Taste The Difference

21 avril 2011

Aymeline Valade @ Women Direct (NY), Women (Paris & Milan), FM (London)

We know it's a pretty subjective notion and everyone may have his own point but let's leave aside the old syrupy melody of beauty being in the eye of the beholder (broken record somehow, isn't it?). Let's focus on the obvious and forget about the obnoxious politiquement correct as it's quite rare and happened twice in two different situations: Aymeline Valade outperforming her partners in editorials. Strictly speaking, full stop. Or to say it in a more casual way: give her one of these so-called multi-girl-stories and she just takes the cake. You won't see it every season and won't feel the same two seasons in a row. We will try not to name who she overshadowed but as all the references of the editorials are here and our readers are generally well informed of who's doing what in fashion and modeling, it's easy to guess who are the unfortunate characters of that plot. Above from most recent issue of Vogue Deutsch, a series of portraits by Greg Kadel, featuring some rather recent models (mostly shooting stars ready to fall apart?), each one with one black and white and one color photograph as the given theme of the editorial, the presence of Aymeline in the cast is a total eclipse for the others regarding of their skills or latest runway achievements. Again, we are fully conscious this sounds as a totally subjective or even biased point of view but we go the way our eyes lead us to. And we are fully conscious there are models able to outshine Aymeline's work by far. But at today's turnover pace (slightly slower and smoother than a few seasons ago but still speeded up and sharp enough to hurt), it's a rare fact one model can brilliantly take the first role by herself. The first picture below, from Dazed & Confused (by Josh Olins) is the ultimate example to demonstrate our point.

The idea of this post is not to write an ode to Aymeline's glory, though. Her career is just starting now (from a fashion-only point of view) and the future will tell us if it keeps on rising or slows down, stays here at this height or even stops faster than we could expect. So, no way to overreact and get a little too excited the wrong way. The general idea, the "point behind the point" of these lines takes its roots in the words we chose as title. Taste the difference, first in its most literal sense but not only. We could have expressed this idea with dozens of other expressions. The impact wouldn't be the same, though. If you take "taste" and "difference" separately, you get a few more other concepts coming to your mind. Taste as we used it here refers to a feeling, an appreciation or express enjoyment in a more subtle manner. And as it's an article on fashion after all, another obvious meaning of taste immediately appears and it's hard to too think of what it takes to "have taste", what is good taste or bad taste etc. There is neither good nor bad tastes, if you ask (but that's for an endless night chat, please), there is taste as a whole and it goes back to the first meaning of the word, as we used it in the title. Having taste starts with feeling something. Which makes it personal as a matter of fact and that's a high quality (and geniune asset) in such a visual world as fashion. Then difference. Once again you can turn the word upside-down and inside-out and get a cornucopia of various possible meanings, with various connotations. Let's put it straight: we do not intend to glorify difference as you will read here and there as a notorious good intention (or some way to satisfy everyone and extend your customer database?) but we strongly relate the existence of beauty with the idea of difference. Not random difference or difference for the sake of difference. Different as beyond common, difference as the frontier between the exception and the masses. Having taste means seeing the difference and working in fashion is all about... tasting this difference. Just too bad there are still legions of professionals who keep thinking the fastest way to take the cake is to use the same old mold.