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The eruption of specialized fashion terms into everyday speech is now nearly as pronounced as the seepage of terms like "deconstruction" from the leaking jarheads of academe. Think about it: Where, except maybe in the pages of an off-color X-Files fanzine, would you ever have expected to run across the phrase "fox chubby"?
That most folks can now sling the lingo of Women's Wear Daily with as much ease as they supersize their lunchtime lard intake speaks to a curious disconnect in the current state of our sartorial savvy. In the words of one writer at Detour - last season's most conspicuous purveyor of the so-called heroin chic - "fashion encompasses the courage and the determination to make sense of one's life through the act of dressing." Ah, but of course! It's so simple when you think about it: Peppering one's speech with "Prada" this and "bias cut" that makes clear the wildly abstract synecdochic relationship of fashion to man's search for meaning, love, security, really good crispy-crust pizza, yadda yadda yadda.
Still, one expects such inanities from the downtown glossies. After all, the hip and trendy youngsters on the front lines of fashion probably don't get enough sleep to write or think cogently, what with all the clubbing, coolhunting, horse-sniffing, and so on. It was at least mildly surprising, though, when the New York Times simpered at length about "what it is we love most about clothes: namely, their direct access to the realm of emotions."
There you have the industry's fall strategy in a nutshell. Not that it takes a genius to figure this out - though it clearly takes someone smarter than your average Salon columnist. The heart of the matter is simply that this season, more than the ones before, is less about a particular style of dressing appropriated from mass culture (remember the exquisitely tailored plaid shirts of "grunge chic"?) than about a more emotive attitude toward consumption itself. To encourage us to spend cash (and credit) for clothes this season, the approved tropes are "happiness," "optimism," and "luxury." As one wag put it, more is the new less.
This exuberant turn is apparent even in the layouts of the ads themselves. There seem to be, for example, an inordinate number of pull-out gimcracks and two-page, landscape-oriented ads this season, including spreads for Jil Sander, Missoni, and Calvin Klein. Such spreads obviously require one to turn the magazine and view the image like a pin-up, but aside from their cost (which must make both publishers and account execs happy, indeed), what is the message here?
Lest we meander off on a snit about the pornography of consumption, however, it's worth remembering that it was ever thus. Eighteenth-century Paris saw a stunning explosion in working-class and bourgeois consumer spending on what historian Cissie Fairchilds has dubbed "populuxe" items, the contemporary equivalent of fake Rolexes and Armani knockoffs that allowed hoi polloi to ape the aristocracy. This was a hundred years before the supposedly insidious development of the modern window display documented by William Leach in Land of Desire, which just goes to show that the boom in wannabes wasn't all Wanamaker's fault.
The weird part is that the current uptick in luxe-lust comes at a time when the dominant cultural narrative is one of biting the bullet, doing more with less, and adjusting one's expectations to the demands of a global economy. In an era of social and cultural instability marked chiefly by concern for "family values," one would think the hypocrisy might be a tad less blatant. Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels, f'r-instance, kept mum about his enormous wardrobe and fetish for silk, even as he enforced a social-realist dress code. But in a curious inversion of media manipulation in previous eras, the spectral availability of haute couture - through the n +1 fashion programs afforded by a subscription to basic cable - actually feeds the appetite for luxury.
In a recent New Yorker, punk raconteur Malcolm McLaren remembered himself in the '70s as a laborer in his own "luddite factory, battling the consumerist fashions of the High Street." And yet he was making couture clothing - one-of-a-kinds, things with as much aura as anything made in the ateliers of Paris or Rome. It's no wonder McLaren and his ex, Viv Westwood, are enjoying such a renaissance. For her part, Westwood has now shown her first couture collection, and has inked a fragrance deal with the muskmonging behemoth Lancaster.
McLaren's intended political message - a sort of muddled parody of consumption cobbled together out of his well-documented affection for situationism and other recreational mindstates - was absorbed in due time by the market. Eventually, fashion moguls realized that a huge windfall was waiting if only they could bring couture to the street and vice versa.
Does everyone really want to put their nose to the grindstone solely for their 40 acres and a pair of mules? If so, why? Maybe because we know that a thimble-sized taste of the luxe life is as much as we're ever going to get. So doff those cheerless weeds, my friends. Neither Gianni nor Diana (nor poor little Agnes, for that matter) can appreciate them anyway. In the words of the come-on: Get happy.
This article appeared originally in Suck.
