Monetization

When you monetize the thing you love it stops being yours and it starts to belong to everyone else as well.

This isn’t exactly a bad thing, but is it a good thing?

It’s easy to forget why you fell in love with a thing when you spend a  lot of time trying to cut and contour it for your customer. Pretty soon your mind is consumed by the re-sculpting of the thing and all the reasons you fell in love seem to slip away.

It’s strange because the cutting and sculpting teaches you how to love the thing in new ways. You have a new appreciation for it but if you’re not careful then your point of view pretty much disappears.

It’s good to take a step back, maybe not financially but mentally, spiritually, emotionally.

It’s good to get away from the chatter of wants and remember the subtle silence of love. Because that love forms a part of you and when you forget it a hole starts to form that slowly grows from the size of a pin to the size of a crater, and soon you’re spending countless hours on Instagram searching for a nameless thing to fill the void of losing the thing you love in the way you loved it.

I’ve always loved minimalist fashion even when I hated that I loved minimalist fashion. I’ve spent a long time trying to not love it, trying to be more ‘out there’ ‘more weird’ ‘more strange’ wishing that my mind was more twisted, more wild. I’ve created a lot of things that I’m proud of, that people loved and praised but that aren’t me. It’s weird how that feels amazing and shitty at the same time, then mostly just shitty because then what people love is not actually your work but the work that you recreated or that your client wanted which is technically your client’s work and not yours.

I made a lingerie set this week. Her name is Charlie. I’ve had the idea for Charlie for a while but I sat on it like I do with most of my ideas lol. In any case when I made Charlie it reminded me of the things I love. It reminded me of why I fell in love with fashion, with the minimalism, with pieces that have a hint of sexy. It reminded me of the importance of always remembering what you love and why you fell in love and finding ways to always honour that.

This isn’t a post to say that I want to stop collaborating with my clients on their pieces or even a post to say that I no longer want to recreate pieces (pretty sure I wrote that already, you can still read it but I changed my mind) but it’s more of a note to self to find time to create the things I love because they have just as much value as the pieces that I create that I grow to love.

I’m not ready to share lingerie as a product just yet.  For now lingerie gets to be my thing that I pour my love and creativity into and I’m sure that there will be a time where I want to share that but it isnt right now.

xx

Kat