Perfectly Tailored
‘Reading Lauwaert is an event, not in the dreadful sense given to the term by the entertainment industry but in the way Lauwaert himself defines the concept (in his essay about philosopher Gilles Deleuze): “That which could be anticipated by no one and astonishes everyone.” Lauwaert’s essays are indeed disconcerting in their stylistic virtuosity, the heterogeneity of their topics and the defiant argumentative power at work in them.’ So begins Koen Brams his foreword to Unrest, a collection of essays on the philosophy of art and culture and the intellectual projects of Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze.
In Lauwaert’s hands the essay has found an innovatorKoen Bram
‘Perfectly Tailored’ is a collection of Dirk Lauwaert’s most important writings about fashion, clothing and film costumes. He writes just as brilliantly about the hilarious aspects of a pattern as about the impudence of Helmut Newton, or about the ethereal Audrey Hepburn in a Givenchy twopiece.
Dirk Lauwaert was a continual observer who thought and wrote about what he saw, never stripping an experience of the emotion that accompanied it, yet always contemplating his experiences from within a firm conceptual framework.