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For Vogue Singapore's 'Escape' issue, one editor explores the intrinsic ties between fashion and reverie.

- MAYA MENON

In The Universe, Life and Everything: Dialogues on Our Changing Understanding of Reality, authors Sarah Durston and Ton Baggerman unpack the perceptions that come with human existence, from the well-rested early morning yawn after a deep sleep to the mundane yet persisting stressors of everyday life. So, what exactly is reality? The question sharply punctuates the beginning of the book. “But how do we distinguish dreams from reality? Is it not by the test of coherence or persistence in our experience? If one’s dream-experience in any one dream were to be perfectly coherent with itself, and if the events of one dream were always to follow in an intelligible sequence on the events of the dream, undoubtedly our dream-life would be as real as our waking life,” Durston and Baggerman muse. Fashion and its many manifestations have long existed beyond the confines of reality, logic and reason. In the realm of the suspension of disbelief, it sits on a throne of etherealness, a world so curiously far off in the distance, even though it exists as an intrinsic part of most of our day to day. The iterations of this have changed with time.