So, I’m not a fashionist. I always try to take fashion into consideration as a serious subject but I can’t go along too much sustaining this belief. Maybe this is some kind of inherent bias on me but things like the reutilization of shoulder pads by designers who certainly stated for years that these were undoubtedly disgusting flaws in cloth design shapes as a reinforcement of this assumption.
That’s why I really consider oversimplified the brief comment made on news section of the SPFW official site about the album cover of the new Kasabian’s release – the writer says the members of the band have exaggerated on costume choice. Well, let’s see it.
Anyone who has a fair amount of knowledge about the history of music realizes that they did not simply decide to dress fancy clothes on the album cover. There is an obvious purpose in it – and I did say it has a purpose but not necessarily a meaning, though there is one. The cover, that depicts the band as inmates of the mental institution which the album title – West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum – makes reference is clearly an homage to the 60’s psychedelia on music. The atmosphere built by the reincarnation of what seems to be napoleon, a priest, a king and a prisoner, all of them reflected in a mirror and holding something – a bottle, a knife, a book by Jorge Luis Borges, a light bulb and a golden globe – echoes the similarly baroqueness of album covers made on that decade, as well as most part of the songs composed by the band also references the sound that was born in the 60’s. After The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is it really so difficult to realize this is not simply a band preparing themselves for a costume party? Well, maybe it is, since fashion shows are usually like that, aren’t they?
