Recycled Dress Quotes

Far as I knew, closest she'd gotten to art was a drafting table and dressing mannequins in store windows, and the closest I'd gotten to saving the world was my name on some petitions, for everything from recycling aluminum cans to saving the whales. I put my cans in the trash now, and I didn't know how the whales we're doing.

Why was fabulousness important? The world was a scary, sad place and adornment was one of the only ways she knew to make herself and the people around her forget their troubles. That was why she had opened her store almost five years ago. Everyone who entered the little square white house with miniature Corinthian columns, cherub statues, and French windows seemed to leave carrying armloads of newly handmade and well spruced-up recycled vintage clothing, humming sixties girl-group songs, seventies glam and punk, eighties New Wave one-hit wonders, or nineties grunge, doing silly dances, and not caring what anyone thought. Weetzie loved the old dresses she found and sold, because they had their own secret histories. She always wondered where, when, and how they had been worn. What they had seen. Old dresses were like old ladies.

Because it was sexism, wasn’t it? Beatrice’s detractors never said it aloud, never authored op-eds that stated Beatrice shouldn’t rule because she’s a woman. They just criticized everything she did. If she wore a new dress, she was extravagant; if she recycled an old one, she had no style. If she was photographed holding a glass of wine, she was a lush; if she didn’t drink at an event, she was pregnant, or boring, or rude to her hosts. If she was caught in a photo unsmiling, then she wasn’t likable; if she smiled too broadly, she was trying too hard.

Facebook has ruthlessly curtailed the days of buying only one or two new dresses for ‘Wedding Season’, and so recycle-wearing your fancy frocks to the nuptials of couples from different friendship groups who were never going to show up in each others’ photos is a thing of the past. Now it’s a trip to Lakeside Shopping Centre every time I’m asked to share someone’s special day.

Were the women of Trinity Avenue control freaks? Is that a serious question? Because we pulled together as a community to prevent crime? No, no, I know you didn’t mean to offend. Let me answer your question this way: if a control freak gets up every morning to dress and feed her children (herself too, if she’s really on form), take them to school and head straight to the station to cram onto a commuter train to Victoria and then a tube to the West End; if, after working a full-on day, she then comes home and gets on with the kids’ reading, bath-and-bedtime routine (sometimes still with her coat on for the first part), segueing seamlessly into making dinner while unloading and reloading the dishwasher, her email open on the iPad on the counter or, every now and then, a friend propped nearby with a glass of wine because it’s so hard to catch up any other time, even though she gamely signs up for book groups and residents’ association and, yes, meetings with community police officers; if she finishes the evening by making the kids’ packed lunches for the next day and sorting out the recycling and putting the laundry on and ordering groceries online or birthday presents or whatever else needs finding or replacing that day; if she climbs into bed thinking her greatest achievement of the day has been not to scream at her children, not argue with her colleagues, not divorce her husband… If that’s what a control freak does, then yes, I was one.

Woods is one of those people who make you hand on their recycled words.

Based on the parts of this... this scene that are not covered in refuse, and the drawings you have done for me, I know you are an artist with talent. Maybe I have old-fashioned views, but I simply don't understand why you would spend your time creating something like this." He shrugged his shoulders. "The sort of art I am used to seeing is more..." I raised an eyebrow. "More what?" He bit his lip, as though searching for the right words. "Pleasant to look at, I suppose." He shrugged again. "Scenes from nature. Little girls wearing filly white dresses and playing beside riverbanks. Bowls of fruit." "This piece shows a beach and a lake," I pointed out. "It's a scene from nature." "But it's covered in refuse." I nodded. "My art combines objects I find with images I paint. Sometimes what I find and incorporate is literal trash. But I also feel that my art is more than just trash. It's meaningful. These pieces aren't just flat, lifeless images on canvas. They say something." "Oh." He came even closer to the landscapes, kneeling so he could peer at them up close. "And what does your art... say?" His nose was just a few inches from an old McDonald's Quarter Pounder wrapper I'd laminated to the canvas so it looked like it was rising out of Lake Michigan. I'd meant for it to represent capitalism's crushing stranglehold on the natural world. Also, it just sort of looked cool. But I decided to give him a broader explanation. "I want to create something memorable with my art. Something lasting. I want to give people who see my works an experience that won't fade away. Something that will stay with them long after they see it." He frowned skeptically. "And you accomplish that by displaying ephemera others throw away?" I was about to counter by telling him that even the prettiest painting in the fanciest museum faded from memory once the patrons went home. That by using things other people throw away, I took the ephemeral and make it permanent in a way no pretty watercolor ever could.

Much of medieval literature is what Lewis, in one scholarly article, refers to as “traditional poetry.” Certain poems, such as the Iliad or the poems of Thomas Malory, are not individual acts of inspiration, but rather are more the works of a storyteller who, repeating the essential plot line, weaves new characters, themes, descriptions, or details into the basic outline he inherited, a kind of literary recycling. Lewis had analyzed, in particular, the Arthurian legends, which had been repeated, retold, translated, updated, and modified. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, they tended to become accumulations of the techniques and additions of all previous editions rather than a unique and unrepeatable literary vision. Lewis felt that critics in his age would dismiss an author as “derivative” and “unoriginal” who “merely” repeats what has been said before, or who does not invent his or her own personal style. But the greatest authors of the medieval period were just this: shapers, composers, and recyclers of old materials. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Malory borrowed and translated, but also mended, updated, and altered. They wrote traditional poetry in the sense that they felt it their chief task to dress old stories in new garb. In other words, by adopting this medieval conception of the art of composition, Lewis could liberate himself from the need to be “original.