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To Worship Fashion or not to worship?

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I prefer to consider the issue in the affirmative, crediting myself and other style-worshippers with appropriately valuing the power of image projection. “It is not shallow to care about what the proper belt width will be this fall,” I tell myself. “Fashion” is just shorthand for telling all of us how to look our best. “Trend” is shorthand for the necessary, cyclical evolution that keeps getting dressed in the morning interesting.  

But I also can’t help but consider the negative- what it would mean if the mental energy spent on stylistic considerations was actually making me less self-aware and simply more self-obsessed. The objection that those who attempt to opt-out of the fashion world have, maybe rightly so, is that valuing fashion means valuing style over substance. They see an interest in the pages of Vogue as something beyond wanting to look one’s best; they see insidious vanity. Consider Jane Austin: “Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” So which is fashion? Pride, or vanity? 

The real problem with those who object to fashion carte blanch, the send-the-industry-to-the-moon-for-all-I-care bunch, is that they seem to be operating under the illusion that they have somehow opted out of the fashion industrial complex already. What they don’t get is that there is no opting out. 

 

There is a reason that like-minded groups of people always seem to look alike- our outsides serve as a visual shorthand for our inner lives whether we want them to be or not. For university professors that’s the tweed jackets, for I-bankers it’s the power suit, for Dave Matthews Band fans it’s cargo shorts and a backwards baseball hat. Across the country, figurative scions of Williamsburg are visually identifying themselves with beards, cotton scarves, and skin-tight denim. Try to really opt-out of fashion and you’ll find that while you can change the statement you make, there is no such thing as making no statement at all. Even a nudist would say as much. 

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