Friday 8 May 2009

Political fabric

Yes, of course – Canada was the ‘country’ that the canned heat hippies moved up to, to avoid the Nam-draft games that the USA was playing. The Californians moved up the seaboard over the border and settled in Vancouver. They took their fabrics with them…It makes sense shell suit being a political invention. It still lives, in certain poor inner city regions in my country, hung on neds as a symbol of their own stupidity. The ‘empty shell’. Plastic… In fact, it now lingers in Paisley – the now poor district of Glasgow which gave its name to the very fabric patterns that defined the counterculture. Sad but true.

Recall Eddie Felson, associate of nasa top brass in the early 2000s, illegally imported fashions from the UK, to bypass the politicos and bring loud cotton florals into the US. He got away with it by being ‘fast’, but it isn’t so easy for most people – CCTV will catch the loud colours. Unless the patterns are too loud and too grained to show – kind of stealth cloaking clothing…? So, presumably the soft Michigan planned by the soft core was indeed non-military and in floral cottons… Unless an exercise in counterculture-hijacking? Remember Melissa Parrish’s military education background… I don’t know which to believe…

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