Plum at the Council: An Exercise in Believing Purple Is a Personality
I have attended every council session this quarter with a notebook, a measuring eye, and the exhausted patience of someone who has been right about everything for a very long time. I did not expect Plum to surprise me. Plum did not surprise me. And yet here I am, compelled to write, because silence in the face of this level of smugness is not neutrality — it is complicity.
Plum arrived wearing nothing. This is standard for the so-called workers at the rival rag, whose relationship with textile is, charitably, nonexistent. I have made my peace with nakedness as a structural condition of their profession. What I have not made my peace with is the posture. Plum sat at the council table with the specific energy of someone who believes deep purple skin is, on its own, a look. It is not a look. It is a pigment. Pigment requires curation. Plum has done none.
The silhouette, such as it is, communicates nothing deliberate. No tension. No restraint. A vague rotundness that seems to suggest fullness without committing to volume. If Pomelo can dress for a room, Plum can at least attempt to address one. Instead, we received a fruit that appeared to have arrived inside its own confidence without any of the infrastructure to support it.
The bloom — and I use the term loosely — sat slightly off-centre, as if applied by someone who gave up midway through a decision. I have seen better compositional choices from Durian on a Tuesday, and Durian actively resists aesthetics as a matter of principle. Plum has no such excuse. Plum, by all rights, should know better. The colour demands architecture. The colour demands intention. What the council received instead was a fruit coasting on adjacency to wine and expecting the room to fill in the rest. It did not. I did. You're welcome.