Young Meager

Young Meagher’s Militant Guild of Rural Tailors seems to be a fashion line doubling as a museological collection of historical objects and textiles supposedly belonging to a revolutionary worldwide underground cult of rural tailors reaching back into early 19th C history. You can lose several hours if you fall into the web orbit of this extremely thoroughgoing narrative fantasy and its imaginary steampunkish realm. The combination of extremely high-quality tailoring (unfortunately only for men) and handcrafted fantasy props is, not surprisingly, very big in Japan, one of MGRT’s biggest markets. “Audiences” seems a more appropriate term than “markets,” because even though these clothes are commodities, they also seem part of a larger performance. The fact that these objects are presented as props and artifacts rather than as mere products seems to be a part of a rebellion against cheap meaninglessness of the commodity market and a hopeful alliance with quality and historical meaning, so that the company’s symbol - the hybrid brass knuckle scissors above - cleverly comes off as insignia rather than as a logo. As for the styles themselves, they seem to point to the American Civil War and more broadly to the 19th C in general, which seems to be a popular nostalgia at the moment and has ties to the eclectic antiquey references of steampunk. These photos are all from the Young Meagher website (be prepared for bleak, howling wind and antique train soundtracks) and their Flickr pool, which goes by the name Rural Tailor Research. Captions to photos below are from the Flickr pool.