Fashion is not necessarily spectacular (though it often conforms to the theory of the society of the spectacle), it can often be demotic, ordinary, mundane, routine, and humble. It is the stuff of the ethnographer and the archeologist.
Fashion is Yves Saint Laurent. Its Paris, New York, and Milano. It’s Fashion Week camera flashes, Wintour sunglasses spotted front row seat. It’s red carpet, pearly smile, the first Monday of May.
Fashion is Zara. It’s “5 FOR $25” and “LESS THAN $7” rack in suburban malls. It’s my fourteen-year-old self’s allowance spent, it’s “I want to look cool”.
Fashion is identity. Hanes or Fruit of the Loom? Calvin or Tommy? It’s the surgeon’s scrubs, the monk’s habit, the police officer’s hat, the business man’s suit. It’s the drag queen’s heels, it’s the chef’s white hat. It’s the tutu, the jersey, the headscarf, the sash, the pin.
Fashion is slavery. It’s pain, women dead, women working, their children still hungry. It’s greed of powerful men, their yachts in Sweden.
Fashion is street sneakers, t-shirts, jeans. It’s the old leather jacket worn twenty Novembers. It’s strangers on the subway, strangers in the coffee shop, their shoes, their pants, their shirts. It’s how strangers read other strangers, judge other strangers — “do they look friendly?”.
Fashion is paradoxical. Fashion is uptown, downtown. It’s vogue, quotidien. It’s big-city black snakeskin and small-town red striped plaid.
Fashion is time, and time within culture. It’s Marie Antoinette and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Fashion is language. It’s choosing when and where to say “rad” or “radical”.
Perhaps, however, fashion is merely smoke and mirrors, always an obscured view, regardless of whether one is from the outside looking in, or the inside looking out.
Perhaps, fashion does not exist. Perhaps our understanding of fashion is not based in reality, the meaning of the word (see next answer) is ambiguous and interchangeable. Therefore, it must be viewed subjectively, in context, body, site, history, gender, it must be viewed in the context of its existence.
Fashion is gossip. Never underestimate the power of gossip. Semiologists are driven into ecstasies of supposition by its whispers.
Merriam-Webster defines gossip as “a person who habitually reveals personal or sensational facts about others”.
If fashion is gossip, if the two are entwined, one in the same, and therefore, deserving of sharing the same definition, let us replace the word “gossip” with the word “fashion” in this definition.
Fashion habitually reveals personal or sensational facts about others.
Let us continue interchanging the two words in Brewer’s aphorism:
Gossip is fashion. Never underestimate the power of fashion.
How can we ever know gossip to be true? Therefore, how can we know fashion to be true? Fashion is ephemeral, fleeting, in time and culture, and on one’s body.
How does the dress one wears to work “gossip” about them — reveal information about them that may or may not be the truth? Everybody wants to believe something about somebody, about anybody. Most of the times, this “belief” stems from a quick judgment. Why is gossip popular? Why is fashion popular? Because it justifies judgement.
