Baltimore's Aesthetic

Designer notions of couture fashion and a trendy elite tend to evoke the specter of Manhattan High Society or worse, Los Angeles.

It's certainly an odd notion, to say the least, that no other area in the country is capable of pushing the conversation in the fashion arts forward; I would even go so far as to say that most of the conversation being created in the "Meccas" of the design world is actually a strong blend of the various cultural identities swirling about the American populous at any given moment. To find a truly distilled couture perspective, I suggest that we in this country must travel to areas outside of the Manhattan and LA circles where a blending of national ideas is not taking place.

To wit, I submit my own locale: Baltimore, Maryland.

To most, Baltimore is merely the eccentric home of the native son John Waters, and a vehicle for his overtly exploitive ventures of the alternative and bizarre. Or, it's simply one sprawling ghetto where people of color lurk in the shadows waiting to take your livelihood or your life. Recently, the latter tends to be more common, and though it may be an expression of the country's latent racism, I would say it also vastly ignores the fact that walking into the "ghetto" area of any big city, USA, will result in the same dangers to you and your person.

Rather, to those who live in the city, the aesthetic and the cultural impact of a distinctly Baltimore Style lies in the deep age of the city, combined with its strong ethnic communities of various extractions, and an almost 'emo' undercurrent among the artisan class. Likewise, these communities tend to feed off of each other, imbuing the resultant mix with an exceptionally esoteric point of view and reference point. Perhaps this esoteric quality is exactly what prevents the outside from seeing in.

Baltimore is primarily a city of faded glam, a shout back to an era of movie stars frequenting the Belvedere, or captains of industry commanding much of the commerce of the country from within its boundaries. The city is old, with so much of its buildings and architecture remaining constant through the centuries so that it continues to appear very, very old. Whereas almost every city has a historic neighborhood of aging homes and previous grandeur from the late 19th Century, Baltimore tends to call most of its land 'historic' as there are very few buildings that do not have this quality.

The city's aesthetic also defines a level of sophisticated camp that no other city tends to be able to pull off. Its strong artisan class (supported in no small part by the presence of numerous world renowned art institutions) tend to continually redefine their limits and perspectives, creating a dynamic quality that tends toward the eccentric, and the intellectual.

The style is casually dirty, though by no means deliberate; faded, decadent, and dark. It moves between strong clashes of hot colors such as neons and pinks and muted tones of gray, brown, and greens. It continually stands at a distance from the mainstream, with overtones of ominous antagonism that lie in the city's sometimes violent and graphic underbelly. The style begs for individuality from its recipients, demanding an incorporation, not an assimilation. As such, it tends to mutate on a case by case basis.

Raw pigment, strong textures of natural and synthetic quality -- particularly animal fur, steel, and rusted iron -- and a deep contrast between the notions of traditional and provocative, with each distinctly desiring the other.

Look to old refinement, bold splashes of lime and neon pink, unwashed hair, crumpled papers and sketch books, muted clothes, intricate linear designs, pigment, asymmetry, and dramatic make up in a Baltimore style.