Exactitudes

Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek

2002

Published by 010 (Rotterdam)

128 pages

32 x 22.5 cm

I think it is always tremendously positive and stimulating that all creative disciplines should stare from time to time into their own abyss, their atrophy. I doubt that was the intention of Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek when, in 1994, they started their famous and very influential project Exactitudes, but it is the reaction it awakens in me. It is anti-fashion in its pure, almost terrifying state. Not as something cool but as something absolutely loathsome. People of little interest, standardised, portrayed as in police records, with no glamour or even affection, extracting their total lack of personality or individual style by launching them onto a relentless grid that lays bare their condition of being just another member of the herd. Each page could be an aesthetic option, a life choice, but exposed so coldly and systematically, they give off the impression of being nobodies, of lacking interest. Fashion as the negation of individuality. A very good but fearsome book, yet very necessary for anyone looking into fashion and its inferno.

Luis Cerveró