What is Fashion?

or
How Much is that Purple Shirt on the Sale Rack?

I tried to buy some clothes for myself the other day. I have a complete lack of patience when it comes to shopping so my actions are more along the line of a smash-and-grab artist than an intelligent consumer. About all that I look for in clothes is something that makes me look good and won’t make me look like a complete idiot. This seems to preclude about 99% of what I see in the department stores these days. I often feel that the goal of the fashion industry is to try and make as many people as they can look goofy.

The idea that there is a ‘fashion industry’ cracks me up. When we talk about the ‘fashion industry’ we aren’t referring to the anonymous people working in slave-labor factories sewing together our Tommy Hilfiger jeans or DKNY shirts. That’s the ‘industry’ side. We mean the ‘fashion’ side of runway models and clothing designers. When we say ‘fashion industry’ we don’t mean people toiling in some third world hellhole, we mean the beautiful people and the glamour of New York and Paris.

We love hearing about all of the tremendously talented people in fashion design who really only decide what color everyone is going to wear for the season. This past year it was purple for boys. If you didn’t have a purple dress shirt you probably got beat up at the office by the other kids. Whatever genius decided that the color this year would be purple probably made more than all of the employees of every slave-labor clothing factory in China put together.

Fashion is supposed to be about individuality, but what could be individualistic about buying a shirt that is the same color as every other one in the store? Fashion is really about dictating the parameters of the uniforms we will wear for the coming season, unless you buy your clothes when they go on sale. In this case you will be wearing your purple shirt a few months late.

When I buy clothes I like to think that I am buying something that will be timeless, something that someone could have worn twenty years ago and could wear twenty years from today. When you look at old photographs and you make fun of the clothing, you are making fun of the purple shirts of a bygone era. Whether or not they bought their clothes on sale won’t cut them any slack when we laugh at their “funny” clothes.

For my fashion cues I like to watch French movies from the 1960’s. I can’t remember what film it was but I saw some French dude in an old movie wearing a pair of black shoes with a buckle. I have owned a pair of black dress shoes with buckles my entire adult life. Sometimes this means getting a pair resoled because the ‘fashion industry’ decides to leave the “black dress shoes with buckles” field fallow for a few seasons. I have a heavy black leather car coat that I have owned for years and that I haven’t worn for the past two years. It hangs fallow in my closet until that particular men’s accessory becomes a bit less ubiquitous. A good black suit always looks good along with a black trench coat. That's about all that I know about fashion except the old adage that when you buy a bottle of expensive wine the label should match your shirt.