Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Do you feel like that every morning? No.
You're like, this is a life commitment.
Yeah. Well, see, this is the thing though, right? It simplifies your thought process in the morning. So like I have other ways I do that. I park in the same exact parking spot when I go to work on the fourth floor of a parking garage because no one ever parks on the fourth floor. So I can, I don't have to remember where I park my car. But I really like aesthetics and playing with them.
So I'm willing to spend part of my cognitive energy every morning trying to figure out what I want to be that day.
And even this one could have been really different because like, you know, it's not just the sort of jacket and the shoes and like, and the hairstyle. It's like the jewelry and the accessories. So like any outfit is a lot of small decisions.
Yeah. Yellow's my daughter's favorite color. And I never really thought about yellow much, but she's been obsessed with yellow. She's seven now. And I don't know. I just really love it.
I'm playing with yellow a lot lately. Like this is not even the most yellow because I have black pants on, but I have worn outfits that have probably five shades of yellow in them.
Yeah, it's interesting. It's not – I mean, I am attracted to style and aesthetics because I think they're beautiful, but it's much more because I think it's fun to play with. And so I will get to the beauty thing, but I guess I want to just explain a little bit about my motivation in this space because it's really an intellectual thing for me.
And, you know, Stuart Brand has this great infographic about the layers of like human society. And I think it starts with like the natural sciences and like physics at the bottom and it goes through all these layers and it's like economics and then like fashion is at the top is like the fastest moving thing. part of human culture.
And I think I really like that because it's so dynamic and so short and it's temporal longevity, uh, contrasted with like studying the laws of physics, which are like, you know, like the deep structure reality that I feel like I like bridging those scales tells me much more about the structure of the world that I live in.
Are you embodying this?
You wouldn't know how to be you. I know this is amazing though, isn't it? Amazing. You have the choice to do it. But one of my favorite, just on the question of beauty, one of my favorite fashion designers of all time is Alexander McQueen. And he was really phenomenal.
But like his early – and actually, I kind of used like what happened to him in the fashion industry as a coping mechanism with our paper when – like the Nature paper in the fall when everyone was saying it was controversial and how terrible that like – But controversial is good, right? But when Alexander McQueen first came out with his fashion lines, he was mixing horror and beauty.
And people were horrified. It was so controversial. It was macabre. It looked like there were blood on the models. That's beautiful.
Yeah. No, I mean, his stuff is amazing. His first runway line, I think, was called Nealism. Okay. I don't know if you could find it. You know, I mean, he was really dramatic. He carried a lot of trauma with him. There you go. That's, yeah. Yeah. But he changed the fashion industry. His stuff became very popular.
Right, right. But this gets at the question, like, is that horrific or is it beautiful? And I think, you know, he ended up committing suicide. And actually, he left his death note on the descent of man. So he was a really deep person.
Yeah, it sure does. So I think it's the intellectual pursuit, right? Like it's not, so this is like very highly intellectual. And I think it's a lot like how I play with language is the same way that I play with fashion or the same way that I play with ideas in theoretical physics. Like there's always this space that you can just push things just enough.
So they're like, they look like something someone thinks is familiar, but they're not familiar. And yeah, and I think that's really cool.
What do you mean it doesn't have function?
Oh, evolutionarily, maybe, but then beauty becomes a signal of other things, right? So it's really not like, and then beauty becomes an adaptive trait. So it can change with different, like, you know, maybe some people, some species would think, well, you thought the frog having babies come out of its back was beautiful. And I thought it was grotesque.
Showing 301–320 of 510 · page 16 of 26
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