( Article for Clash Magazine )

20 DAYS IN THE LIVES OF JULIAN & SOPHIE

Saturday 17th July 2004

Day 51 in the Big Brother house.

Preface to our story, Star Wars style lettering:

Fashion in the nineties was very strange for new graduating designers.

With so many students being trained on BA and MA Fashion&Textiles courses, they all stockpiled in their thousands after Graduate Fashion Week, and swamped the fashion market, which had far too few vacancies to sustain such mass fashion graduation.

This created a new designer class: a wave of fashion trained individuals ending up in non-fashion related jobs to pay off their loans, excluded even from the fashion underground in Hoxton, and pushed to the outer fringes of society; their absence devaluing the market for real sought after talent, leaving only the rich, connected & stupid designers on offer to the press, who loved them wildly anyway.

Unseen, this band were forced to survive using only the fashion skills taught them, in what always seemed a hostile & strange territory: 1998-2004.

Sunday 18th July 2004

Day 52 in the Big Brother house.

Sophie & i have a small 450sq.ft studio in Bethnal Green in London, in which we spend most of our lives.

We make clothes, which we show at London Fashion week.

But we find it hard seeing ourselves as just 'Fashion Designers'.

We help & mentor other designers, we teach at fashion schools & demonstrate our techniques & ideas in front of the press & public, we do our bit in the seasonal fashion pantomime, and some website design & graphics to market Blow PR our own press agent, and the 20 on&off schedule designers they represent.

And then i've just become a Professor of Fashion at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, where I’m setting up a new  fashion school from scratch.

To give you a rare insight into our daily lives behind closed doors, most of our time recently has been spent writing a lot about fashion & what it is, about designing & cutting & all the things we really enjoy doing together.

We have a million plans each day, big ideas for new ways of making fashion, new ways of being or becoming a Fashion Designer.

So therefore we are not really 'Fashion Designers' any more, we've outgrown that description, 'cos if we were just that & it was that simple, we wouldn't be doing all these extra things, or wasting so much time thinking about what else we are or could become.

We are Fashion Motivators.

They're new & different.

Monday 19th July 2004

Day 53 in the Big Brother house.

How d'you spot a Fashion Designer?

As the future does not yet exist in any other state other than imagination, all those who deal in its conception are deluded and by default close to madness.

They're not hard to spot.

Tuesday 20th July 2004

Day 54 in the Big Brother house.

When i designed on my own under my 'nothing nothing' label, i concentrated on providing what people didn't wear; what they weren't then wearing, or felt they couldn't wear for whatever reasons. I strove to fill that gap or absence, to give them exactly what they didn't know they wanted: A product in its most conceptual and un-requested form.

That's why i never made any money and don't own a house.

Wednesday 21st July 2004

Day 55 in the Big Brother house.

So how do we know what shapes or designs we're cutting next?

Shape comes last of all, after structure and form.

We don't know what shapes we're looking for in any conscious way, until after we've gone through the process of cutting them.

We know instinctively if the shape is a good one and relevant, but not before it is made up completely, therefore structure and form comes first...... before shape & even design.

Thursday 22nd July 2004

Day 56 in the Big Brother house.

Sophie,

Am sat in the garden in Worthing,

Shaking like a leaf,

Sunshine,

Bright yellow page through squinting eyes,

Wind blowing through me like a sieve,

A residue of alcohol in my blood,

Still hanging over,

Mixing with my fear and uncertainty,

What's going to happen to me.

Where will i go.

What will i do.

How will these feelings resolve.

Statements without question marks,

Can't hold myself,

Can't put a warm arm round me,

Hold my hand,

Speak to anyone,

Find comfort in just myself,

I only need one person to make things right,

A voice the other side of the phone or,

A face with eyes,

Dark brown,

Full of love and beauty,

Pulling me back up in a seconds glance.

Julian.

Friday 23rd July 2004

Day 57 in the Big Brother house.

Now here's an idea for a new collection:

'Self-Constructing Dresses'.

We provide: long tubes of fabric, interchangeable pieces such as sleeves, a free one hour ‘Subtractive Pattern Cutting’ class to construct the dress, and a collaborative label to mark the achievement of making it, on which you can write your own name:

' JULIAN & SOPHIE &....................'

Sell like hot cakes.

Saturday 24th July 2004

Day 58 in the Big Brother house.

Ways to show Fashion:

Mail shots and flyers, continuous faxes, dry calls, blanket calls, nuisance calls, spam.

Garment deposits and security alerts, left luggage, reverse-shoplifting, depositing your clothes secretly in other peoples shops & quoting them as your stockist.

Dresses attached to balloons and let go, Dresses in bottles cast out to sea.

Rented films from the video shop over-recorded with fashion video propaganda & returned, new magazine front covers designed& printed & slipped over the existing ones in newsagents, bookshops & libraries.

Shoes, knickers, tights & a dress, folded neatly in a pile and left on London's 13 bridges, or on the beaches of England, with an accompanying note reading:

Hello cruel world. No explanation, nothing.

Just ring the doorbell & run away.

Sunday 25th July 2004

Day 59 in the Big Brother house.

You can't seize the high-ground in art & design: it is part assumed, part conceded.

Good Manners and appropriate style, and indecent gossip, bullshit, finger-wagging scandal, censorship and outrage in the press:

is all just masturbation leading to its inevitable collapse, to change and fundamental groundswell.

The shocking things are where everything really happens in life, where we get really shaken into submission, by something completely flying out of nowhere.

Monday 26th July 2004

Day 60 in the Big Brother house.

Today i made a garment, a garment that is just a sleeve.

But not 'just' a sleeve, but the most intricately cut, most beautifully made sleeve in all the world of sleeve design; the most complex, unfathomable sleeve shape that has ever been stitched: the Rolls-fucking-Royce of the sleeve world.

Tuesday 27th July 2004

Day 61 in the Big Brother house.

Post-It note on my computer screen this morning reads: Be at your desk by 9.00am wearing trainers.

Wednesday 28th July 2004

Day 62 in the Big Brother house.

Things to avoid this season:

Getting famous & 'Making it'.

We can't be seen with the successful, all finding affinities in each other & feeling amongst friends. Too much kissing & touching.

Getting to meet previously untouchable people: those on the other side of image. All networking, so proud to be dressing, styling, mixing with, parting & fucking their hero's: what great achievement.

And then fashion suddenly changes & nobody likes the Yeah Yeah Yeah's & Kate Moss anymore, and they all just go down together, all so linked and inter-styled that they just topple ontop of each other like cards, so much a part of each others success & glory, all so much a part of that same scene.

It's good to avoid fashion & like minds if you think about it.

Safer to enjoy the Yeah Yeah Yeah's & Kate Moss in the safety of your own home.

Thursday 29th July 2004

Day 63 in the Big Brother house.

Write something about me now,

demands the smoking Chinese sex bomb in red fleece,

tight jeans, squeezing moisturizer onto cotton wool buds,

singing and dancing on the spot to the music of 'Pavement',

coming from my apple macintosh computer, behind me somewhere,

on the table out of view.

Friday 30th July 2004

Day 64 in the Big Brother house.

When you have a creative idea for a product, presentation or event, you can either think it within the context of what is achievable: within a space you already own (in our case, a Fashion Week timeslot, an on-schedule show at London Fashion Week, in the main tent, on the catwalk they provide);

or, you can grow an idea outwards into more exciting territories over which you have no ownership or control: a sort of 'Creative Trespass'.

You can connect an idea with other agendas, anything you dream of, and start to imagine & play with people & spaces that would otherwise seem completely beyond your grasp, control or experience. This is Cultural Space, Borrowed Space, Stolen Space (in our case, its putting on a huge show using the entire store windows of Selfridges, each with a different dress being constructed live in front of the passing public for a particular celebrity model or actress who then wears it, whilst Franz Ferdinand play live on the stores rooftop.)

Saturday 31st July 2004

Day 65 in the Big Brother house.

unit 4.

In and out of the shadows,

dusty grey pools strewn over magnolia pages,

following the pen as it writes.

My dresses displayed on walls between paintings,

sewing machines and pillars,

supporting the building in which we sleep.

The light brings graphic certainty to shapes,

making everything dimensional and present and transcendental and interesting.

A fabric bursting into a garment and then into a form,

oozing life,

inflating in front of me.

Voices talk in the corridor and traffic passes in the road, sage green paint turns to pale blue, a room rearranges, deconstructing the furniture, rotating it 12ft and putting it all back together again, as i observe.

Living life from a different direction,

within these tiny confines,

adding space by moving things apart,

scooping out a hollow.

The seconds clicking mechanically crunching into gear,

the world rotating in and out of shadow.

Sunday 1st August 2004

Day 66 in the Big Brother house.

Finer than Art.

The need to paint & sew & make videos & websites, is not i think satisfied in the act of actually doing it.

We never do exactly what we think we should be doing. It's a battle we never win: There can never be enough time.

It is necessary for the project always to be bigger than what is achievable, and that the things we end up achieving be not the things we set out originally to do, and that in doing them we forget & extend our purpose, and drift into deeper waters, losing our thread completely.

Monday 2nd August 2004

Day 67 in the Big Brother house.

Came by tank,

Left by helicopter.

Tuesday 3rd August 2004

Day 68 in the Big Brother house.

Buyer Beware.

We want to open a Julian & Sophie shop in Paris called 'Parc deS EXpositions'.

Giving people exactly what they want, but in extremes.

Being able to make a garment on Monday evening & have it in the shop ready for Tuesday morning.

Wednesday 4th August 2004

Day 69 in the Big Brother house.

I'm not used to this feeling.

I feel a bit sad, as if something terrible has just happened, and now all that is left is its consequence.

It's too late, time has passed, there's no going back now.

The sentence started, and now i'm this far into the page, and i have to just put it down to experience, and just get on with other things, with whatever comes next.

This is not my time.

This is not my place.

I do not yet 'have' my collection, will it ever finished?

This is the time i have to myself.

The planning time, apparently, which is another word for just time itself, just time passing,

wasting itself,

moving forward from one digit to the next unseen, unheard, unfelt.

Thursday 5th August 2004

The penultimate day of Big Brother.

Sat at my desk in the J&S studio, Sophie's out, paperwork all around me, piles of A4, plans for my new fashion school, notes from my sketchbooks, coffee cups, diaries, cigarettes, the new Futureheads CD playing on our rather cheap sounding 'Bang&Oelfsen inspired' sound system, which cost £30 from Woolworths, and would only fool a 9 year old into thinking it the real article.

But hey, we buy into that kind of style.

And at this very moment, sat here, i notice a sheet of paper with 'CLASH MAGAZINE' written on it.

It's a brief they sent out asking fashion designers to write down their daily experiences of being a designer, in 20-day diary format, and then suddenly Lwindi Ellis my Press Agent calls for like the 4th time to remind me that the deadline for it is TODAY shock-horror, and i'm like shit what am i gonna do, i can't put a diary together retrospectively in just a few hours.

Or can I?

I'm just gonna have to use all these bits of paper on my desk, glue them all together and compile them into a sequence.

I mean they were all written over the last few weeks, so maybe they are like diary entries anyway, and maybe i've been writing this diary for CLASH all along but just didn't know it until now.

I guess it all makes sense now.

Anyway, a description of Life never really fits together neatly, day to day.

It’s a montage of influences, just like anyone else's life i guess:

We are not so strange or different.

Words by Professor Julian Roberts

"20 Days in the Lives of Julian & Sophie", article for CLASH magazine 2004.