The Ill-Conceived Conception Brand was born from an art performance video. The jeans were worn while Jennifer let her stream-of-consciousness drive her artistic decisions in a video.
“I was on my front lawn, Amy behind the camera, and I had no clue what I was going to paint. But that’s the beauty of these types of real-time, object inspired artistic ventures.
When faced with painting, no time to think out a super-cool master plan, I have to rely on rapid associations. There is an unconscious truth that surfaces. It’s that over arching theme which becomes interesting to me. In the case of these jeans, I was overwhelmed with the clothes potential to express who I was. However, suddenly, I wasn’t anyone, because I was abandoning the jean’s maker, S.O.S., and putting my own marks on them.”
“Instantaneously, I welded major power. The power to brand myself. A power I’d been giving away since 1978 when I bought my first Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I think they were red. Wait…I know they were red. And…they were kick-ass.”
In this instance, the video drove the meaning of these jeans. Jennifer began to ask, if I’m not S.O.S. then who am I? What does Jennifer Balser look like?
“By the time I was born, women of average means purchased “elite brands,” well-promoted designers (mostly the children of Industrial tycoons) and sneered down their noses at women still sewing, who in their efforts to avoid shame, had resorted to “store-bought” patterns in hopes their work pass for factory-made.”
“For the next hour I contemplated how a more than a hundred million women depend on a handful of fashion designers to create a jean that they believe reflects their personal style. It’s fascinating how industrialization has limited women from developing a personal identity in and with fashion when all logic prior to the revolution might have had theologians thinking the access to cheap and easy means of fabric and tools and services might have brought on a fashion revolution. One so decadent, so hellacious with inventive and bizarre personal visions that the heyday of Parisian fashion would look pathetic. Uh…that did not happen. Nope. In fact, the industrial revolution inadvertently stole millions of women’s voices.
“Middle class women freed from the labor of sewing (the vulgarly wealthy have never abandoned their tailors and seamstresses), transferred a stigma onto handmade clothes: only those who can’t afford store bought brands sew their own clothes.”
J. Balser Inc.
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