>> FASHION, ART, and LITERATURE, brought together by someone who is passionate about
ALL THREE! :^D <<
While my updates include the very latest pictures from the world of fashion (right up to NEXT season!), I have sought to make this blog less like a magazine, and more like an ONLINE FASHION MUSEUM, enhanced by tons of beautiful portrait paintings and memorable literary quotations, making it is more like an Online Museum of Culture, UPDATED EVERY WEEK with a new collection of fashion pictures, and/or paintings, and/or literary excerpts (but MOSTLY Fashion ;-). So, feel free to use this site as a resource for your own work—and if you let me know, I will include the link in my "Online Press" page! Thanks...

This website is made possible by the use of 2 search engines: one is Google, the other is my brain.
And indeed,
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
-Woodrow Wilson

~*~ TheFashioniste.com ~*~
Building a Bridge from High Fashion to the Works of Great Artists and Authors,
Renewing the Meaning of “Culture” and Contemporizing the Classical Spirit,
& Proving that Beauty and Genius are Two Sides of the Same Coin.

~*~ TheFashioniste ~*~
“The Premier Art-Fashion-and-Literature Synthesist of Our Time”
(maybe because I'm the ONLY Art-Fashion-and-Literature Synthesist of Our Time)
Pioneering a New Form of Integrative, Interdisciplinary Education by
Exploring the Endless Possibilities of High-Speed Global Research;
Sifting through the Databases of Diverse Archivists and Enthusiasts,
Blazing a New Trail in the Realm of Google-Enabled Scholarship,
from the Arts to the Humanities, and thereby
Paving a Superhighway of CULTURE through the Age of Information!

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking onto the matter. ... Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
-Marshall McLuhan, the father of media theory, in 1957, from "Classroom Without Walls"

TheFashioniste.com:
One Enthusiast's Lovingly Created & Curated Museum of the Finest in Contemporary Fashion, the Greatest in Classical Art, and the Most Memorable in World Literature. The Only Website of its Kind!!!!!! (I think!!!!!!!!) Was that bloated enough for you? I mean, DAMN...

The Fashioniste: An Online Fashion Museum, updated every week with a new set of delightfully captioned runway or editorial pictures, juxtaposed with classical paintings from over the past centuries, and vintage fashion pictures from over the past decades, as well as other images, videos, and links for those who love the many forms of beauty from all throughout history, right up to NEXT season! :D

The term “global village” is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. The Internet globalizes communication by allowing users from around the world to connect with each other. Similarly, web-connected computers enable people to link their web sites together. This new reality has implications for forming new sociological structures within the context of culture.
-Wikipedia article for “global village”

My site—a simultaneous survey of the worlds of fashion, art, and literature, while being at the nexus of all three—It is the inter-cultural citadel where these three creative traditions, as wide as they are and as far back as they go—these three traditions now each have their own high-traffic superhighways on the global-village map, and my site is where they intersect!

I am an intellectual cyber-cartographer, academic historian, art historiographer, semiotician, ideographer, memeticist, creative archivist, humanities enthusiast, and cultural anthropologist of ehhh…sorts….

The premier, preeminent, most presumptuous and pretentious image-scouring Googlist and most aggressively ambitious arts-fashion-and-literature synthesist of 2007. (No, I do not wear a giant red sash that says that in gold letters. The sash is blue and the letters are silver. Ridiculosity.)

The term Revolution should be preferred instead of terms such as "economy" or "society", in order to par the previously used terms Agricultural Revolution and Industrial Revolution.
-Wikipedia article on the Information Revolution

And now we have The Information Revolution. I would say I want to be part of a Cultural Revolution, if it weren’t for the fact that this is already used as the English translation of the 1960s Revolution in China.

The three-sector hypothesis, developed by the economists Fourastié and Clark, is an economic theory which divides economies into three sectors of activity: extraction of raw materials (primary), manufacturing (secondary), and services (tertiary). The culture sector will be another subset of the services sector! How?

Behold—The Culture Superhighway!
The culture superhighway is the path along which all people are encouraged to cultivate their individuality as much as they please...

Contrary to the fears of some sort of robot takeover, the medium of the Internet, and of computers that are more and more tailored to our personalities, should certainly not change the ability for individuals to develop their own individuality, their own style, their own genius. And there are still forms of self-expression  that speak directly to people of today, just as they spoke to people in their own time and local place of origin, and have spoken to people of other times and places since.

In the Wikipedia article on “technological singularity,” there is a graph that is captioned with the observation that “There is a clear trend of smooth acceleration through biological evolution and then technological evolution”—and to that, I add cultural evolution.
~
And so here is my ~BIG IDEA~:

Biological Evolution ==>
                           Technological Evolution ==>
{The creation of "The Culture Superhighway," paved by The Fashioniste,
Self-Described CyberRenaissance-Man Wannabe, Google PseudoScholar Extraordinaire, and Unabashedly Outspoken Lover of Classical Art, Classical Literature, All Forms of Classical Beauty}
                                                                      ==> Cultural Evolution,
                              Heralding the New Age of Culture in the Newly Digitized World

American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson's overarching project in his work from the 1830s to the 1870s was to present "A Natural History of the Intellect," which was the name of his last series of essays, though his essays are as much, if not more, about human imagination and creativity as about intellect and rationality. And the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson put forth and expounded upon the concept of "gene-culture coevolution" in his book Consilience (1998), detailing the theory with the knowledge and precision that only an accomplished scientist could bring. What I aim to do, in my own individualized way and in an instantly distributable form, thanks to the World Wide Web, is to actuate the third stage in that chain of evolution, and keep it rolling along. As such, I am seeking to simultaneously build a bridge from the cultural work of the past to present, and to continue the advancement of culture from the present into the future.  A "meme" is the unit of culture; to be clearer, it is defined as "any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity." But it is also defined as "a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics)."

In biology, evolution is propelled by spontaneous changes that occur in a member of a species that enables it to survive to continue its own life, as well as the life of the species of which it is part. These changes are known either as “mutations” or the more neutral word “recombinations,” and it is the latter choice that I would apply to the arts and to culture. As the current American inventor Jeff Hawkins said (which I’ve slightly re-worded for clarity): “Prediction by analogy—that’s what creativity is, and it is so pervasive that we normally don't notice it. We do, however, believe we are being creative when our memory-prediction system operates at a higher level of abstraction, when it makes uncommon predictions, using uncommon analogies” (On Intelligence, 2005, p. 185) And his own achievement has not been specifically in the field of biological or cultural evolution, but in technological evolution, as he himself created both the Palm Pilot and the Treo smartphone. And so, as the business management expert Peter Drucker famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

As an proponent of high culture, I am very much in love with the work of many, many different authors and artists, I want to keep the memes of so many past great minds and imaginations in circulation. Atavism is a term used in both biology and in the arts. In biology, it denotes the “recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination,” and, similarly, in the arts, it refers to “recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity.” In many cases, I am aiming at a sort of atavism; I will quote one more expert from the field of technology and modern business, Douglas Merrill, the Chief Information Officer at Google, who in a discussion about Web-enabled collaboration, said: “[In the past, you didn’t] generally have to [or get to] work with hundreds of other people. We aren’t all in one building, the talent doesn’t all live in one city, or one country, or one continent. Talent is wherever it is, and increasingly, companies have to work across geographical boundaries” (YouTube video - “Talk About Google Apps”). He’s right! But I will add to that, that not only does talent exist across countries and continents, but across centuries too! What great authors have said is said directly to us, and many authors themselves have observed this. And to return to his initial point: not only has global talent now become instantly accessibly over the Web, but all the “global talent” of the past has become instantly accessible too! As I said at the outset, this website of mine, and all the work I do, is through the use of two search engines—one being Google and the other being my brain, my memory, and, to paraphrase what Samuel Johnson said about knowledge in the 1770s, I either know a thing myself, or know where I can find out about it.

There has been so much work done in the arts and humanities through the centuries that is not taught, or even mentioned, in schools, and that is certainly not mentioned in the media. But I have sought this stuff out, I love it, and I just can't believe that there are other people in the world who wouldn't also be interested in it, if not as inspired by so much of it as I am. And that...is the key to the evolution of our culture in this age of incalculably increasing amounts of mere information. And that is why I strive to cut through all these information superhighways with a culture superhighway that anyone with an inclination for the arts or any kind of creative activity can travel!
~
The periods of history that are of most interest to me are:

The Italian (or Florentine) Renaissance (Il Quattrocento) (1400s - early 1500s/Cinquecento, as well)

The French Enlightenment - (1751-1789) - (From the publication of Diderot and Alembert’s revolutionary Encyclopédie to the French Revolution, La Révolution française, itself, which some historians posit was more a European Revolution than one strictly confined to one particular nation)

The German Hellenic Revival (1764-1889) (From the publication of Winckelmann’s influential and multi-translated Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (“History of Ancient Art”) to the publication of Nietzsche’s Götzen-Dämmerung (“Twilight of the Idols”) – Some of the prominent Hellenic figures of this period included Winckelmann, Goethe, Hegel, Holderlin, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche)

> > > The Culture Superhighway!!!! < < <
The NEW Enlightenment!
* ~ * ~ * ~ *

~*~ TheFashioniste.com ~*~
The Lightning Flashes of Great Literary Minds,
And the Colorful Glimmers of Visionary Painters
Brought to you by New Media means (something like this)

~*~ TheFashioniste.com ~*~
Throwing a Baroque Platinum Wrench into the New-Media Machinery

~*~ TheFashioniste.com ~*~
Culturizing the Marketplace of Ideas

Ah-ha, YES! That’s right: What started as a desire to create an art-fashion-and-literature website that would change the world became…an art-fashion-and-literature website that, uh, keeps claiming its gonna change the world. ?:o “Hey man…how’s that workin’ out for ya?” “Wow, that is SUCH a good question! I, eh…wait, what was the question again?” “Never mind.”

Prophecies of
~The Culture Superhighway~

The “information superhighway” is a now-obsolete term that was used to describe the future of what existed up until the mid-1990s as the Internet. It was coined in 1974 by South Korean-born American video artist Nam June Paik and was popularized by Al Gore in through the 1990s.
-Wikipedia article on the information superhighway

What we need is a transportation system for linking minds, the electronic equivalent of the Vulcan mind meld from Star Trek, where you crawl into someone's head. We can aspire to this, even in 15 years.
-Thomas Furness, Director of the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Lab

I create a curriculum, a course, an education for myself... I am in love with learning, and I would like to inspire others to be as in love with learning as I am, and the infinite, truly infinite possibilities of the Internet for both learning and teaching make it hard to stop researching, and easy to forget that one has, well, forgotten to stop. Then day somersaults into night and the sliding door our own mental schedule moves imperceptibly from AM to PM and back again. Thence shall commences the discombobulation of one’s internal circadian rhythm.

The men of sense, the idols of the shallow, are very inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts.
-Claude Arien Helvétius, 18th-century French philosopher
There is nothing so sure of succeeding as not to be over brilliant, as to be entirely wrapped up in one's self, and endowed with a perseverance which, in spite of all the rebuffs it may meet with, never relaxes in the pursuit of its object. It is incredible what may be done by dint of importunity alone; and where shall we find the man of real talents who knows how to be importunate enough!
-Baron Friedrich von Grimm, late-18th century German-born French author
Merriam-Webster defines “importunate” as “overly persistent” and “troublesomely urgent.”
So how does that manifest itself? Let's see:
Romantic passion is euphoric and obsessive… On that analogy, [anthropologist] Helen Fisher and others propose that romantic love taps into the same pleasure circuits of the brain through which such recreational drugs as cocaine and amphetamines ply their high. If you take cocaine, the concentration of stimulative neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain rises, making you feel manic, hyperalert, anorexic, expansive. These are also symptoms of passionate love.
-Natalie Angier, science journalist, in Woman: An Intimate Geography (1999), p. 334
As Shakespeare said, in what could be used as a pun for the way in which the average Internet user (like uh, 98%) wastes his time away--or rather spends most of his time (note the italics):
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid.
-Macbeth, Act I, Sc. iii.
And as Lord Montague said of his son Romeo:
Away from light steals home my heavy son (<-another pun)
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night…
-Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Sc. i.
Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.
-Cicero
You can’t eat, you can’t sleep, there’s no doubt you’re in deep… Might as well face it: You’re addicted to love.
-Robert Palmer, "Addicted to Love," 1985
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
-Tim Berners-Lee, British software developer who co-invented the World Wide Web
Wasted days and sleepless nights, and I can’t wait to see you again.
-David Coverdale, from Whitesnake “Is this Love?,” 1987
Restless days lead to sleepless nights—and what’s worse? Well…
A lack of sleep, even without the assistance of dextroamphetamines, can be the manifestation of an affective disorder and, whilst this can render one fuelled with enormous intellectual prowess, it can be hugely counterproductive on your catecholamine levels—serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine (known in the UK as noradrenaline). Catecholamines are a group of neurotransmitters that control brain and, at a precuror level, body functions. Lack of sleep dramatically elevates your dopamine receptor functioning; in the short term, of a great value, but ultimately draining them and thus unbalancing neuronal synaptic charging. It, effectively, down-regulates your dopamanergic receptors, thus diminishing the power of thought and one's emotional stability. It can also accelerate the onset and increase the severity of those conditions associated with a decline in the powers of the mind. Also, to keep a nocturnal schedule—that is, to stay up all night and sleep through the day—can serve to deplete one’s melatonin levels, and insufficient melatonin and ultimately low DHEA levels can reduce one’s lifespan and intellect as well.
-From an IM chat I had with someone from the UK named ‘Dmmdmp’ back in 2003…at 5:00 in the morning on a weeknight :\
Guy in love: “Can’t eat! Can’t sleep! Can’t stop!!!”
The voice of reason: “Replenish your melatonin levels, ROMEO….”
It is a man’s own fault if his mind grows torpid in old age.
-Samuel Johnson
~
The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing. It offers the potential for humans to learn new ways of thinking and organizing social structures. Right now, we're evolving without much vision. But if we could boost our collective IQ [with computers and networks], maybe we could see where we're going.
-Douglas Engelbart, American inventor who co-invented, among other things, the computer mouse, as well as windows and hypertext
But there is so much out there—and online! What matters? Let’s get a little perspective:
Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written; and of this but little is extant.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 18th-19th-century German writer
“The goal of Wikipedia is for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. The idea is to write a freely licensed encyclopedia in every language of the world and distribute it to everyone. That’s a huge goal, that‘s a really exciting, very motivating goal, and in fact that is an important goal…”
-Jimmy Wales, CEO of Wikia, YouTube video – Jimmy Wales at Zeitgeist '07
The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of October 14, 2007, over 47,000 more had been added. And in total, as of September 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 8.29 million articles in 253 languages.
-Wikipedia article on Wikipedia
And that’s just Wikipedia…
“Many times I’ve wondered how much there is to know…”
Robert Plant in Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away,” 1973
“Many is a word that only leaves you guessing
Guessing 'bout a thing you really ought to know, oh-oh,
You really ought to know...
I really ought to know...”
Well, he just might be guessing for a little bit longer: There was an article I saw just today (October 22, 2007), right before posting this, on the front cover of the New York Times—it said: “Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web.”
So you can find the books you want online, and then, if you can't wait to buy them or get them from your local library, you can print them out on your printer. Now that may sound ironic…and that’s because it kind of is.

A polymath (from the Greek polymathēs, πολυμαθής, "having learned much") is a person with encyclopedic, broad, or varied knowledge or learning.
An omnimath is someone who knows everything; the fancier word for a know-it-all.
To now more then someone else
Omnilegent, which, aptly enough, rhymes with diligent, means “reading or having read everything; having encyclopedic curiosity and knowledge.”
Alas! The flesh is sad and I have read all the books.
La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.
- Stéphane Mallarmé, 19th-century French poet, from Poésies, “Brise Marine”
He wrote that in 1898. Let’s consider how much is now accessible to any avid reader, and first let’s consider the very measurements of storage capacity that are now in existence for the reading material that the Internet makes available:
A kilobyte is a thousand bytes, megabyte is a million, gigabyte is a billion, terabyte is a trillion, petabyte is a quadrillion, and an exabyte is a quintillion bytes.
Okay, and now for the stats:
A UC Berkeley study reported that in 2002, the most current year for which there are figures, humankind created 5 exabytes of stored data—in paper, the equivalent of creating 500,000 new Libraries of Congress each year. By stored data, the Berkeley scholars meant print, film, and optical media (hard drives). … Every day we create and store more information (in digital format) than had been stored for most of our history on paper.
-John Battelle, “The Search” (2006), p. 276
—And that is just one reason why “the digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.”
The Library of Congress houses over 30 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages, but I believe the statistic about the Internet refers to the entire contents of the Library, which consists of 130 million total items, including the books, manuscripts, newspapers, films, microfilm reels, sound recordings, and other materials.
But hey, let’s put this in perspective, as far as our own needs are concerns:
Just as the largest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller amount that you have abundantly and repeatedly thought over for yourself.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, mid-late-19th century German philosopher
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
-Samuel Johnson, 18th-century British writer, scholar, and lexicographer. If you consider that Johnson was the editor of the first comprehensive English-language dictionary as we know it (published in 1755), it gives the turning over of a library" a more authentic meaning. But at this point we've got like what, 30, 40 quintillion bytes of recorded knowledge? At least? So much for turning over that library…! (For whatever it's worth, the entire text of this update you're reading right now is 89,000 bytes, or 89 kilobytes.)
But many of the eager and passionate loves of learning may wonder how one could even begin to separate the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the dross, the diamond from the volcanic rock? What can one such person do to separate a few ounces of digital "wheat" from so many megatons of uploaded..."chaff"?

And that's what I have to tell myself: maximize your time and productivity! Your choices are obviously going to be selective, but the awareness of quality—of spending your time on that which is more worthwhile, most powerful and positive in its effect, and more useful and meaningful, will be a better investment of your energy that just zigzagging haphazardly through whatever random stuff you possibly can. (And I will provide a list of great online collections later!)
In a discussion called “Globalization and the Flow of Knowledge” (available on YouTube), Steve Weber, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, talks about Google and the new worldwide movement and integration of ideas that is rapidly increasing:
Goods have begun to move around the world quicker, as has money, he points out, “and now, of course, in the last decade…the rapid, rapid acceleration of that process with regard particularly to knowledge. And the company we’re sitting in today [Google] wouldn’t exist without that mobility of ideas. But we’ve also learned one other very important thing, which [AnnaLee Saxenian, Berkeley professor of city and regional planning] understood in her early work about the ways in which clusters of industries form and sort of help each other evolve, and, even more profoundly [that] the ideas that really matter are not the ones today—today, and technology may change this—are not the ideas that can be digitized. They’re not things that can be coded into bits and bytes and sent across fiber-optic cables. They are ultimately the ideas that fall into the vessels that we think of as human minds.
When I say that,
"This website is made possible by the use of 2 search engines: one is Google, the other is my brain."
--that is exactly the idea I have in mind, namely the undigitizability of human creativity, whether mine, or yours, or anybody's!
Later in that same discussion, Weber adds:
In a world where human capital is the primary driver of value-creation, education is the thing that makes that possible, is the raw material.
And everyone learns in his or her own unique way, and naturally combines their formal learning with the experiential learning of life. We are all choose, we all single out certain ideas, thoughts, feelings, memories, and visions, while excluding the vast majority of others. So, of course, there may a whole new, unbelievably vast magnitude to the amount of information that is accessible—and that gives a whole new meaning and importance to Voltaire’s observation that:
The multiplicity of facts and writings has become so great that everything must soon be reduced to extracts.
So, why not make it the best of the best?!?
And let each creator judge for him- or herself, and each reader, viewer, or onlooker as well. For,
Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will right thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck!
-Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayist, “Lecture VI,” from Heroes and Hero Worship (1840)

In my senior year of college, an early draft of my English Honors thesis, not surprisingly titled “An Idealistic Analysis of Love and Beauty in Western Literature,” was evaluated as not being an actual research paper, but rather just “a compendium of quotations.” Well, that was the intentional design on my part, and I stated so at the top of the first page, and the same concept applies to this arrangement of ideas you now read:
It is through culling quotations and ordering them in a certain way that I hope to explicate what it is that beauty does and love is. I use the main idea of Emerson’s essay “Quotation and Originality” as an underlying basis for my paper: that is, I will not attempt to say in my own words what I have already found more eloquently phrased by another author; but it is the in arrangement of the quoted points that I unfold my argument. Poetry is “what so oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed” (Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”), but I also maintain that the poet knows what the philosopher takes a long time to figure out. Nevertheless, I will use the work of both poets and philosophers throughout.
I had begun work on it, as everyone had to, in spring of my junior year, and did that by going through every single quotation book in the Reference Section of the university library, and typing up all the ones I liked, even the ones I only vaguely liked, and then arranging them thematically, and then putting them in an order than made sense in terms of idea-cohesiveness, even though the style and voice was, of course, constantly changing. This was before there were such extensively developed quote collections on the Web, and even still, I love books! You could actually say that that “thesis” itself, that compendium of romantic and passionate sentiments from the universe of literature, was the framework, scaffolding, or skeleton of which this website is the meat and muscle. In his tribute to the 16th-century French inventor of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, the American essayist Emerson said:
The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” from Representative Men (1850)

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
-Erich Fromm, 20th-century German-American social psychologist
There has to be something there of your own. You have to struggle to find your own way to give it expression. If it's a fresh thought then it's likely the form will be fresh too. It all comes down to what the artist has to say.
-Sybil Andrews, mid-20th-century British-born Candian printmaker
Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.
-Ayn Rand, mid-20th-century Russian-born American philosopher and novelist
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
-August Strindberg, turn-of-the-20th-century Swedish playwright
The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.
-Paul Cézanne, turn-of-the-20th-century French painter
Style is not created through servile imitation of the masters; it proceeds from the artist's own particular way of feeling and expressing himself.
-Paul Cézanne, turn-of-the-20th-century French painter
An author can have nothing truly his own but his style.
-Isaac D’Israeli, early-19th-century British writer and scholar
Fashion fades, style is eternal.
Les modes passent, le modèle est éternel.
-Yves Saint Laurent, mid-late-20th-century fashion designer

Personality is everything in art and poetry.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Personality, indomitable, inimitable, irrepressible, irreplaceable—Personality is EVERYTHING in art, in fashion, and in great writing.
-extended

Style supposes the reunion and the exercise of all the intellectual faculties. The style is the man.
Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fullness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skillful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.
The style is the man.
Le style c'est l'homme.
-George-Louis de Buffon, 18th century French naturalist, Discourse on taking his seat in the French Academie
When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.
-Denis Diderot, mid-18th-century French philosopher and writer
There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
-Charles Kettering, early-20th-century American inventor (the most prolific one after Edison)
To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions.
-Jacob Burckhardt, mid-late-19th-century German philosopher
~ ~ ~
The books I follow in my theories and my approach:
The five incredibly researched, groundbreaking books that undergird my own research and work

1. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, by Harold Bloom (1973, expanded February 1997), and by extension, the list of great literature found in the appendix of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (September 1995) – The intellectual, philosophical, and literary minds that have shaped and guided my own
2. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, by Nancy Etcoff (July 2000) –The premise on which I base the pictures I include, it consists of countless fascinating studies that illustrate the effect of beauty, and is the best analysis of how beauty is variously defined around the world, as it has been throughout history
3. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson (March 1999) – The theory of consilience, of a synthesis and sympathy between the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, is one that I have applied to Art, Fashion, and Literature – that “Beauty and Genius are two sides of the same coin”
4. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle (October 2006) – The means by which I do this site and reach other individuals
5. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, by Henry Jenkins (August 2006) – The old-and-new “transmedia” effect I seek to leverage and interpret in my own way, building a bridge through fashion back to great art and great literature

Each of these works is based very much on the principle of evolution, recombination, re-creation, and that now-overused business buzzword, innovation. Again, this is true, whether the evolution and recombination are biological, technological, or cultural, and indeed all three are inextricably intertwined, and, with the World Wide Web and this new world for us to learn in, and teach in, and coexist in, those three forms of evolution are even more intertwined than ever before.
And thus, what the 18th-century German writer and experimental physicist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, said of the sciences, I will say of the arts, by simply replacing that very word in his following point:
It is the geniuses who, as pioneers, create the highways, and the cultivated who level and beautify them. Highway improvement would be a good thing in the [arts], so that we could get from one of them to another more easily.
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in “The Waste Books,” (c. 1774), p. 49
~
The Five Advancers of Culture I Most (Attempt to) Follow in My Own Work

The five pioneers whom I only wish I could follow in their advancement of modern culture:

1. Samuel Johnson – creator of the modern comprehensive dictionary
2. Denis Diderot – creator of the modern (pre-Wiki) encyclopedia
3. Johann Joachim Winckelmann – father of art history
4. Jacob Burckhardt – father of cultural history
5. James J. Rorimer – curator of outstanding accomplishment

These are each remarkable figures who did much for the good of society in the name of culture, and I plan to elaborate on the ways in which I will, to the best of my abilities, continue the spirit of the work that each of them did.

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
-Erich Fromm
And, for all the ladies out there:
There is no meaning to life except the meaning woman gives her life by the unfolding of her powers.

~"Great Authors Comment on Various Websites"~

About Google.com:
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
-British literary master Samuel Johnson in 1775, from James Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
In his book about Google, John Battelle, co-founding editor of Wired magazine writes:
[N]ow we assume that everything is connected [and that] vastness is causing another kind of Web blindness: a sense that we know there’s stuff we might want to find, but have no idea how to find it. So we search in the hope it will somehow find us. …
Indeed, many in the industry make what I think is an important distinction when it comes to search: there is search to recover that which we know exists, and then there is search to discover what we intuit exists, but have yet to find.
-John Battelle, “The Search” (2006), pp. 31-32

About Wikipedia.org:
Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.
-Alexander Graham Bell, turn of the 20th-century Scottish inventor, known for his work on the telephone in the 1870s. His remark has an obvious significance in relation to the telephone, as it is only with the help of another person that such a device could be tested, let alone used. Kinda gives a whole new historical meaning to "Can you hear me now?"

About UrbanDictionary.com:
The genius of a democratic people is not only shown by the great number of words they bring into use, but also by the nature of the ideas these new words represent. Among such a people the majority lays down the law in language as well as in everything else; its prevailing spirit is as manifest in this as in other respects.
-French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville in 1840, from Volume II of Democracy in America.

Regarding the models at the Paris Couture shows at Style.com and Elle.com:
At this moment, who would not remain persuaded that these women are virtuous? Are they not the flower of the country? Are they all not fresh, ravishing, intoxicating with beauty, youth, life and love? To believe in their virtue is a kind of social religion, for they are the ornament of the world and are the glory of France.
En ce moment, qui ne voudrait pas rester persuadé que ces femmes sont vertueuses? Ne sont-elles pas la fleur du pays? Ne sont-elles pas toutes verdissantes, ravissantes, étourdissantes de beauté, de jeunesse, de vie et d'amour? Croire à leur vertu est une espèce de religion sociale; car elles sont l'ornement du monde et font la gloire de la France. 
-French novelist Honoré de Balzac in 1829, from The Physiology of Marriage, “Meditation II: Marriage Statistics.”

About Web designers:
A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
-R. Buckminster Fuller, mid-20th-century American writer and architect
But is that really true of all Web designers? Well, the design program IIII use is known as Dreamweaver, so OBVIOUSLY I’m a multifaceted, multitalented, multitasking, multidreamweaving inventor-strategist. Yeah um.

Regarding Hollywood Gossip Blogs—yet another shockingly timely one—
Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.
-Sébastien Nicolas de Chamfort, late-18th-century French writer
The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
-Theodor Adorno, mid-20th-century German philosopher

Anyway, if only this mid-20th century media theorist could see the modern Internet, when he said that radio, yes,
Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice.
-Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan in1964, from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
It indeed acts as a global “bathroom wall,” the anonymous psychological dumping ground for millions of bored minds, and
Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.
-Lord Chesterfield in 1749
Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness. 
-Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont, mid-19th-century French poet
The devil finds work for idle hands.
-English proverb, also quoted by the singer Morrissey in The Smiths' "What Difference Does It Make?," 1984
Constant occupation prevents temptations.
-Italian proverb
Be ever engaged, so that whenever the devil calls he may find you occupied.
Do something, so that the devil may always find you busy.
Fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum.
-St. Jerome Letters cxxv. xi., c. 390 AD

The MySpace Generation, The iGeneration:
[A]s we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear.
-Marshall McLuhan in 1980
The “iGeneration” or “MySpace Generation” as it is also called, takes the Internet for granted as part of the 'natural order of things,' accepting the utility of services such as Internet forums, email, Wikipedia, search engines, MySpace, Facebook, imageboards and YouTube.
The term "iGeneration, draws from the popularity of technologies such as the iPod and connotes the paradoxical simultaneity of both 'ear bud insularity' and relatively blasé attitudes about the loss of private space since the rise of the Internet (Hence “The age of the First-Person Singular” that is alluded to by the “i-”) and, in particular, YouTube, where Andy Warhol's “15 minutes of fame” prophecy has been literalized—well, considering the usually enforced 10-minute time limit on YouTube videos, it more like 10 minutes of fame.
-Wikipedia article on the Internet Generation 

Indeed it’s a grand-scale loss of privacy, but no one is too concerned, and the vast majority are quite eager to publicize and/or exploit their entire private lives

Internet Addict – Anyone born in the modern world after 1975. The phrase is already as depleted of its meaning as calling someone a “TV addict” would be in the ‘80s or ‘90s. It’s an indispensable aspect of modern life in every area of life now.

About MySpace.com:
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th-century German philosopher (attributed) c. 1850s.
When smashing monuments, save the pedestals – they always come in handy.
-Stanislaw Lec, 20th-century Polish writer
The expression is a paraphrase of Andy Warhol's statement in 1968 that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." In 1979 Warhol reiterated his claim: “[M]y prediction from the sixties finally came true: In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”
In the present, everyone in the world is famous for 15 kilobytes per second. “What? That doesn’t even make sense.” Okay, hmm, well, considering that the average webpage appears on a screen in millionths of a second, then let’s say that “In the present, everyone is the world is famous for 1500 microseconds (depending on your bandwidth, but that would be about right, at least for another few years in most of the web-connected world, even if ya got WiFi).” Ohhhh-kay. There.

Regarding the millions of cell-phone self-portraits on MySpace:
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
-Ansel Adams, mid-20th-century American photographer
Wait--it’s the same damn person!!

When Tom Anderson, the co-creator of MySpace was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live (October 12, 2007), he was mentioned in the monologue as “someone who most of you know for his extremely low standard of friendship.” Ah, funny! And here’s an accurate definition of what a MySpace Friend perhaps more likely is—an
Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.
-American journalist Ambrose Bierce in 1911, from The Devil’s Dictionary

Regarding YouTube.com:
Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
-French artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, c. early-mid 20th century.
Yes, ah…if only he could have seen probably at least a hundred of the super-mega-famous amateur-“produced” viral videos (that is viral in the sense of spreading in its popularity in a virus-like way, not in the sense of causing a virus, mmkay), no matter who you may be, have surely watched over the past year. I won’t even give any examples; you probably think and talk about the clips enough as it is, lol.

Regarding the YouTube comment section on just about any video with political or social content:
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, mid-late-19th century German philosopher

A Concluding Point:

Really...seriously--who cares if one person happens to know more than another person? What does it mean? What does it matter?  Ivory-tower snobbery is just plain old stupidity. What matters is not who knows more, but who educates more—by which I mean education as means to realizing one’s own individuality and making one’s life center around that. What matters is not who knows more, but who teaches more, who inspires more, who encourages more. That’s why there’s not a single line on my website that is a criticism, a condemnation, or a prohibition of or about anyone or anything. I’m not interested in telling people what not to do, what not to wear, or how not to think. All I do is express my own passion for things that I love and find beautiful, and I can only quietly hope that I am inspiring others to do the same in their own way—but that’s all up to them!
Again, it’s not a matter of who knows more, but who teaches more.
It doesn’t matter how much you HAVE, but how much you GIVE….

The only reason that some people join gangs, or lead destructive lives, whether of themselves or others, is because somebody else has failed to interest them in something more productive, in occupying them, and leading them to be employed in every sense. It’s only because someone who knows better was shirking their responsibilities.

It is for this reason that I agree with Aristotle point, which says that,
Teachers who educate children deserve more honor than parents who merely gave birth; for bare life is furnished by the one, while the other gives the art of living well. -Aristotle
Also translated as:
Those who educate children are more to be honored than parents, for those only gave life, and these the art of living well.
And how important is it?
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of a nation's people depends on the education of youth. -Aristotle as well

Would I say we are in the middle of some sort of cultural crisis? Whether we are or aren't, I will nevertheless do everything I can to contribute in some way to the culture of the world, and I take these insights as guiding thoughts to keep always in mind:

"While his views on modernity were pessimistic, [Jacob] Burckhardt believed that '...a new existence, built on old and new foundations, will arise out of the storm... our destiny is to help rebuild after the crisis is past.'"
-Amazon book reviewer
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who during a moral crisis preserve their neutrality.
-Dante, early-14th-century Italian poet
Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own.
-Charles de Gaulle, mid-20th-century French president
Become the change you wish to see in the world.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
-Mahatma Gandhi, early-20th-century Indian political and spiritual leader

Thank you. More soon...