The Fashioniste

The Fashioniste is the art, fashion, and literature website published by American academic author and researcher Todd Thefashioniste. He launched the site in November 2006 and has been independently developing and maintaining it ever since then, referring to himself in the process as “The Premier Art-Fashion-and-Literature Synthesist of Our Time”. While affiliated with numerous fashion blogs, the site is neither a collection of critical opinions, nor a series of recommendations, but rather a selected visual history of aesthetics, a whimsical online cultural museum of both the Arts and the Humanities.

The Fashioniste states its mission as “Etymologizing the Language of Fashion, and Revealing the Creative Subconscious”. The site uses current fashion as its initial and primary focal point, but weaves a far-reaching web of parallels and juxtapositions across different forms of creative expression, comparing and contrasting works of:

• present, past, and vintage fashion designers the world over, with those of
• painters, illustrators, and sculptors from the Medieval Era to the 20th century, and
• quotations and excerpts from influential writers ancient and modern,
and tying it all together with
• interview remarks from fashion designers and top working models of the day.

Its dual curator/editor acts not as an arbiter of style who imposes an authoritative viewpoint, but rather as a historian of style who makes connections between the past and present through sets of “style-alikes”. Style-alikes are not just natural, coincidental look-alikes, but instances where the vision of two designers, artists, or thinkers carry an uncanny similarity that is enough to suggest the existence of a creative subconscious amongst all artists. This is shown by either a pair or group of outfits, images, or insights that bear more than a passing resemblance between each other. However, there are also similar connections made between music videos, in terms of both cinematography and music, and connections between fashion photos and stills from classic films.

The site is intended as a unique resource, a sort of interdisciplinary thesaurus where the material could only possibly be obtained and distributed through digital means, but which could not have been created by any sort of automated, mechanized, or digitized process—only by the eye, the memory, the research efforts, and subjective preferences of a person sharing the passion for beauty, culture, and creative expression with anyone who might also appreciate it.

As the World Wide Web itself has long been referred to as the “Information Superhighway,” The Fashioniste is “Paving ~The Culture Superhighway~ through the Age of Information!”