Fashion
From the “Fashion and Style” section of the New York Times comes an interesting article about… fashion: “Admit It. You Love It. It Matters.” Ostensibly, it’s an article justifying the very existence of this section of the Times. However, it comes with some very keen observations and quotes that cut to the heart of an argument I haven’t quite been able to formulate in my own busy mind:
“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are expected to scorn.
Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”
Having been steeped in academia for the past four years (with summers off, when I was steeped in organic solvents in a chemistry lab), I can’t do anything but agree with this observation. It’s spot on. Another quote, taking the thoughts out of my head:
“In our deeply Puritan culture, to care about appearance is like trying to be better than you really are, morally wrong,” [Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York] said.
Set into the larger context of the article, Steele’s quote highlights one of the sources of the knee jerk reaction against the industry. (Sidenote: If people react against fashion, I think they should direct their criticism against the incredibly warped body image and accompanying problems that are so pervasive in the modeling component of fashion.)
So, this industry can exist only because of the stable society and infrastructure that it occasionally takes inspiration from, but generally ignores completely. That doesn’t, however, justify society and infrastructure from thumbing its collective nose in return. That is, dismissing what we do not know simply because we are trying to be “intelligent and serious” is not a good enough justification for utter disdain.