Boris has been very enthusiastic about his blog for eighteen months – it got high rates almost instantly, good reviews from peers and a few hundred followers within a few weeks, then thousands. People love his highly literary approach to fashion, his jaunts into imaginary worlds, his old-school dialogues with his cat, his hilariously hypochondriac fascination for body modifications, his cool-hunting in the underground, his way to never really follow trends while always being up to date somehow…
It did him some good for his work also, for which reputation is valuable, and he’s been a guest poster on some big blogs with international and mainstream visibility, remuneration, invitations to a few select fashion shows and parties… There he has more or less the status of a gifted dilettante and he’s OK with it, he doesn’t want to push his design work in the spotlights yet – doesn’t feel ready for it. But most people he gets to work with know him by reputation now, and have for him the kind of positive a priori famous cool people draw.
But lately the excitement has been fading away, maybe since he started to work and hang out regularly at the Lumpenkabarett – he thinks. For a while, the whole costumes, make-up, accessories thing was like an intense and hyper-focused fashion laboratory – combining playful twists of classicism and cabaret clichés with a total absence of the restrictions ordinarily due to modesty, though never indulging in easy extravagance. The DIY dark glamour he contributed to develop there appeals to his own contradictions, from the hysterisation of genders (like they say) as an anti-gender statement to the formidable efficiency of the alliance of futile entertainment and political subversion.
Back home from the cabaret, Boris usually feels quite inspired and lyrical about it, and writes his most praised posts, shamelessly reinventing the show, the people or his costumes more than actually describing them. The cabaret as much as his blog are fictional zones, where it is necessary to add a serious dose of fantasy, desire and imagination to reality to precipitate it into denser matter. He wrote somewhere about this that it is essential to address art, love, politics, religion and every important mental artefact with the same suspension of disbelief that is required for a B science-fiction movie.
But the Lumpenkabarett feels more and more like the only place in town where the air keeps breathable in an otherwise noxious atmosphere. It’s as if a titanic sulphur cloud has settled over Europe in the last few years, everybody seeing it coming, but half of the people being busy making it bigger, while the other half tries to do anything not to think about it. And since the cabaret people added the Johanna sketches to the Dancing on Ashes show, Boris started to look at this phenomenon as something more significant than the last empty hype it seems to be when you purposefully avoid TV and standard mass-media.
Then Boris realizes that both Johanna’s crusade and Dancing on Ashes’s travesty of it, while just shows, reach a level of reality that had utterly escaped him so far.
