Fashion.

The word alone implies a world and a people that are at once adventurous and frivolous at the same time. As an industry, it lives in a place of its own, with its own language and ethics.

Not many can understand it fully. And chances are you have to be part of it to totally accept it.

In my experience, I have, by choice or otherwise depending on the time, stayed on the fringe of the industry. Loving the speed of the lifestyle and the color is just about enough for me. As for the rest of the crap that comes with it, I would say no thank you.

Don¹t get me wrong. I love fashion. It matches the ebb and flow of life as it changes and morphs with every season. When I dabbled in fashion however, I found myself among people who could only talk about it every minute of the day. So what if the Berlin Wall was going down, the hemlines were going up!

It is not like that all the time though. I was fortunate to have met people in the industry who were more than their skins. They had their own lives, had strong relations with their families, found joy in more things than the latest Prada handbag. It is rare to find these people and when you do, you realize that you can be 'beautiful' and smart at the same time.

Staying on the fringe allowed me to stay in perspective. Fashion people live with a temperament that is hard to decipher. And it is a lifestyle of extremes. You could be so now this minute, and so over the hill the next. One week you can be absolutely hating another in the industry with all your soul, the following week that person can return as your long lost best friend.

I found myself with floating overhead question marks recently when I talked to an old acquaintance. He is a very established fashion show producer who gave up his degree to pursue his chosen field. I felt like I was so yesterday when he mentioned names of bosom buddies that earlier this year, he hated with his guts. All of a sudden, this model and that other industry person were among his list of favorites. The change in climate made me feel like I was no longer in Kansas. The swing of the pendulum was incredible.

This acquaintance was also extremely passionate in trying to corner me into hiring one of his discoveries: a model that he found in London, over another model he rated as second and even third best, someone so below the grade he was not worth my time. Strange thing is, he had never worked with this other model before and his judgment was based on how he was being treated by the model's agency and the rumors that flew in the industry about him. His perceptions were narrow and unfair. It was the perfect paradox of closed mindedness in an industry that is supposed to strive on openness.

Listening to my acquaintance rant and rave about how I was going to have the industry hate me for not bending into hiring his boy, I realized the true value of being on the fringe. Objectivity and clarity. I sat there listening as if from behind a glass wall. And I sat there with an emotion that can best be described as sadness.

He was a self professed non-fashion person who happened to be in fashion. He believed once that he was objective and could see through the plastic façade of the people he faced every day. But as I looked at his new and improved chosen list of friends, I realized that even as he claimed otherwise, he is surrounded by people who were more into their own pectorals and their skin care regime than the state of the world. He was surrounded by people who would not mind getting close to him, in order to establish a semblance of trust, for he could offer them jobs.

I didn¹t offer his discovery the job. Not because he was not good or not absolutely gorgeous. But because the project had its own set of requirements. The decision could not absolutely be one of personal taste. For to do so would be to disregard duty, your clearest marker of knowing whether or not you are on the right path.

The person I chose in the end performed well. And frankly he validated my decision by proving the baloney I heard as falsehoods. That made me feel proud. Happily, he was also more than just his skin, with interests that stretched into marine biology (!!!!). Conversations with him I am sure would be interesting to say the least. But the opportunities would be few and far in between since we are both in different spheres of existence. That is what you get for being on the outside looking in. You get involved but never are involved.

I guess I will always be like that: on the fringe. Perhaps that is best, so no one can pigeon hole me. But in assessing what had happened, I guess I am now in the bag marked as last season's friends when it comes to my acquaintance. But who knows, with the way things change all the time in the industry, I might end up being the brightest star in next season's crop of goodies.

Just A Thought.

Creative.

A creative mind is a strange and wonderful thing. It gets its inspiration
and motivation from the most unlikely of sources. But when it is coupled
with a dream and an instinct, magic can happen.

Jim Henson did it. George Lucas did it. Walt Disney did it.

A creative mind does not let traditional inhibitors, such as time and money
distract them. It is like the mind of a child, constantly seeking challenges, constantly seeking answers. Pure. They see benefits in both tangible and intangible ways, and sometimes these cannot be seen by the naked eye until some time down the road. Why?

A true creative mind generates, and that energy comes from a source. That source is a vision. And the vision is never negative in nature. Vision is impossible to put a price tag on. It is something that allows the world to see and do things in a different light. It challenges perspectives, and constantly aims to do better.

Someone had a vision to fly. Someone cut his ear off in the pursuit of his
vision.

Creative thinkers can be brought down by office and sexual politics, lack
of support and growth etc. And there are always skeptics and realists who
use commandments, rules and logical equations to trap the creative mind.
Hoping to use it to their advantage, to hone it, to mould it the way they
want it. They want to have it without having to understand it, and more
importantly to respect it, and in doing so are killing the very thing they
want to harness.

Exploration of ideas are crucial to creative purists who are constantly
seeking that exacting moment of their own spiritual immortality. The
process always yields beauty, but the end result always brings in glory.

Successful people will repeat a single mantra: If you can dream it, you can
make it happen.

And when you do, the people who have put obstacles in your path suddenly become insignificant and those who assist become martyrs.

Just A Thought.....

Mahligai: An Asian Love Story

Set in the mythical kingdom of IndraPurba hidden somewhere in the jungles of early 1800s Borneo, this love story takes on epic proportions where customs and traditions, spirituality and superstition rule amidst the splendour of gold and precious stones.

The story begins over twenty-five years earlier. A woman falls in love with a commoner but is forced to give up her relationship to fulfil a prearranged destiny of marrying the future Sultan of IndraPurba. The man is taken away and incarcerated for the duration of his life for daring to court the future ruler’s intended. The man eventually dies of a broken heart. The woman swears that once she becomes Permaisuri, or the Queen, no one will endure the same fate of pre-arranged loveless marriage as her.

But as the years went by, and memories faded to a misty blur, the newly enthroned Sultan and Permaisuri set aside the past they could not control and ruled the kingdom with love and compassion, often lavishing their subjects with grand mass celebrations where gold dust would literally rain from their palace onto the streets below.

Ten years after their ascension to the throne, and after numerous failures to produce a child, the prayers of the soothsayers and the entire kingdom were answered and a beautiful daughter was borne to the Royal Couple. They named her Putri Sakti, appropriate as it literally means Magical Princess, a gift from the Gods.
Putri was indeed a special child, as she seemed to emanate a divine glow previously unseen before. Streams and rivers would sing as they bathed her, jungle creepers would entwine themselves to form shelter wherever she walked beneath them.

The Sultan was so happy that he commissioned a new Palace, a Mahligai to be built in the image of her beauty. It was to be grander than any other palaces past Sultans have built and it would be a monument dedicated to Love. It was an incredible feat of marble and jewels to accomplish but the Sultan insisted that it should be finished by her twenty-first birthday.

As she reached her twentieth year of life, her parents knew that the time would come for her to be married and promptly looked for a suitable partner in the kingdom.

But the coming of a passing traveler, an adventurer who chanced upon the kingdom when he strayed off the path his expedition was on, changed the tide of contentment. John Fenton was a handsome man, a mixed breed of European and Asian blood, a look that was unique if not out of the ordinary in one race, one language, one religion IndraPurba. And for this reason of uniqueness, and for many more, Putri found herself falling in love with this man who stumbled upon her while bathing in a pond filled with flowers.

The love they developed was beautiful and pure. A kind of love that no other could possible imagine nor understand; that is, no one other than Putri’s mother, whom when young too suffered the pleasures and pain of a forbidden love. Her memories returned, this time sharper than if they were to have just happened.

When the Sultan discovered their secret affair, initial sadness turned to anger as the soothsayers told him that the man was not from the kingdom but worse still was a breed lower than the lowest caste in IndraPurba. He therefore deemed the blood that ran in the man’s body to be dirty and impure, unworthy of his daughter’s affection nor the family inheritance and lineage. The anger turned to rage when it was discovered that Putri was with child. New of this was kept within palace walls.

He sent his palace guards to seek him out, in spite of the desperate pleas of both the Permaisuri and Putri. The soothsayers wrongly accused the man to be the illegitimate child of the man the Permaisuri loved as a young woman. A false sense of betrayal set in, as if the past had returned to haunt him for a crime he never committed, the crime of intentionally taking away someone else’s love. Realising that he had never fully gotten the love of his wife, the Sultan turned his anger towards John and ordered him to be impaled and hung outside the palace gates. Putri begged for his life but to no avail. But in deference to his daughter’s tears he chose a seemingly more humane way of killing: death by a cocktail of the combined poisons of the most deadly insects found in all the land, prepared by the ever present soothsayers.

John’s and Putri’s love was strong and they swore that it would survive any cruelty that the world could offer. The Permaisuri decided to use her influence to overturn the Sultan’s orders of barring Putri anywhere near the dungeons, and help her gain access to him. Realising that their time on this world was short, all they could do was to share a moment of bitter silence. Putri then told John that it was not without reason that their love was allowed by the Gods to happen, and it was with purpose that their love was to be subjected to the cruelest test known: forced separation. But even as her tears fell onto John’s cheeks as she held him in her arms, she told him that separation was not eternal for their love would surely show them a way back to each other. In her arms, John died.

When the Sultan heard of his wife’s actions, he cried treachery. And as punishment for disobeying his word, he banished Putri to the highest tower of the Palace.

The Permaisuri, stripped of her powers, swore that true love would conquer all and the Sultan and the soothsayers would not be the true victors. The soothsayers had after all made false claims before. Fearing that the Permaisuri might turn against them, they laid another claim that she often visited the spirit of her former lover in her dreams, something she could not deny as she could not control sometimes dreaming of their youth together. Outraged, the Sultan turned against her and ordered her banished into the outer regions of the kingdom. She was so distraught of her daughter’s fate as well as that of her own that she flung herself over a high waterfall, causing the water to turn white as it mixed with her own blood.

When news of this reached the Kingdom, the subjects were uncertain of how to react. How could water turn white? Did this signify that the Permaisuri was innocent of the accusations? How can their beloved Sultan allow these events to happen? They turned their anger towards the nearly completed Mahligai, for the very symbol of love no longer seemed to retain any meaning.

Much of the monument was destroyed, all the years of toil was put to an end within a day. The Palace guards could do little to stop the destruction. The Sultan managed to appease his people eventually but a gloom had befallen the kingdom.

From the tower, Putri could see what was left of the Mahligai. Her father, unrepentant, refused to allow her to leave the tower until after the child is born, after which he intended to throw it into the same river his wife died in. He wanted a new beginning where his daughter would marry a man of his choice, thereby appeasing his subjects even more. He was in fact so confident of his plan that he chose a handsome man, one of his ministers’ sons who was popular with the people, to be the betrothed.

But Putri no longer had the will to exist. And on her twenty-first birthday, she gave birth. As her daughter emerged, Putri relinquished her life force and her strength to her. Her father could not do anything to stop his own daughter from giving up. For even as he had power over the lives of his subjects, he had no control of human will.
As her life slowly drained from her body, Putri could feel the presence of her mother and her lover. She kissed her newly born daughter and named her Mahligai, as she wanted all to understand that the true Palace of Love was not something made of marble and jewels, but a child that is conceived out of true love. Her daughter bore the combined features of the Permaisuri, John and herself, was thusly the living Mahligai of Love.

Word spread. The kingdom stood still in awe of this child. For her existence marked a new beginning for all.

No one really knew what happened to the Sultan afterwards, nor of the meddlesome soothsayers. All the people of IndraPurba would say, when the colonists finally discovered the isolated kingdom, was “Seindahnya cinta Putri Mahligai!” or “How Great the Love of Princess Mahligai!”.

The End