this will look better in retrospect

In light of it being application season, I wanted to share my Common App personal statement. If you can get past the narration, there are some points made about the crosshairs of creation—aestheticism, commercialism, and historicism—and how they bear down on the artist in the process of design.

Two years ago, my brother showed me Jahangir Razmi’s “Firing Squad in Iran”. On August 27, 1979, a 30 minute trial sentenced 11 Kurdish prisoners to death at an airfield in Iran. In the foreground, a revolutionary firing squad holds rifles. Opposite them, a row of bodies fold over themselves, blindfolded. The man closest to the camera, whose bandaged hands are the colour of blindfolds, is upright. Dress shirt, tapered jeans, a wristwatch, frozen in silver halide–one of 24 exposures in Razmi’s Nikon. 

"Firing Squad in Iran" by Jahangir Razmi, 1979. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The upright man distinguishes this exposure from 23 others. There is no shortage of photographs of the revolution—albeit many unpublished–but my fascination lay in this instant, caught between normalcy, artifice, and death. Fashion reifies image through fabric. 

For a year, I shaped and reshaped the look. My stack of paper thinned with revision. The most important element—the shirt—stalled me. Every sketch, fabric swatch, and trim oscillated in awkward suspension between decoration and death. Collars and cuffs blurred the page with rework. Enough. I snapped shut the notebook, and retreated to my phone. 

2024 Instagram was an endless loop of oversized hoodies, puff-print logos, recycled, unimaginative silhouettes. Judgement and revulsion swelled in equal parts, as my eyes passed from post to post. Nothing's new on the social internet, not even impatience with its unnewness. 

I watch an ad for baggy jeans. I notice flat-felled stitches on the Basquiat-printed breakdancers’ jeans, restricting lateral movement. When Tamechi Briggs stitched the first baggy jeans on a domestic sewing machine in Atlanta in the 80s, no domestic machine could produce flat-felled stitches. As the camera pans, it occurs to me that Basquiat was not even alive to see baggy jeans become commercial. Explicable inconsistencies abound because manufacturing quirks have neat answers. Commercial forces are repulsive but predictable. Ramzi's photo is inscrutable because it’s candid–nobody signed a waiver, or did a retake. Was the upright man wearing this outfit that morning? Why dress up for death? Why bandage the wounds? Why dress the eyes in bandages too? Reality resolves in mystery.

Uniform white linens drape over the body, annihilating its shapes. Red wax seals mark gunshot wounds. Thin red ribbons falling from each seal trace the trickling aftermath. I cut the collar into a narrow band, low and spare, exposing more of the throat. The blindfold: a thin white strip. The man: tan, Persian, middle-aged. A sliver of cloth obscures stoic calm, illegible like terror. 

Abstraction–wax, ribbons, the linen collar–is starkly immoral because it iterates on someone else’s story. Aesthetic choices, by their nature, alterations of what’s real. Every aesthetic choice effaces history. In art, history demands restraint. It asks me to compromise: step back, pare down, let what happened speak. In history, art demands vision. It asks me to be brave: step in, try out, hit a home run. 

White linen has runway-appeal. It flows with the model’s stride. It’s foreign but familiar, historical but timeless. Casual audiences spot Margiela’s influence. Designers might notice the shirt's yoke, making room for epaulettes on the shoulders. Commercial forces collide unapologetically with creative ones. What’s wholly new is cast aside. 

T. S. Eliot, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, writes that “[the artist] is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

Two wax seals move with the model’s changing gait. Eight ribbons dance between the present, and the past in the lens of a modern camera. The lights flash, the shutters clatter. It’s a dance between abstraction and accuracy, tradition and transience, between the dead and the already living. 

[Note] It is precisely this tension–the pull between convention and innovation, between audience and personal exploration—that defines the anxiety of creation in a modern economy.

American college is a young-old institution. Eighteen-year-olds inherit and iterate centuries of tradition, trying to separate historical fact from the materials it inspires, constantly recreating a present moment of the past. 

"This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes an [artist] traditional. And it is at the same time what makes an [artist] most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity."

— T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent

n/fass moment