While cussing it out is completely unnecessary, I can’t help but feel more disenchanted with fashion than I have ever felt. I got home from a month of frolicking around and promising myself I’d make all sorts of purrty things, only to feel uninspired and even a little jaded by the whole prospect of dressing people up. It could be the market. I know I’ll get myself in trouble by saying so, especially given how sensitive people are, but seriously the market for high fashion (whatever the fuck that means) needs to GET A FUCKING GRIP. We’re talking about clothes, pee-ple. It’s fabric. Shitloads of it are spun each day only to produce shitloads more in the money hungry interest of some prissy connoisseur, and you’re all losing your cool?
I still trawl fashion blogs and read magazines, because I do seriously enjoy what that side of the world has to offer. Let’s face it, clothes are beautiful. Each and every creation first took root as a haze in someone’s mind, and was spun out of the sincere need to create. And just like any craft, a tremendous amount of toil and tedium is required in its perfection. Isn’t this what the word fabrication stems from?
There is a degree of artistry and craft to fashion that is impossible to ignore. But at the same time, I read all these UNBELIEVABLY IDIOTIC REMARKS about the whole endeavor that just make me want to get as far away from it as humanly possible; remarks like “Dear God, If you love me you will give me a pair of YSL cage booties, my life absolutely depends on it.” Seriously, woman? Do you seriously feel the need to bring God in on the equation for your booties? Your booties were probably made by some disgruntled factory worker hammering away under the eyes of another god altogether. And then what, you’ll go for a round of fasting for something to wear with your fucking booties? Then again, fashion loves a woman who fasts.
The thing is, my attitude towards fashion comes through in every job interview I’ve been on. I haven’t even entered the industry yet, and I can already feel my soul getting sucked out under the weight of it. On one hand we have the actual commodity and the market of materialistic, fashion hungry mavens who will shell out ridiculous amounts for an object that costs less than 3 US dollars to make. The fashion industry strives for their patronage and wants to create more of them. While I’d make a lot of money, off of a fashion victim, I’d probably end up losing it by paying him or her to shut the fuck up. On the other hand, we have the side of fashion that treats the commodity as freight, volume, and a meaningless series of standard procedures. I’ve heard people say “Buy some shirts at ____, rip the tag off and slap our label on, just give them what they asked for”. After all, “what they asked for” is just a label.
Maybe I’m just overthinking it. I remember before stepping out of the apartment every day, whoever I’d be living with in the States would tell me not to “think too much”. Is that the only way to get by in fashion? By not “thinking too much”? And is “not thinking too much” the cesspool from which statements like “I will die without this dress by Phillip Lim” comes from?
Alice Sarmiento 