What is Beauty, Beautiful and Invention of Beauty It is often thought and/or imagined that lesbian and/or bisexual women do not care about beauty and beautiful things. If you actually search through databases on number of well-known lesbian interior, fashion, jewellery and graphic designers or architects compared to for instance gay men you would be surprised to how few there are. I can also confirm this from my younger (from high school to postgraduate study) experiences with fashion, jewellery and graphic female designers as well as dancers and architects. I met many gays and almost no lesbians. Actually to be honest I met only one bisexual dancer when I attended modern dance classes (who at one point became my lover for a brief time. My ex-long term girlfriend is an architect; my used to be best friend from childhood until she went to study and work abroad is a world-known jewellery designer; both of them are very beautiful women themselves). And as I like design, photography, fashion and dance and I also like everything that is beautifully written my search to find my own style of writing and my aim for scientific and philosophically writing style actually came from learning about fashion and design style. I also wrote about the history of fashion and philosophy of fashion and design and gave a few lectures to high school and university students on the aforementioned topics. My favorite fashion designers are Jil Sander and Issey Miyake. Miyake for his inventiveness in the area of new textile materials in combination with dance and appreciation for the freedom of body. Unlike Western fashion designers Miyake has allowed the cloth and body to be and move according to their natural feature forms (neither body nor cloth are 'forced' on to each other, they move freely and adapt to each other softly and smoothly). Contrary to Miyake, Jil Sander has been everything that is Western: precise and clean cut, body and cloth should adapt to each other perfectly (almost 'forcing' one another to fit), where Miyake shows abundance and inventiveness, Sander shows moderation and modern classic. In design I like most Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, Phillipe Starck and to add Jean-Louis Denoit and Marcel Wanders. Wright for his wonderful combination with the natural elements, Bruer for his Wassily chair and sofa, Denoit for his combination with applying history in design, Wanders for his abundance in creativity and inventiveness and Starck's design again for combination with sustainability. Of course, no one could pass Le Corbusier and although he was highly revolutionary in his designs and architecture, for instance everything in connection with cubus's, from chairs to rooms and buildings, he never was cup of my tee. While speaking of Le Corbusier, architects I like are Peter Zumthor, Jacques Herzog und Pierre de Meuron, Luis Barragán and Toyo Ito. Zumthor for his conceptual thinking and sustainability, Herzog und de Meuron for aesthetics and social urban planning, Barragán for playing with colours, structure (plane surfuces), transparency and shadows and Ito for his grand design of transparency, conceptual thinking and honoring sensei, again like Miyake freely and smoothly allowing different aspects of (social) life to be intertwined. In dance I admire most Martha Graham and Merce Cunninghem, first for her inventiveness and flexibility in body movements and second for his precise and almost rigid movements. However when I tried to find beautifully written philosophical or scientific work as role model(s) I was again astonished how few world famous contemporary scholars paid little to attention to their writing style. I found for instance, Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, Georg Duby's The Knight, The Lady and The Priest and Women of the Twelfth Century, Jacques Le Goff's Medieval Civilization 400-1500, Todorov Tzvetan's Frail Happiness: An Essay of Rousseau as a very few academic work written with such passion, creativity, accessibility and rigorous precision that their work is read almost as 'poetry' yet with total credibility. You could also enlist Friedrich Nietzsche's works, however his highly pessimistic and misogynistic attitudes never appealed to me. Interestingly written are also Peter Gay's The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom. And when I got an email in September from an American professor about my article on philosophical concepts of love through history in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy saying that my article is VERY helpful (his upper caps) and the writing is clear and accessible and one of the better articles on the Internet I think it is partially because of those few scholars who showed me that it is okay to write a highly complex and sometimes 'mysterious' topics in a light, easy, helpful and almost poetic way. It took me almost 20 years to master a beautiful combination of contents (idea) and style (form). And how we can define what is beauty and beautiful? Classical beauty was defined with Egyptian notion of symmetry and golden ratio alongside with invention of make up to hide the imperfections that do not comply with the standards set. If we look at philosophers, for instance Plato would say that beautiful is everything that is truthful and good (ethical), with Immanuel Kant beautiful belongs to human taste and there is not a universal notion of beauty, however he calls something as sublime beauty which is awesomeness and power of the nature that produces an awe in human, in biology for instance Charles Darwin claims beauty serves for bonding and mating and it is shown in bodily features that advertise femininity and fertility and virility and masculinity (big hips, abundant body and symmetry of the face in women, beard and muscle body in men), however in fashion photography for instance for Irving Penn beauty serves going beyond Egypto-Greek model of symmetry while he was looking at real women in real circumstances (something that could resonate with Japanese concept of wabi-sabi that defined beauty in everything that is, from young to old forms, from symmetry to asymmetry, from perfection to flaws, everything is beautiful because this world is the reflection of the divine. For Richard Powell, "Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect") and for Helmut Newton beauty is re-imagining the classical and glamorous beauty and making women strong, bold and beautiful although someone could also claim some of his beauty perception borderlines to being misogynistic and pornographic; in fashion you have several notions of beautiful, from classical notion which was redefined in postmodern era when it changed from perfect supermodels impersonated for instance in Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer to non-classical real, imperfect beauty impersonated for instance in Erin O'Connor, Karen Olson, Ewa Witkowska and Natalia Semanova. To me beauty is that which fascinates us and we keep thinking about it be it the form of femme fatale, an excellent art, intellectual or tech work. Therefore beauty is not about only physical appearance but personality or contents above all, about someone or something that transcends the everyday average and goes beyond in many ways.
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Katarina Majerholdphilsopher, lesbian, editor Archives
May 2023
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