Fashion Weak.

     So it is Fashion Week again in Sydney "Mercedes Benz Fashion Week" if you please. ("Ferguson Tractor Fashion Week" coming up). Many will visit Sydney many will Ooh and Aah, jobs will be provided, there will be food and drink and the sly coke snort and some will be happy and some will be sad. But this will be an event for the players of the game. Those outside will not count except for the reporters who consider it newsworthy. Nor will those who don't count be aware of the extravagances of the week and its industry. An industry which adds value to a select few and devalues multitudes, especially if they are silly enough to get hooked.
     Fashion is the bastard consort of capitalism. It exploits the vulnerable who are too slavishly dependent to decide for themselves. It provides a cosmetic covering for those who devalue themselves, or want approval or want to launder their shabby reputations. Superficiality dominates over substance and the false self wins the day over the genuine, authentic and the real.
     In a world needing to act sustainably fashion really doesn't get it. Fashion provides new and disposable carapaces at an enthusiastic launch and a covert dumping after little wear. Institutionalized waste. The only warn out unrecyclable bit of the discard is the jejune momentary thrill of the new or the shame when someone else wears the same gear. The fashion industry feeds narcissism and makes a virtue of the compulsive 'must have' feast.
     Can you think of any significant world thinker, humanitarian, author or philanthropist who followed fashion? Mostly innovative people abandoned the line of sheep and strike out for themselves. Apologies to sheep who are quite bright and well clothed. Fashion needs followers, but the pied piper of fashion is like the king who was naked. Without a mindless group of attendants fashion would be considered bad taste, extravagant or just plain silly. By comparison folk and peasant clothing is mostly well designed and functional. Fashion derides function, and slavishly searches for a different arrangement of feathers on the egoistic peacocks who can afford the plumage. Oh yes afford. It is sponsored by Mercedes Benz not your service delivering corner store in Sydney's western suburbs or an ethnic or disability group. Fashion is exploitative and plays on the needs and purses of self doubting vulnerable personalities and offers a costly snake oil nostrum while leaving the basic malady untouched but ready for another shake down the following year.
     But am I too harsh? Fashion does provide jobs. So do the Taliban and CIA rendition centers, or online betting or poker machines. Providing jobs is only a valid argument if the jobs add value rather than detract it from mankind.
I would argue that the pursuit of fashion is a blind for consideration of the inequities of the world one of which is the price of clothes. Machinists in underdeveloped countries work as slaves and retailing clothing companies suck off their sweat. And of course the partners of the fashionistas need to travel to Sydney and require people to feed and accommodate them too. Are they going to knock the festivities?
     You could say, "Can't you see it as just a bit of fun?" Perhaps so if there were not so many undeserving elitist winners and so many losers worldwide. Maybe it is just a bit of what Erich Fromm might call "orgiastic associating instead of love".  "Oh dorling, I adore that on you".(Transl:It looks so hideous that my shares will go up by comparison when you are around draped in that crap.)
      But fashion has been around for along time and who are you to change it? Sure in art, architecture, morality, theology, politics and feminism which all have fashion cycles. Heraclitus and Hegel rightly demonstrate universal impermanence. However over time there is generally some refinement of thought or design or theory or science or manufacture. Except in effete declining cultures.
     Would that designers had the courage and sense to celebrate tribal and authentic modes. Instead it is "penny decorated and twopence plain". But don't tell the flocks at Fashion Week, they are deaf beyond reason, all in a little fluffy fatuous flurry all their own.

 Hill Tribe Weaving  and Fashion Billboard.