On Fashion

Tengal on Fashion:

"Regardless of its sociological implications in culture and society, fashion, personally I think is an empty enterprise because it celebrates more on the realm of superficiality and all its derivations; exemplifying existential transience (trends come and go) magnified and expounded by mass media and popular culture at a engrossing level, building trends, defining counter-cultures, up to the point of catering sickly obsessive compulsions of people to buy buy buy all these things because there is a need for fashion, rather than on its basic prime, the need for clothing.

That is to say this mere "make-up" of societal expression, etc associated not only with youth but with the roles we portray within a society. i.e. wearing the expensive classic nike airforce-ones [those rare all white dunks] or some louis vs define top prestige and put you on the upper classes in society. Fashion focuses on these superficialities, and like in science, we're all stuck in the dominant paradigm; in the case of fashion, in someone else's shadowy trends, and we live day in day out trying to make ourselves look good and hip.

On a more ethical note, what does fashion have to do with all the poor? What is its real social moral relevance apart from just building trends and conceptual prestige? Does it bring satisfaction on a societal level say on those people who can't afford to buy or wear all these designer clothes but strive to buy because they have to look good coz society deems it so?
Nada.

On another note, although it shares some primary essence in art, since both have evidence on the wonders of the rational mind to not only create but imbue extraneous meanings to things -- apart from just basic descriptions of what the world is say "I can see there is a color of this certain shade, etc" as compared to "this is bright red color is communist." Only humans can do that. And only humans can worship / be enslaved by fashion.

This is not to say I don't like fashion, in fact if you read my comment again, I was praising it albeit the sarcasm, and should have been viewed as rather a Self-deprecating opinion, since I'm guilty of it."

[Taken from an online response with a friend upon being taken aback by my comment:
"Viva la vanity and everything that has "empty" written on it, like fashion."]


"Fashion is a tyrant from which there is no deliverance; all must conform to its whimsical"
- French Proverb

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
- Jean Cocteau