Prompt No. 4: World-Building
The train, Homeward Bound, has vanished. Fifteen hundred passengers are missing but operating CEO Li Dapang is adamant that everything is perfectly fine; the train is being repaired.
“[Taking out a piece of paper and drawing for the camera]: This is our space-time continuum. To go from one point in space-time to another point, we usually follow a brachistochrone curve, also known as a line of fastest descent. Like this alright? But if we can use miniature black holes to change the local gravitational field, it would be possible to start from one point and reach the other point by following a completely different space-time curve.”
Illustration from Hao Jingfang’s “The New Year Train”
In the May 2020 INDIE article, “Enter the World of Ottolinger’s Destructive Sci-Fi” the Berlin-based design duo Christina Bosch and Cosima Gadient cite Hao Jingfang’s short story, “The New Year Train” as inspiration for their Spring/Summer 2020 line. Like many designers and creative directors, Bosch and Gadient practice a sort of world-building, immersing themselves in seemingly disparate forms of art for inspiration to create a distinct, consumable aesthetic. “Reading just allows you to imagine this world in your head,” says Bosch, “then we try to translate that to the clothing.”
The Ottolinger designers continued translating Hao’s worlds. In an 2021 interview with Crash, Bosch and Gadient mentioned ordering her novel, Vagabonds, which, according to WWD, inspired the Fall/Winter collection they debuted later that year. Everything required a bit of scaffolding. Tie-outs swayed along the body, as if a trailing seam might come in handy for traversing time. Denim sets doubled as a sort of armored uniform in different colors as if to connote a sort of rank or planetary origin. The mesh, saturated with stretchable artwork by Bronx-born Cheyenne Julien, evoked a playfulness for the uninitiated; however, the artist is known for grappling with trauma through her humorous cartoon-like style.
Artist Cheyenne Julian in Ottolinger pieces featuring her work.
If designers constantly build and examine worlds based on what inspires them, consumers are inhabitants. With the rise of social media, most shoppers opt for worlds that are popular and/or readily digestible, with uniforms and lifestyles determined and dictated by hyper-visible celebrities and influencers paid for the service. Writer and editor Marjon Carlos explains this phenomenon of consumption in a recent TikTok, stressing that the acquisition of the “right” clothes and accessories is not enough to establish taste and style. It requires building a world onto oneself: “the way one decorates their home, the food they eat, the books they read... the exhibits they see.” The long list Carlos provides hints at the labor required, the labor many outsource to said designers, celebrities and influencers. Interestingly, Hao explains the reason for this avoidance in Vagabonds:
“The more someone excelled in the old world, the more unwilling they were to start afresh in the new. They had put so much of their life into the outdated mode of expression that they could not abandon it. No one liked to abandon themselves.”
Only world-building requires it. For example, the enervation of the “quiet luxury” discourse led me to the realization that my wardrobe — as is — no longer aligns with who I am today. As Dazed put it, “The people who are legitimately ‘old money’… are distanced from subcultures built by people with distinct and visible aesthetic codes...” As a 41 year-old Black woman, I have reached a level in both life and career where I no longer feel compelled to mimic that distance. In letting it go, I found space to discover new ideas, concepts, and stories that actually reflect the subcultures I occupy.
Having described a Hao-inspired collection as “intuitively sculpted as if by nature, after a billion years of random mutations”, Bosch and Gadient’s world seems to evolved from the raver, club kid fashion of the late 90s — a look popularized for middle-class suburbanites by Delia’s, Miss Sixty, Diesel, and Miu Miu. However, to simply reduce Ottolinger to that misunderstands the world entirely. It represents another point in space-time, one where today’s race, class, religious, and ecological trauma are so far-flung, we find humor in our ancient ignorance. And it is for the individual whose manner of dress stems from a deep and vast knowledge of — and confidence in — oneself. The labor cannot outsourced.
Perhaps the most interesting part of world-building is the recognition and awareness of everyone else in the effort-filled process — how the seemingly complex matrix of human creation simply asks (and attempts to answer again and again) the meaning of our existence. At a time where most all of intelligence and understanding lies on either side of a paywall, why not create worlds for ourselves and let our style advance with it?
This spring, A Sunday Journal examines our attachment to the stories we tell — what we believe luxury communicates, whether millennials have killed the guest and writer’s room, and how model minority status makes for brutal observations.
Until then, there’s Prompt — the accompanying biweekly newsletter.
CAUTION:
WORLD BUILDING
CAUTION: WORLD BUILDING
This edition of Prompt will not include Acquisitions — at least not in its typical capitalist form. Instead, I invite you to visit a newly-discovered world. Get lost: create, destroy, discover, expose and see what rises to the surface for you.
But first, play this prompt’s playlists, 41: The Alameda Age and 41: The Haditha Age, for the full effect.
Language
Alameda: The Power of the Familiar
Unapologetically confident; leads with culture, joy and ease.Haditha: The Power of New
Dawn. Visionary but ruthless in its self-determination and preservation.
Ecology
