Sneezy floral spring: a guide to spring fashion
That was meant to be a play on "hot girl summer"
Hey! What’s the last flower you saw IRL?
Something you might do (perhaps more when inebriated) is think about how good nature is. For me, I think the sky is art for The People. Because it’s always available and it’s always pretty cool to look at no matter the time of day.
In unsurprising news, I am not the first to make this revelation. When you Google “nature is art” the first thing you see is a pic of beautiful nature with “nature is the art of God” plastered over the top of it. Beautiful.
As a child, I was always a bit scared of things that were flowery, or even too girly because... I think I thought being girly meant you were also stupid?
Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.
If you look at trends over the last several years, spring always has florals, and we keep calling it a trend. But it’s not really a trend if it comes back year after year, so it’s kind of weird that we keep calling florals “trendy”. Florals are all around us.
(I have not yet bought this, but I would like to soon)
(I have bought a version of this on Depop)
(I made this all by myself, but it’s maybe a bit warm for spring)
As a child, I realise I was deeply wrong about the florals thing, and I was really just trying to be a UnIquE iNdiVidUaL. As an adult, I have learned that you can kind of just wear anything. And I choose florals because they are perfect.
Why are florals for spring the perfect celebration of the season?
I have been thinking about this question all week, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this if you know. But when I look at floral fashion through the ages, it’s always trying to put the natural intricacy of flowers onto a print.
I think it’s because flowers are a wildly accessible, yet inimitably beautiful thing that we have around us. We never really quite get to duplicate the beauty of flowers on our clothes, but we can imitate it.
Putting our flowers on clothes are a way to immortalise an impermanent beauty
There’s this concept I always think about in Japanese, mono no aware. Basically, it’s about recognising the beauty of impermanence. For example:
What comes most easily to mind is the beauty of the cherry blossom; the flower blooms intensely, yet only for a short period of time each year. As the flowers die and the petals fall, cherry blossoms line the streets like a layer of soft, pink snow, and are most beautiful when captured between the precipice of life and death. That is precisely the unique appeal of the cherry blossoms; their aesthetic focuses on the unavoidable transience of the material world that exists. (Berkley Center)
Flowers die so fast! I always get flowers and try to keep them for ages, trying to slow their death. But you know what’s a bit more permanent? Replicating them and putting them all over your clothes.
Anyway, I don’t really have any thoughts, beyond that this week. All I can hope is that you’re going out for your double-vax picnics soon, and you pay a bit more attention to your flowers, either on your clothes or out in nature before they die their predictable, unavoidable death.
Next week, maybe I’ll talk you through some highlights of articles I’ve been writing rather than going down this “flowers are perfect on clothes” rabbit hole, eh?
Much love,
Sam