EkFASHsis
towards a poetics of style writing...
Ekphrasis is one tune to the song of another. It is music about writing, and architecture about dance. It is a description of art that is also art, and an art object that unravels into writing.
So ekphrasis is a mode.
A mode is a style of approaching whatever. Its mobility makes it a form of street style. I can’t lurk with a camera in the street: a diffident glance doesn’t make for good photography. But if photography’s a matter of timing, then words are a matter of time. And so is style.
In What is an Apparatus? Georgio Agamben links clothing to chronos—time in its linear mode—but fashion to kairos, which is all about the moment: the rhetorical-sartorial technique of being in the right mode at the right time. Both are ways of managing time and working with it, or through it. Words are clothing: but, add kairos, and both words and fashion become style.
The word fashion comes from Latin fascare: to make, but also to do, and also to compose or write. It has shrunk to the modern suffix, ‘-fy’, as in beautify, and falsify, implying that whatever goes under its hand starts as something else. It is also there in anything ending in ‘-ficent’ like magnificent or sufficient, and anything ending in ‘-ficial’ like superficial and artificial.
But, though it sounds like it might be its root-word, fascere’s mobility and malleability mean it has nothing to do with fascism.
If Kairos is a mode of the radically particular[1] that ties theory to praxis, in coining ekFASHsis, I insert ‘making’ into ekphrasis’s ‘description’. Fascere, besides being in factor, is also in factory. So fashion, far from being only conceptual, is also practical. It is both make and do: it is concept made (literally) material.
EkFASHsis is kairotic: it is a rhetoric, a poetics, of style writing. It describes the writing of clothing into style by the wearer, in relation to other wearers, as the instant of an outfit. It is the collaborative poetics of a glimpsed sartorial moment.
EkFASHsis 1: Métro ligne 4
How to start with something that seems to go on too long: long pale wash jorts, trapeze-shaped: a difficult shape, a difficult garment? How to wear jorts without something that reinforces their meaning as jeans, which can look like full-on cosplay? Or rather. How to wear them without something that doesn’t reinforce their meaning as jeans without producing a contrast that looks too calculated and so falls fadé, fuddy, flat?
Like this: the bottom half: all jorts, reinforced by sturdy Birkenstocks.
On top, the blouse, pulling in the opposite direction, both temporally (it’s ‘victorian’: high collar, pleated, white, almost transparent, cotton lawn) and physically—sitting at the hipbone, a christmas-cracker waist, a christmas-cracker dagger hem; this shape itself pulling against the wearer’s shape, waisted below the waist, then the waist of the jorts lower, barely hooked to the hip bones, dangerously, almost impossibly, low.
Producing the gap.
It’s the gap that matters.
This seemingly-casual outfit is all tension, movement, direction, held together by that slice of skin that appears and disappears, as the strap-hanging wearer exits at Gare du Nord.

[1] Paul, Joanne (Spring 2014). “The use of Kairos in Renaissance Political Philosophy” (PDF). Renaissance Quarterly. 67 (1): 43–78. doi:10.1086/676152. JSTOR 10.1086/676152. S2CID 152769631.