¡Hola! Bonjour! Ciao! Salaam! It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Although i completed my M.A. in Fashion Studies at Parsons, i have architecture, urbanism, & international affairs tendencies. Fashion studies is not fashion design, as it were. My days don’t consist of me living and breathing inside a design studio (#sadface) since Fashion Studies is ultimately the academization of fashion (i.e. theory, theory, theory, theory, theory). In spring 2011 I took city as lab in preparation for a summer in Beirut. I went to Beirut, and fell in love. But Beirut was a place I knew I would love before I ever landed. Lebanon, actually, is a second skin. And I miss it every day.
Perhaps, someday, when I have a sufficient amount of debt paid off, I will get my PhD and be a scholar of architecture, urban design, and middle eastern studies (with fashion tendencies).
My “professional / scholarly” interests in Beirut are tri-fold.
- For one, Fashion Studies, thus far, has proven itself to be an inter-disciplinary field. However, Fashion like any field of academic analysis, can have its biases. One of the current debates involves global cities, and challenging the long-seated legacies of fashion capitals such as Paris, New York, Milan and London. I want to see Beirut as a fashion capital itself, and in doing so, find out what characteristics are endemic to it being so.
- The state / nation’s idea of person-hood and citizenship are fought on the female body. The female Middle Eastern body is always relayed as being Muslim, and therefore, veiled. I am so tired of the word veil I could spit. There’s more to the Middle East than a fetishistic piece of cloth (with personal and religious and political connotations). To be be able to characterize and chart Beiruti / Lebanese notions of style (fashionability) as well as beauty for both men and women, and to see how these ideas are also linked to nation-building and / or nationality is appealing.
- After the French Mandate but before the Civil War, Beirut was often called ‘the Paris of the Middle East’ or the ‘Paris of the Orient.’ Likewise, the same title has been bestowed on Buenos Aires (except it is deemed the ‘Paris of Latin America’). Having been to Paris, Buenos Aires, and soon Beirut, I’m curious to investigate the ‘cultural capital’ of Paris and how it’s conferred on to cities or spaces, and how that transfer of cultural authority functions - for the city, for the people living within it. (This third is more of a personal theory I’m trying to work out, and as ever, it’s a work in progress.)
On a personal level, though, I feel a sense of kinship to Lebanon. As a child of mixed ethnic heritage (American & Iranian, with Spanish-speaking and Farsi-swear-word proclivities) and mixed religious upbringing, I too feel the pull of needing and wanting to be different people for different interests, if only to make everyone happy in the process. How do I learn to forge my own path as a person, as an individual, mindful of the past but not living in it? How do I hope for the future but respect all I know and all I’ve seen? How do I make sense of that and still retain a sense that I am my own being, and not a body of forever-competing interests? The mind is the greatest battlefield, and the heart too.
Alas, changing lanes …
For two years prior to grad school, I was a 9th grade special education teacher and Spanish teacher in New York City. Before that I studied Print Journalism (Magazine Writing, Editing, and Production), Spanish and Biochemistry at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.
On ideal days, I live and breath words and images and long, intent-less walks in the city with no regard for time. Most days I’m running from task to task to task, trying to make sense of it all. I’m obsessed with new books, new ideas, independent media, and above all, travel.
This blog started as a way to record assignments for class, and turned into my daily journal / amalgam of images that remind me of home … wherever I find it.
xoxox
maniezheh firouzi
slouching [dot] towards [dot] beirut [at] gmail [dot] com
p.s. i have another work-in-progress at hehzeinam [and more are in progress too].
p.p.s. the photo is a detail from an Emily Cremona gown, sold at Starch, Summer 2011
