On Everything #145: Have We Killed the Pleasure of Fashion?
Apologies for taking a little break from the newsletters. I’ve been slammed with work, etc. etc. , but I still love you!
Announcement: The publication of my book, Torn: Fashion and Postmodernism, is less than a month away. You can preorder it on any bookselling platform, or ask your local bookstore. I am planning a book tour with stops in New York City, Dublin, London, Antwerp, Milan, and Paris this September. I hope to see you there!
And now onto the main dish:
It increasingly feels that fashion is being scrutinized on an unprecedented level; the questions of why we wear what we wear unceasingly swirling around the ecosystem of self-appointed fashion critics and commentators and traditional fashion media alike. Fashion is now treated as a serious and culturally relevant business. Numerous articles dissect earnings, business strategies, and the hirings of CEOs are now classified as “breaking news.” The media discusses fashion consumption in terms of aspiration, competition for attention, influence, emulation, celebrity worship, and so on, pretty much ending in one direction, one of shaping sales strategies.
In treating fashion as business first, we imply its seriousness. In the banality and dullness of seriousness we also forget that fashion is about pleasure, one that we have destroyed with over-scrutiny. Dressing up is supposed to be a pleasurable experience, and not one riddled with anxiety about whether you will look good on an Instagram photo. Shopping is supposed to be a pleasurable experience that the luxury fashion industry has successfully murdered post-Covid by forcing customers to wait for the privilege of parting with their money, then trailing them throughout the store, their eyes betraying their burning desire to sell, and only sell.
The new puritanism surrounding fashion would be bewildering to someone like Jean Paul Gaultier or Claude Montana or even Karl Lagerfeld. But it’s not just the camp greats who would be dismayed at the overwhelming humorlessness of today’s fashion. Pleasure does not have to be facile; it can run as deeply as self-expression does. I don’t know about you, but I take pleasure in dressing up, in buying clothes, in running my hand over a beautiful fabric, in noticing construction and treatment details. I take pleasure in ownership, in the tangibility of garments. I take pleasure in wearing the work of designers who have the reputation for being serious and cerebral – Helmut Lang, Ann Demeulemeester, and Martin Margiela. In our culture of pop banality, which includes fashion, we have forgotten that intelligence can be a source of pleasure, too.
We have replaced pleasure with anxiety also in part because the industry has been dominated by impostors.
