathy- we just don’t care. And, nor is it, he says, necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it is an instinctive coping mechanism as a relative system overload has left us bereft. But he is not alone in his studies of how digitization has pushed us to our limits and nor is he the first.
It all began way back in 1997 with our Nokia 210s. Microsoft researcher Linda Stone was mulling over what was then a very primitive human -technology affiliation; one that was enchanted with downloading ring-tones, ‘cool’ screen-savers and calling taxi-dad when you were stuck on the wrong side of town. Having worked for a multitude of computing companies, Stone was amongst the first to see how twenty-first century mod-cons could turn sour. “We were in the sweet spot of it,” she says, when we catch up with her (over smartphone email, of all things), “delighted with these devices that offered convenience: ‘I'm lost, I'll just call them on my cell phone,’ or ‘I'm running late, I'll just text and give them a heads up.’”
Noting the growing dependency on the new best friend permanently attached to our ears, she coined the revolutionary phrase, Continuous Partial Attention. It was a phrase that alluded to a society that never shut down, socially or mentally and had resulted in an extreme form of multi-tasking to cope. “When I talked about CPA in those days, I suggested to audiences that, for the moment, we were excited by this opportunity to be connected anywhere, anyplace, anytime. But ultimately… we would grow weary of this.”
And, of course we did.
Aside from a more complex relationship with our mobiles, a barrage of social networking sites suddenly meant we had an online presence, a presence accessible to anyone and even more alarming- one locked in cyberspace. It was a menacing component of modern connectivity when Facebook announced ownership of uploaded content, likewise an account could never de deleted should you wish, just made dormant. In short, you could never leave and never die. It was a revelation that shook the world. Furthermore it was revealed in 2008 that you could actually develop something called IAD (Internet Addiction Disorder) of which Facebook was the most common addiction. Symptoms included withdrawal symptoms, anxiety attacks and obsessive thinking about what could be going on online, etc. It was proof enough that our dependency on the Web had spiralled out of control.
The fear that we will become unwitting androids is one that has long plagued sociologists, but whilst this was all rumour and superstition, could science have accidentally stumbled upon proof of our living a logged on half-life? Linda Stone namedrops something called ‘email apnea’, a temporary absence of suspense of breathing whilst on email or mobile, namely we are quite literally ‘plugging in’ to an online moment. However, the question is, once we become an avatar how much of us is actually human?
David Giles specializes in media psychology at Winchester University and through his own studies of social networking sites (SNSs) he has deduced a striking theme that isn’t far off of actual science fiction. He explains that, “SNSs are a means of replicating yourself and leaving part of you behind, possibly forever and leaving all this material online in photos, personal preferences, blogs etc. is a small step towards immortality. Most SNS homepages only get seen by a few hundred people at most, but I also think that people still have, to some extent, a belief that everyone is logging on and looking at their websites. Thus they believe that simply having a website is a step towards immortality.” Perhaps, like Cypher in The Matrix movies we find that life is easier as an avatar, continues Giles: “We have the capacity to be the better person online; we can edit, delete and ascribe a personality to ourselves that might not be strictly true, but better.”
In the late 90s, before mobile technology and widespread computing had frazzled our brains, future talk of a cyborg globe all seemed something of a distant hallucination. We probably reacted as if Mum had just tried to change over our cartoons: ‘don’t overeact’! Comments Stone on our overzealous technological presence, “What we're seeing today is a shift into an always on mode. Even when we hope to take a break for a meal or a movie, an evening or a vacation, we find ourselves checking emails and texts we find that we're not able to break away. We're like the hamster on the wheel. In motion. Staying in motion. This contributes a lot of wear and tear on the body and the psyche.”
Our online issues became the stuff of widespread debate. New words such as ‘mouse potato’ and ‘stress puppies’ became commonplace in beehive offices to describe an unprecedented wave of net-addicts and Hulk-like work ethics. The first foray into future forecasting our descendents began in 2006 with the release of Mike Judge’s cult movie Idiocracy, a satire set in 2505AD that ran with the tagline ‘The Future is a No-Brainer’. It saw a prospective world where the inhabitants of Earth were so thoroughly inbred, lazy and addicted to token pop culture they were facing extinction.
Then in 2008 Atlantic journalist Nicholas Carr asked the question on the tip of everyone’s lips, ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ It was a pertinent point at a time when contemplative intelligence was radically being swept under the carpet to make way for prospective hardships; a looming recession caused by, what’s that, a lack of attention to detail. Carr later went on to dedicate an entire book on the subject of ‘Shallow Thinking’ in 2010. It went on to great critical acclaim. Meanwhile, author Susan Hill hit back at online reading, identifying it to be the sole cause for her sudden lack of concentration. She polemically quoted: “Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted. Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready-meals and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition.”
Continues Stone, “CPA is an attention strategy, however there are times when it is a terrific strategy for an activity, other times when it's not. Because we are working so hard at trying to stay on top of everything, we shift into a ‘fight or flight’ state: a state of vigilance. In such a state, we are more likely to have inattentional blindness, where we see only what we are looking for so vigilantly that we miss everything else.” We have simply lost our capacity to commit to one thing for a period of time and information overload is the reason why.
Of course, these theories have been consistently challenged, overruled and deemed timely fear-mongering. One such techno- optimist Jamais Cascio through his work via the Institute for the Future and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies defends the computing age as the very proof of our supposedly flagging intelligence and says we are developing new parts of our brain as we go. “It's happening all around us,” he says speaking on behalf of trend agency Pew Research, “Across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence: it's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines. We are developing fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge."
However, the fact cannot be escaped; that whilst we have developed in and rather established new areas of digital intelligence, it is rustling a few feathers as it goes. The computing age has led to a systematic dependency on digital medias in just about every area of human life, a lack of social skills and many argue, a cultural time bomb waiting to explode.
Furthermore, there is the flipside to this so-called social erosion; with any information available at the flick of a button, perhaps, query some, we have become so fearful of being incorrect, what we know and can know becomes endless. In agnotological instances, even simple debates we once thought we knew the answers to have become clouded. Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. We assume that surely knowledge can only increase? Well, apparently not. According to Proctor, when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed and ignorance increases. To quote Farhad Manjoo in his book ‘True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society’: “If we argue about what a fact means, we're having a debate. If we argue about what the facts are it is agnotological Armageddon; where reality dies screaming.”
Of course, the fear for many is that we cannot undo what grave cultural mess we have gotten ourselves into; however the solution, according to Linda Stone is far more simple than one could have ever supposed. In a society where we spend over 30 hours a week logged-on, plugged-in and absorbing, scientists are studying the benefits of something called Earthing.“Nature is the antidote,” says Stone, “In grass, earth, trees, water and sand; we're more likely to breathe fully. We're more likely to feel replenished.”
Strange that after all our technological accomplishments, from television to mobiles, to think that there would indeed come a time when we would rely on the age old saying that, sometimes ignorance is indeed bliss.
Why Don't You Stuff Me Up?
What happens to trends after the cool-hunters have been and gone? Answer: they carry on. Lauren De’Ath explores why taxidermy will never truly die.
And so it came to be that all God’s creatures, great and small came back to life. Was it a miracle? Or, just a piece of well-positioned wire? For a time, taxidermy was la crème de la crème of the arts world; there it was, splashed like a cheap shot of Jordan all over the tabloids and broadsheets, in What’s Hot and Top Buy lists, alike. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Aside from numerous exhibitions held only in the chicest of London postcodes, it was not uncommon for stylist extraordinaire Katy Grand to use a few taxidermy hens and mice for shoots during her Pop! days and earlier this year esteemed photographer William Selden shot kangaroos and goats in preppy outfits for hipster magazine Vice. Meanwhile, king of creepy, magician Derren Brown it is rumoured keeps a pet taxidermy cat he affectionately refers to as Spasm on a living room shelf. Charmant!
Indeed, it was a great and ghoulish trend that worked its way through the cool pockets of Islington and East London faster than you could say, ”stitch’n’bitch” with sinister boutiques and nostalgic window displays boasting all kinds of wicked paraphernalia springing up weekly. And as we all know when the fashion crowds move in- you’re on to a surefire winner.
But trends are cruel. And as with all hyped merchandise, all that was glassy-eyed and stuffed was soon ditched and replaced with the impertinence of 90s fluro shades. To add insult to injury, taxidermy forever had the challenge of overcoming public doubt: “It is a little bit weird though isn’t it, y’know stuffing dead birds,” “bit dark.” Macabre. Sinister. Wrong. Strong words. These are the kind of folk who keep a deer carcass in the deep-freezer; forget the fish fingers and peas, so it really comes as no surprise then, that taxidermists are a fiercely secretive breed. They decline interview, shy behind work-sheds bedecked ceiling to floor with mounted stag heads and can ‘only type with one finger’, apparently. Yet despite all this and for a business that came to prominence during the late-Victorian era, amazingly there are more working taxidermists in the UK today than ever before. But who are these certified ‘oddballs’ and what do they want with our deceased moggies and pooches?
“Well, I quite like a good vole.” Enter Dave Hornbrook, at the moment he is busy mulling over which long-dead specimen to pluck from his freezer for the annual taxidermy championships held in the States. As the sole British representative and reigning champ, he is feeling the pressure (although he’d never let on). A straight-talking Yorkshireman through and through, his own dramatic tale of his foray into the industry, reads like a Barry Hines novel. From humble beginnings as a bored childhood hobby ‘tinkering’ with dead specimens on the moors, to a horrific car crash leaving him fighting for his life some two years ago that made him finally realise his lifelong dream. He even taught himself the well-honed craft by borrowing books from his local library, of all things. To date, he is most proud of his running hare- a mounted piece that won him third place in his first competition. A celebratory shot of which is the homepage on his website.
Like all things, it hasn’t taken long for the taxi’ trend to do its rounds; he now runs classes, in his isolated North Yorkshire town to train up a new generation of skilled zoologists that will do the industry justice. Although he is says his new protégés are hardly exemplary: “There’s more to it than people think. They often scarper once they realise how hard it really is.” The trick to a good piece of taxidermy all lies a finicky process of removing the skin of the animal whilst it’s still fresh, defatting, degreasing, fitting the model around the skin, sewing, modelling some more and then leaving the animal to dry for a week. Not for the faint-hearted, but not as perturbed a process as the public assume. “It’s not gruesome at all! But you have to be very dedicated; even now after I finish a piece, I take a step back and think, ‘Hmm, what could I do better for next time.’ I get a lot of young ladies who want to learn for some reason,” he muses, although he is utterly nonplussed as to why. “I guess they come for the nature side of it. It’s like all things that come around,” he says in his slow Yorkshire brogue. “Fashions, I suppose.”
Back in London, hidden in a not so conspicuous spot on Hackney’s Mare Street lies London’s finest purveyor of all things weird with a self-confessedly ‘disparate collection of objects’. Set up way back in 1878 by America philosopher William James, Viktor Wynd’s Last Tuesday Society stands as East London’s original gateway to ghoulish; Facebook is awash with Blackberry snaps of winged taxidermy cats apparently ‘flying’ on the ceiling and a £3000 eight foot polar bear surrounded by a harem of equally rigor-mortified characters. It is a store where seeing is indeed believing.
Ever-eloquent spokeswoman Suzette Field speaks on behalf of mysterious silent founder Viktor Wynd: “We opened up the London branch of the society in order to continue to build upon Last Tuesday’s ethos of furthering the artistic, literary and esoteric aspects of urban life,“ she says. Already an avid collector, Field jumped on the bandwagon after compadre Wynd ‘surprised’ her with an articulated skeleton of a tiny shih tzu; years later her collection is so large she uses the shop as a museum for her reams of odd bits and bods. As an art, graphic and interior designer, she has the perfect summary for why she believes taxidermy is so eternally loved: “It’s an escape! Really it is exploring all of these things within the confines of somewhere like Hackney that makes it so popular.”
Meanwhile, things are a little more grounded elsewhere. Talking about his upcoming taxidermy show in the States, Hornbrook is comparing the austere trade rules over there in comparison to the UK, “There’s this inspection at customs, see. There are some strict rules in America about what you can and can’t bring into the country- no road-kill. No kestrels and no brown owls- not even a feather can enter the country. Else, your work is taken away and incinerated. I don’t know why.” Rife with all manner of delicious opinions, he laments in about a Britain ‘overrun with cowboy taxidermists, who just don’t do things properly.’ The fear for those like Hornbrook is that it is these nonchalant vagabonds who continue to give the industry a bad name.
Stemming from the 1800s, it was a service that went to bridge an ever-expanding Empire with her people by opening up new zoological gems previously unseen by the public. But for every person awed, was another stymied- when the first platypus arrived in Britain, for example, some experts refused to accept it was a genuine species, convinced a backstreet taxidermist has sewn a duck’s beak on a beaver’s body- for with interest came the backstreet peddlers . A black market of shoddy creations shook the country, but for the virtuoso Victorians, avid collectors of anything bizarre and bewitching; a mummified hand or stuffed creature from foreign lands was a must-have above every Victorian fireplace. One fraud even passed off a variety of exotic birds native to Africa and Asia as having been hunted from his own back yard in quiet seaside town, Leonard-on-Sea. It only came to light nearly a hundred years later that he was indeed the faker, he was, but it is an uneasy mistrust that is maintained until this day.
Over the years the widespread curiosity has been replaced by suspicion and rumours of taxidermists acting like savage butchers continues to plague the profession. Meanwhile with some 30,000 working taxidermists in the US compared to just 2000 here, reports suggest a less than satisfactory culling of wild animals to satiate an obsession with trophy murders to hang from a drawing-room wall. And we can all imagine Ace Ventura’s face at such a spectacle. “Times are a-changing,” muses Dave, “You’ve got women buying chickens from the supermarket, not knowing what to do with it. People aren’t what they used to be fifty years ago.”
It is something that divides opinion in an age of ‘Fur is Murder’ PETA campaigns and political correctness. You may recall the 2009 Bodyworks exhibition by scientist Gunther von Hagens that came under some serious fire for displaying a naked corpse couple having sex and thus ‘combining the two biggest taboos left in the 21st century- sex and death.’ Artisans and partisans alike continually defend the priming of the dead as an opportunity to be close to something for further study, however intentions are sometimes assuaged for propriety.
“But, it’s the same process as preparing your chicken for your Sunday roast!” argues Katie Brookes. At twenty-four, she is stands as something of a ‘dermy newbie but whereas Hornbrook’s occupational decision was a road less taken, hers was a more standard approach. At first glance, Katie is just the taxidermy “type”, you might think. With the kind of clear-faced good looks and seemingly naturally windswept hair you’d expect of a London cool kid. Hers however is an interest that began with a certain stuffed vulture in a GCSE art class, for whilst the rest of her colleagues were no doubt raving about the latest Maccabees record, Katie was feverishly collecting roadkill and creating amateur taxidermy pieces nerdishly in her bedroom.
Having been schooled on the continent, on her arrival in London she immediately requested an internship with Polly Morgan in London (before she was famous, we might add) and set to work perfecting her craft. On her offbeat hobby, she comments: “I had been experimenting with preserving dead animals purely for drawing purposes, so it seemed like a natural progression from the unsuccessful resin casting of dead mice and birds I had been doing before. It's really great when you have started to mount the animal and you see the life it has lived: scrapes on its feet or small scars on its beak or a chunk out of its feathers or some fur that has been scarred. Its whole life becomes very apparent before your very eyes.”
It could be assumed, her creations take the place of a sort of pet, but it is just a passion for art and animals taken to new levels of admiration, no different from a taking a photograph of a loved one, or as Katie puts it ‘keeping a pair of leather shoes’. “I love the idea of an animal or bird lasting forever,” she rhapsodises. “The beautiful face, the feathers, the fur not being lost to the ground or thrown in the bin but celebrating the animal. I think I get more defensive than people in negative reactions to the work as I feel the practice is moral and is natural and enjoyable when you see a really gorgeous animal looking almost alive that will last for a long time.”
Likewise, Suzette Field is just as defensive of anti-taxidermy ignorance, claiming it is all down to public fear of the unknown, “ In our case, our shop is more of a collection that appeals to our sensibilities, from joke shop items to butterflies, from desk masks to two-headed teddy bears. If other people label them grotesque that is because they don’t share our eclectic outlook. In any case much of our stuff, for instance the taxidermy is totally natural; it’s nature preserved. As a vegetarian, I’m more disgusted by a slab of steak.”
But sadly, despite its imminent and eternal beauty, taxidermy is no longer the popular feature it once was; considered too garish for the average English household. Instead, we buy plastic tabletops from Ikea. However, we can still see the true craftsmanship in action, in the stuffed animals behind the glass at the Natural History Musuem and the likes; it allows us to get right up close to a lion, look a grizzly in the eye and see for the first time just what a dodo really does look like. Meanwhile, Dave Hornbrook offers us some exclusive top-notch advice for budding collectors; apparently, though sold cheaply for their Victorian gaudiness, taxidermy pieces in a glass case are worth thousands of pounds these days; so get busy scouting Spitalfields market, folks.
But money, science and nostalgia aside, what’s the honest reason why taxidermy is still so admired today? “Really?” concludes Suzette Field, knowingly, “It is because naturalia and zoology reminds us how nature is really the finest artist of them all.”
And so it came to be that all God’s creatures, great and small came back to life. Was it a miracle? Or, just a piece of well-positioned wire? For a time, taxidermy was la crème de la crème of the arts world; there it was, splashed like a cheap shot of Jordan all over the tabloids and broadsheets, in What’s Hot and Top Buy lists, alike. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Aside from numerous exhibitions held only in the chicest of London postcodes, it was not uncommon for stylist extraordinaire Katy Grand to use a few taxidermy hens and mice for shoots during her Pop! days and earlier this year esteemed photographer William Selden shot kangaroos and goats in preppy outfits for hipster magazine Vice. Meanwhile, king of creepy, magician Derren Brown it is rumoured keeps a pet taxidermy cat he affectionately refers to as Spasm on a living room shelf. Charmant!
Indeed, it was a great and ghoulish trend that worked its way through the cool pockets of Islington and East London faster than you could say, ”stitch’n’bitch” with sinister boutiques and nostalgic window displays boasting all kinds of wicked paraphernalia springing up weekly. And as we all know when the fashion crowds move in- you’re on to a surefire winner.
But trends are cruel. And as with all hyped merchandise, all that was glassy-eyed and stuffed was soon ditched and replaced with the impertinence of 90s fluro shades. To add insult to injury, taxidermy forever had the challenge of overcoming public doubt: “It is a little bit weird though isn’t it, y’know stuffing dead birds,” “bit dark.” Macabre. Sinister. Wrong. Strong words. These are the kind of folk who keep a deer carcass in the deep-freezer; forget the fish fingers and peas, so it really comes as no surprise then, that taxidermists are a fiercely secretive breed. They decline interview, shy behind work-sheds bedecked ceiling to floor with mounted stag heads and can ‘only type with one finger’, apparently. Yet despite all this and for a business that came to prominence during the late-Victorian era, amazingly there are more working taxidermists in the UK today than ever before. But who are these certified ‘oddballs’ and what do they want with our deceased moggies and pooches?
“Well, I quite like a good vole.” Enter Dave Hornbrook, at the moment he is busy mulling over which long-dead specimen to pluck from his freezer for the annual taxidermy championships held in the States. As the sole British representative and reigning champ, he is feeling the pressure (although he’d never let on). A straight-talking Yorkshireman through and through, his own dramatic tale of his foray into the industry, reads like a Barry Hines novel. From humble beginnings as a bored childhood hobby ‘tinkering’ with dead specimens on the moors, to a horrific car crash leaving him fighting for his life some two years ago that made him finally realise his lifelong dream. He even taught himself the well-honed craft by borrowing books from his local library, of all things. To date, he is most proud of his running hare- a mounted piece that won him third place in his first competition. A celebratory shot of which is the homepage on his website.
Like all things, it hasn’t taken long for the taxi’ trend to do its rounds; he now runs classes, in his isolated North Yorkshire town to train up a new generation of skilled zoologists that will do the industry justice. Although he is says his new protégés are hardly exemplary: “There’s more to it than people think. They often scarper once they realise how hard it really is.” The trick to a good piece of taxidermy all lies a finicky process of removing the skin of the animal whilst it’s still fresh, defatting, degreasing, fitting the model around the skin, sewing, modelling some more and then leaving the animal to dry for a week. Not for the faint-hearted, but not as perturbed a process as the public assume. “It’s not gruesome at all! But you have to be very dedicated; even now after I finish a piece, I take a step back and think, ‘Hmm, what could I do better for next time.’ I get a lot of young ladies who want to learn for some reason,” he muses, although he is utterly nonplussed as to why. “I guess they come for the nature side of it. It’s like all things that come around,” he says in his slow Yorkshire brogue. “Fashions, I suppose.”
Back in London, hidden in a not so conspicuous spot on Hackney’s Mare Street lies London’s finest purveyor of all things weird with a self-confessedly ‘disparate collection of objects’. Set up way back in 1878 by America philosopher William James, Viktor Wynd’s Last Tuesday Society stands as East London’s original gateway to ghoulish; Facebook is awash with Blackberry snaps of winged taxidermy cats apparently ‘flying’ on the ceiling and a £3000 eight foot polar bear surrounded by a harem of equally rigor-mortified characters. It is a store where seeing is indeed believing.
Ever-eloquent spokeswoman Suzette Field speaks on behalf of mysterious silent founder Viktor Wynd: “We opened up the London branch of the society in order to continue to build upon Last Tuesday’s ethos of furthering the artistic, literary and esoteric aspects of urban life,“ she says. Already an avid collector, Field jumped on the bandwagon after compadre Wynd ‘surprised’ her with an articulated skeleton of a tiny shih tzu; years later her collection is so large she uses the shop as a museum for her reams of odd bits and bods. As an art, graphic and interior designer, she has the perfect summary for why she believes taxidermy is so eternally loved: “It’s an escape! Really it is exploring all of these things within the confines of somewhere like Hackney that makes it so popular.”
Meanwhile, things are a little more grounded elsewhere. Talking about his upcoming taxidermy show in the States, Hornbrook is comparing the austere trade rules over there in comparison to the UK, “There’s this inspection at customs, see. There are some strict rules in America about what you can and can’t bring into the country- no road-kill. No kestrels and no brown owls- not even a feather can enter the country. Else, your work is taken away and incinerated. I don’t know why.” Rife with all manner of delicious opinions, he laments in about a Britain ‘overrun with cowboy taxidermists, who just don’t do things properly.’ The fear for those like Hornbrook is that it is these nonchalant vagabonds who continue to give the industry a bad name.
Stemming from the 1800s, it was a service that went to bridge an ever-expanding Empire with her people by opening up new zoological gems previously unseen by the public. But for every person awed, was another stymied- when the first platypus arrived in Britain, for example, some experts refused to accept it was a genuine species, convinced a backstreet taxidermist has sewn a duck’s beak on a beaver’s body- for with interest came the backstreet peddlers . A black market of shoddy creations shook the country, but for the virtuoso Victorians, avid collectors of anything bizarre and bewitching; a mummified hand or stuffed creature from foreign lands was a must-have above every Victorian fireplace. One fraud even passed off a variety of exotic birds native to Africa and Asia as having been hunted from his own back yard in quiet seaside town, Leonard-on-Sea. It only came to light nearly a hundred years later that he was indeed the faker, he was, but it is an uneasy mistrust that is maintained until this day.
Over the years the widespread curiosity has been replaced by suspicion and rumours of taxidermists acting like savage butchers continues to plague the profession. Meanwhile with some 30,000 working taxidermists in the US compared to just 2000 here, reports suggest a less than satisfactory culling of wild animals to satiate an obsession with trophy murders to hang from a drawing-room wall. And we can all imagine Ace Ventura’s face at such a spectacle. “Times are a-changing,” muses Dave, “You’ve got women buying chickens from the supermarket, not knowing what to do with it. People aren’t what they used to be fifty years ago.”
It is something that divides opinion in an age of ‘Fur is Murder’ PETA campaigns and political correctness. You may recall the 2009 Bodyworks exhibition by scientist Gunther von Hagens that came under some serious fire for displaying a naked corpse couple having sex and thus ‘combining the two biggest taboos left in the 21st century- sex and death.’ Artisans and partisans alike continually defend the priming of the dead as an opportunity to be close to something for further study, however intentions are sometimes assuaged for propriety.
“But, it’s the same process as preparing your chicken for your Sunday roast!” argues Katie Brookes. At twenty-four, she is stands as something of a ‘dermy newbie but whereas Hornbrook’s occupational decision was a road less taken, hers was a more standard approach. At first glance, Katie is just the taxidermy “type”, you might think. With the kind of clear-faced good looks and seemingly naturally windswept hair you’d expect of a London cool kid. Hers however is an interest that began with a certain stuffed vulture in a GCSE art class, for whilst the rest of her colleagues were no doubt raving about the latest Maccabees record, Katie was feverishly collecting roadkill and creating amateur taxidermy pieces nerdishly in her bedroom.
Having been schooled on the continent, on her arrival in London she immediately requested an internship with Polly Morgan in London (before she was famous, we might add) and set to work perfecting her craft. On her offbeat hobby, she comments: “I had been experimenting with preserving dead animals purely for drawing purposes, so it seemed like a natural progression from the unsuccessful resin casting of dead mice and birds I had been doing before. It's really great when you have started to mount the animal and you see the life it has lived: scrapes on its feet or small scars on its beak or a chunk out of its feathers or some fur that has been scarred. Its whole life becomes very apparent before your very eyes.”
It could be assumed, her creations take the place of a sort of pet, but it is just a passion for art and animals taken to new levels of admiration, no different from a taking a photograph of a loved one, or as Katie puts it ‘keeping a pair of leather shoes’. “I love the idea of an animal or bird lasting forever,” she rhapsodises. “The beautiful face, the feathers, the fur not being lost to the ground or thrown in the bin but celebrating the animal. I think I get more defensive than people in negative reactions to the work as I feel the practice is moral and is natural and enjoyable when you see a really gorgeous animal looking almost alive that will last for a long time.”
Likewise, Suzette Field is just as defensive of anti-taxidermy ignorance, claiming it is all down to public fear of the unknown, “ In our case, our shop is more of a collection that appeals to our sensibilities, from joke shop items to butterflies, from desk masks to two-headed teddy bears. If other people label them grotesque that is because they don’t share our eclectic outlook. In any case much of our stuff, for instance the taxidermy is totally natural; it’s nature preserved. As a vegetarian, I’m more disgusted by a slab of steak.”
But sadly, despite its imminent and eternal beauty, taxidermy is no longer the popular feature it once was; considered too garish for the average English household. Instead, we buy plastic tabletops from Ikea. However, we can still see the true craftsmanship in action, in the stuffed animals behind the glass at the Natural History Musuem and the likes; it allows us to get right up close to a lion, look a grizzly in the eye and see for the first time just what a dodo really does look like. Meanwhile, Dave Hornbrook offers us some exclusive top-notch advice for budding collectors; apparently, though sold cheaply for their Victorian gaudiness, taxidermy pieces in a glass case are worth thousands of pounds these days; so get busy scouting Spitalfields market, folks.
But money, science and nostalgia aside, what’s the honest reason why taxidermy is still so admired today? “Really?” concludes Suzette Field, knowingly, “It is because naturalia and zoology reminds us how nature is really the finest artist of them all.”
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