history as farce, history from farce, farce from history

This was originally going to be a simple little post expressing amusement that, apparently, an actual fashion designer included this little item in a show (headlined at Yahoo). The amusement (other than the "hat"'s inherent absurdity) is that, of course, a very similar shoe hat featured in Terry Gilliam's Brazil - and so I was going to have a little laugh that Gilliam's parodic joke at the absurdity of high-fashion design had been (like so much else) outdone by reality.

Problem is (damn my compulsive fact-checking), in looking for an image from the Gilliam film to complement the Yahoo photo, I found out that Gilliam himself was inspired by a '30s-era fashion moment (designed by Salvador Dali - search "shoe hat" on the page to get directly to the relevant image and paragraph).

So Kazuo Takashima (the designer of the new shoe hat) is essentially remaking history himself.

(And, of course, Homeland Security seems intent on imagining the world of Brazil as its model for actual reality...)