Think fashion, think catwalks. Think women with a remarkable resemblance to bamboo, and an audience with a thirst for the latest trends. Fashion can be defined as a prevailing custom of style or dress, convention dictates that fashions change regularly, as often in fact as the changing of the seasons.
Think style, and think of James Dean, Sophia Lauren and Audrey Hepburn. Think of classic lines, classy cuts and sophisticated aesthetics, prevailing through the worst of fashion’s fickle blunders. If greatness is measured through a legacy, then the perennial idea of style is immortal and untouchable.
And so, to the industry of fashion. Run by scrotum-faced, leathery, pouting old men, along with their surgically enhanced, professionally bulimic fashionista colleagues these are perhaps some of the most deluded, vilest people on the planet. Their industry is that of the zeitgeist, the Next Big Thing, a continual quest for the new and the shocking.
Countless expose’s of drug taking, eating disorders and monster tantrums has done nothing to challenge the industry itself, as the love of drama and gossip is what keeps this cartoon-like merry-go-round from imploding all over its own hollow ideals. Its commandments are those of outrageous aesthetics and protruding spines, its weapons are brand grooming, bitchiness and bulimia.
With the release of the Bruno film next week, the world of fashion is set to take another barrage of logical and forthright analysis. The expression ‘fish in a barrel’ comes to mind. It may be said that normally sensible people can acquire all the characteristics of a giddy 12-year-old at a Take That concert when confronted with shiny footwear that has only previously viewed in a shiny magazine, being worn by a shiny bamboo stick.
For what reason other than mimicry do people buy the same clothes? Why do certain trends die as quickly as they arrive? The fashion demographic is populated largely by wealthy upper classes and young, impressionable females with a need for acceptance. Ones grasp of fashion can dictate ones popularity, social hierarchy, and even employability (the devil, indeed, wears Prada).
Huge brands pump out Uggs, leggings, 501’s, and whatever else the magazines are telling people to buy. The side effects can include relentless ridicule of those who are deemed unfashionable, and the constant preening and search for acceptance so prevalent in insecure and unconfident teenagers.
However, clothes maketh the man; naked people seem to have very little influence on society. A beautiful aesthetic is not to be scoffed at, and the image one can portray of oneself through the choice of one’s clothes can be profound. Empowerment of the wearer must also be a part. However this requires little of what those in fashion defiantly covet. Style, as a concept, can include any cut, any reference point, any colours, any decade, any individual inspiration, and as such, can produce a beautifully unique ensemble, when forged with clarity of vision and appreciation of aesthetics.
Of course, this could produce some horrifically attired people, as everyone has different tastes, but the writer can think of nothing worse than 6 billion people in Diesel jeans and a River Island cardigan. Fashion can be ruthlessly totalitarian; a Saturday night in any branch of Wetherspoons is proof of that. With this freedom afforded by a healthy disregard for fashion, it is easy for people to sartorially wander to wherever they like; a free range belle of the ball, as opposed to the fashion victims’ fearful battery-farmed peacock.
Style is the sophisticated godfather of fashion. Those with true and original style often influence others to wear the same, and as such the idea of fashion is born. A knowledge of fashion is the mass ‘copy and pasting’ of an idea that someone else has had. A sense of style and class can be achieved with reference points of their own, look at the most sartorially gifted people: James Dean, Jack Terricloth, Daniel Craig.
These are people who pay little attention to the catwalks of Milan or Paris, but know what looks good and certainly have a sense of style and class that cannot be bought, but is innate and earned. Pay close attention, Mr. Kanye West, Mrs. Colleen Rooney. Style can be effortless, elegant and inspirational. Fashion is often strenuously over-worked, vacuous, transient, and even a slur on ones character.