Tainted Love
By: eleanor
Everyone’s talking fashion; the grocer with his crisp pin-tucked shirt, the business lady with her devastatingly gorgeous FMH’s, the closet-gay cops peeking into the backseat of your car for a glimpse of that adorable LBD hanging by the window… Needless to say, fashion is the latest news, and if you’re sitting there in your dull and dinghy bedroom, Googling the abovementioned acronyms for a hint of a clue, you deserve to rot in hell. Seriously. No, seriously.
But besides the profound demand for headbands and stockings (so declares the inner Blair Waldorf in all of us), what do we really know about fashion? How do we delineate our love for fashion? Is it the intellectually ardent ecstasy caused by the faded image of a Madame Gres gown? Is it understanding the subdued connotation behind Coco Chanel’s 1954 skirt suit? Or is it one’s natural knack of pronouncing designer names such as Ann Demeuleemeester’s without a blink or hesitation? Not that it really matters, love is blind and fashion is a state of mind.
For as long as history alone, the journey of fashion has been as precise and descriptive as print can be. Era after era has been ideologically rationalized by acts of fashion activism, be it the demise of crinoline cages and corsets by the dawn of women empowerment, or the intoxicating notions of making love in dyed emotions and not war in bloody motion; each a testament of true fashion revolution, a timeline of our existence.
And then we arrive at the 21st century. To quote the insatiable Elsa Klensch, “Fashion today is different; trends come and go quickly, so in-depth coverage is less important.” Because of this innate sense of belonging we’ve obtained through fashion, our love for it has become an inconsistent force to be reckoned with. Loyalty is considered as vintage as Courreges’ iconic red vinyl jacket, and we are but a messy bunch of faux believers.
Unlike the generations before, we’ve spent so much time perfecting the surface created by Hollywood that we failed to represent our genuine tastes, our individual styles, and most importantly, ourselves. We avoided scrunchies because of Carrie’s obvious disgust by them in Sex & The City, yet we embraced them with zealous fingers when seen worn dubiously in Gossip Girl. We’ve laughed and pointed at older women with blinding costume jewelry, yet we’re flippantly attempting the same bejeweled look because bright gems were spotted on all three idyllically styled women of Lipstick Jungle.
Do any of these trends really work on us? Most of the time they do, as long as we abide by the rules of indifference. But does it even matter? We’re garishly happy being extras in an audaciously prolonged dress rehearsal, as long as the writers of Hollywood are dutifully paid to keep feeding us the voguish one-liners.
Years from now, people will study the pages of fashion history and notice nothing significant in our generation, nothing to justify our presence in fashion, nothing new… We are neither here nor there, neither fashion forward nor classic backwards, neither delicately tried nor meticulously measured. After all, overnight sensations don’t have a sense of the past. And while most of you are blissfully unaware of the missing footprints on the dusty catwalk, I despair over what manner of identity the future generation will determine our era by; God forbid our sense of style be affirmed by mass sales of discarded headbands and stockings.
