Crimes of fashion

MANILA, Philippines - Everyone’s a DJ nowadays,” says my friend Max Brenner (not his real name, but yes, he’s bald and googly-eyed).

“Like photographers,” I offer.

“I wouldn’t know.”

I feel the same way about fashion bloggers. With the shrooming of sites like Lookbook, Looklet, and Chictopia, every one and his kid sister are models in self-shot editorials — good thieves and better borrowers in clothes referencing Wang or Balmain but are either thrifted, or Zara. Even without the online avenue, everyone’s been sulking, cross-footed, on the corner of styles.

New Kids On The Block

If you haven’t noticed, the adopters are not just struggling models and magazine-mad high school girls. They’re kids. That punk Maddox, the youngest hipster Kingston, and little-blogger-that-could Tavi, (tavi-thenewgirlintown.blogspot.com) — that thirteen-year-old who gets handshakes from Marc and handouts from Rodarte. Pretty soon, the babies will say “mum mum mum mah” before they can say “ma-ma.” Although that would be kind of scary.

The slightly more bearable reality for now, though, is this: The fashion pack is getting younger and younger, brought on perhaps by an ever strong magazine culture (the demand for quick lit apparently being inelastic), the sustained ascension of Anna Wintour, and the consequent legitimization of fashion careers. It’s something to think about whenever you feel all alone paying your credit card bill — we’re multiplying like Gremlins. Just add Gerber.

In hindsight, it kind of sucks for those of us born before the Nineties. What happened to the awkward years? I used to remember the time when all we wore were matching prepster outfits, like rugby-striped collared tees and knee shorts from Bossini, with moccasins. It didn’t matter whether we were it in a game of tag in the fields of the Polo Club or whether we were boys, or girls, for that matter. We were all dressed the same. By our parents.

The Devil Doesn’t Just Wear Prada

I guess it speaks about the double-o generation’s sense of agency. If clothes make the man, then go ahead and make yourself. But to play the devil’s-advocate-in-Prada (natch), isn’t the global interest in fashion just a little off in timing? Consider recent movements, shifting climate patterns, and an enlarged carbon footprint as a result of too much industry (clothing manufacture, included), a necessary recession that’s got people spending less, and for those who can still spend, doing it discreetly (buying crumpled, frugal-feel items, I guess), and those big nags — poverty, armed conflict, world hunger.

Darn it, even LC’s over it. Leopard print what? Whatever! The more pressing question being, “With crises underway, is fashion frivolous, or worse, apathetic?”

Well, not exactly.

The problem is in the assumption — putting fashion and serious stuff opposite each other. It’s not like you can’t have one and forget the other.

In New York, Wintour’s tour-de-force, Fashion’s Night Out, was conceptualized as a shopping event with designers performing at stores e.g. DVF singing; curly, cute, I’m-not-his-type-at-all Zac Posen handpainting a dress on a model, plus models coming out in full force, and a 50-percent increase in sales — with the notion that for all its associations with fantasy, the fashion industry is a real one. It gives jobs. It puts complex carbs on the table. And it makes people feel good about themselves. At a time when things look pretty bleak, dressing up actually gives us a much-needed boost, whether it’s in vintage band tees (Maddox), nautical-striped tees just like muh-muh-muh-momma’s (Kingston), or knit spiderweb tights under a peasant dress from the Salvation Army under a Tsumori Chisato jacket under an origami paperboat hat you made yourself, which you were supposed to float on the river with your playmates but decided it would make a cute topper instead (Tavi). A bit questionable, yes. But when it’s quick, painless, and indescribably palatable (especially when you’re doing trend upon trend upon trend on its way out), that’s when fashion gains cred — when you can get away with it.