Rage Against the (Fashion) Machine

Word is out—this season the in-shoes have heels that begin at 4 inches and climb to the vertiginous (and truly unwalkable height) of 6 inches.  Couple a 6 inch stiletto with a 2 inch platform and it’s a wonder any woman can walk from her bedroom to a waiting cab.  The argument is being bruited about, yet again, that these super high heels represent power dressing.  Give me a break.  Any man who sees a woman hobbling and tottering around on such footwear, while he strides boldly and firmly through the world will hardly see Ms. Fashion Victim as powerful, and never as an equal.  No, and in addition to the toxic footwear, she will be encased in an outfit that broadcasts some (male) designer’s fetishistic preoccupation with the female form, be it S&M, prostitution, porn, the ravages of drug addiction, domestic violence, etc.  I think you get my drift.

Magazine editors, stylists and fashion photographers are also hardly opting out of the club that seems determined to demean women every chance they get.  We get fashion spreads that double as necrophilia/snuff, Vampirella, pedophilia, or a glamorization of self-imposed starvation.  Not only models, but even well-known and established female film stars cannot pull off a shoot just being themselves any more, they have to be restyled as look-alikes of Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Sofia Loren, Ava Gardner, Debbie Harry, etc. 

There are many very talented people working in the fashion industry.  It isn’t that hard to sift through the crap and see the real value of a lot of what gets proposed by designers season after season.  At the level of couture, there can a dedication to craft that rises to the level of art.  So what went wrong that we see some of the most extreme and demeaning elements pushed as this season’s “fashion message” to women?  The magazine editors are women, they set editorial policy for their rags, why don’t they have greater respect for their readers who are not only mostly female, but also mostly under the age of 30?

Another disturbing trend is the over-reliance on Photoshop to take attractive women and make them look like the kind of airbrushed babes that used to be the purview of science fiction illustration not so many years ago.  The degree of enhancing and “perfecting” of photographic images before they are submitted for publication can be terrifying if you are a woman.  No one can nor ever will look like the women we see in magazines today.  These images have created a market for females that literally are no longer products of nature, whom you will never see walking down the street.  The bar has been raised to an impossible standard.  No matter how good a woman looks (and most never approach that sort of attractiveness) she can never, ever look as good as one of those photoshopped images.  It is quite literally impossible.  She can visit all of the plastic surgeons, dermatologists, and personal trainers she wants, but she can never approach the perfection that now gluts fashion publications.  We are way beyond old school air-brushing here.  Facial proportions, body proportions and so much more can now be altered by a few clicks of the mouse.  See enough of these images and real women, even very beautiful women, look imperfect and clunky in comparison.  It is hardly a mystery why women hate the way they look so much.  The fashion industry has created a perpetual market for itself in the hundreds of millions of women who look at these manipulated images and hope against hope that if they just use the right face cream, purchase the right designer gear, buy the right pair of shoes, sign up for the right trainer, that they can fool us into thinking that they are fashionable and beautiful--according to the latest limited and limiting standards--and that their insecurities about appearing sexually attractive to the opposite sex will be magically fixed.

I guess my one hope is that these things come in cycles.  The last period of so much artificiality in women’s fashion was post World War II to the mid-1960s.  The backlash, when it arrived, brought us the natural look of the late 60s and 70s, with its rejection of constricting undergarments (I still remember long-line bras (never wore one, thank God) and girdles with garters attached (did wear them and all I can say is, ouch!)).  I reached adulthood in the no make-up, wash and wear Vidal Sassoon hair days.  Wearing a bra was optional, designer labels were for your grandmother and her blue-haired bridge-playing friends.  Fashion came from the streets, not from a handful of snooty fashion tyrants in Paris, New York, London and Milan.  If such a dramatic reaction was engendered by the rather tame fashion idiocies of that earlier era, I tremble in fear to think what the reaction will be to the current lunacy that passes for fashion in this day and age.  If the world economy really is headed for a crash, no one will have the money to buy designer duds, anyway.  (Did you know you can hardly touch a designer dress for under US$6,000, and most “special” designer pieces are priced in the tens of thousands of US dollars?)  I have noticed in recent months an ever dwindling number of shoppers at the usual commercial emporia in my town.  Most people have looked at their closets this fall and see that they have enough clothes to manage to dress decently for every occasion that presents itself.  The majority of people are going to make due with what they already have.  A lot of my friends (granted we can’t afford to wear designer clothes) are talking about making due with less by simply not replacing all of their items of clothing as they either wear out (gasp, I know this isn’t fashionable, to wear something until you wear it out!) or go hopelessly out of fashion.  More and more people are hitting the thrift stores to fill in the gaps and find clothes for work when something really must be purchased.  Most people are taking stock of what they really need.  With this more practical attitude towards shopping and the amassing of articles of clothing, perhaps a self-correction, akin to that the stock market has been undergoing in recent weeks is underway.  Some fashion houses, like some banks and investment houses, may falter and fall by the wayside.  Consumers are beginning to ask some hard questions of their consumption-driven lifestyle.  If the Titanic that is the fashion industry does not read the signs in time to make a significant course correction, it may join GM as a once proud industry mainstay that has become irrelevant to the new global realities that appear poised to sweep away much that we took for granted, but was never more than smoke and mirrors.  As far as fashion is concerned, I only have this to say:  Vive la revolution!