Noihsaf
Posted on November 16, 2013 | posted by:What’s wrong with fashion? I hope it was simpler and with more goodwill than it is now. So I looked up the etymology of the word “fashion”:
Fashion (n.)
c.1300, “shape, manner, mode,” from Old French façon (12c.) “face, appearance; construction, pattern, design; thing done; beauty; manner, characteristic feature,” from Latin factionem(nominative factio) “group of people acting together,” literally “a making or doing,” from facere “to make”
People challenge fashion because it panders to the bad side of people: the side that of greedy, jealous, irrational, complicated, and contradictory. Fashion controls and pampers our lust and makes money of it. What happened?
Workers in the fashion machine
Fashion has become an industry with fashion workers acting as countless but replaceable parts of this gorgeous machine. “Ta-ta-ta-ta-” the sound of high heels, perfect hairstyle and make-up…The careers connected with fashion are always bling bling. However, there was a joke about fashion magazine: what the fashion magazines do is teach people who earn 4k/m with how do people who earn 20k/m spend money by a bunch of fashion editors earning 8k/m. It’s so true! What’s more, do you find that the fashion magazines in Beijing is sharing the same content as NYC’s?
Consumerism is the lubricant of this machine as well as commercial is the fuel. Apart from fashion magazines, “there are professions really harmful and possibly one profession is phonier. Advertising, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today,” said Victor Papanek in his book Designing for the Real World.
Fashion got an Alzheimer’s disease
Forgetting the latest thing (did I have lunch today?) and remembering the oldest story in childhood is the most obvious symptom of early Alzheimer’s disease. Don’t you think fashion is like someone who has a sickness like this? Fashion has a poor memory with the just-out-of-fashion things and embrace the vintage trendy element in 1980s warmly. So called “fashion” is a “noihsaf”, a reflux process of “abandon- retrieve- retro- abandon- retrieve-retro.” The fashion machine keeps running in a certain routine to be boring, forgetful and stupid.
So in the end, what happens to all the fashion stuff we bought? At this rate of consumption, it can’t fit into our houses even though the average U.S. house size has doubled in this country since the 1970s. It all goes out in the garbage. And that brings us to disposal. All of this garbage (stuff we bought) either gets dumped in a landfill, which is just a big hole in the ground, or first it’s burned in an incinerator and then dumped in a landfill. Either way, both pollute the air, land, water and, don’t forget, change the climate. World will be finally exploded because of “fashion trash”.
The earth becomes ugly with every “pretty” product we buy every second. How ironic!
How will fashion die?
Although it is biased I am still looking forward to seeing the end of fashion industry. This will be difficult unless it dies in an unnatural way, like global war, huge financial crisis, environmental disaster or outer space aggression. Fashion, as an unnecessary of human being’s first and second level of needs according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs will finally be ignored by the world. No fashion week, no SS/FW trend and collection releasing, no fashion magazines with luxury commercials, celebrities no longer pretend to walk on street with the deliberately casual, internet and 3G will be interrupted, department stores and boutiques closed… Thus, no one has something new to wear. Hooray! Everyone starts to look up their storage and closet for old clothes and even shares with family members and neighborhood. No “in” or “out”, the understanding of fashion from people’s intuition reflects on mix-match of styles and colors and the reconfiguration of different vintage clothes.
Designers don’t design fashion; real fashion is an emergence from both top-down and bottom-up. Fashion can exist with a new form by emergence, a way that is guided and designed by no one. The human instinct towards the balance of functionality and aesthetics is the most fair and natural decision maker and trend leader. Anyway, this is my own wishful thinking. Our civilization is as complicated as the universe, unfortunately, it’s becoming more complex instead of simpler.
The new fig leaf
The original value of clothes is keeping warm and acting as the fig leaf, so does fashion. The more civilized, the more complicated the “embarrassment” means. “I am not a barbarian,” the fig leaf on your waist claims, while fashion claims: “I am not the mass. I have my life style.”
This is a way to balance wildness and adhere social complexity. It promises the cultures evolving, races migration and classes change, which means, you start to look down on people wearing Old Navy when you start to wear Zara someday, but soon you will feel shame when standing with the ones in Armani Exchange. In other words, fashion makes you keep feeling embarrassed by making your fig leaf transparent. At the same time, society will merge and evolve when you keep updating your sense of shame. The sense of superiority is build and exposed. Cultures will evolve, races will migrate, classes will change while we are finding next fashion tag as our fig leaf.
Let’s get to the point, can we face the world nakedly and throw all fashion tags away? I once was confident with it before I found myself showing my “tag” of my education background subconsciously. Suddenly I knew, it is so hard to forget no matter luxury handbags or famous school which are the same thing: the fashion tags that attached on our body: the new fig leaf.