Intelligence Online
NEWS
STORY
|
CREDIT: Susan B. Markisz, National Post
|
|
"The fact that you can buy a dress for $15 creates
an attitude that clothes are disposable," says Michelle Lee,
author of Fashion Victim.
|
Michelle Lee says she wishes she could take everyone on a
tour of the cafeteria where she used to eat lunch when she was an editor at
the now defunct Mademoiselle magazine.
"It was like a fashion show every day," says Lee
of the eatery frequented by staff at several Condé Nast publications
including Vogue and Glamour. "There was one woman I will always remember.
She was wearing a tight, strapless black dress with 3 1/2-inch Manolo Blahnik
heels. She was getting a salad. This was lunch time and this was what she wore
to work that day. It all suddenly seemed so ridiculous to me."
It was over lunch in that cafeteria that Lee decided to
redefine the term "fashion victim" to include such people as this
beautiful though overdressed woman. "What we usually think of as a
fashion victim is someone who piles horrible trends one on another on to their
body and they just look terrible," says Lee, the author of Fashion
Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of
Style. "But when you really start to analyze what a true fashion victim
is, it does include those people that most of us would look at and think of as
nice-looking."
The fashion world has attracted more media attention over
the last 10 years than ever before, with television and newspaper coverage in
addition to the usual fashion magazines. Technological advances in the
industry have reduced the time it takes to copy high-end designer clothes and
ship cheaper versions of them off to stores. Consumers have never been urged
to shop shop shop as much as they have in the past few years. And all of this
has left people feeling exhausted from the increasing speed of the trend mill,
broke from the need to shell out for the latest thing again and again and left
with a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear. "What's more, we're so
busy going with the flow that we never develop our own personal style.
Instead, we've become a culture of copycats," writes Lee.
Fashion Victim tries to identify how things got out of hand
in the last few years. One big change Lee points to is that the industry has
moved from being a business based on the art of design to being basically just
business. She reminds us that part of the reason Yves Saint Laurent retired
was because the fashion world had become too corporate for his liking. It's
all about the brand now, whether the brand is the Gap or Calvin Klein or
Chanel. Lee likens this slavish preference for brand names over personal style
to wearing gang colours.
"Give or take a few rare souls, nearly all of the stars
we look up to today as our fashion role models don't even have a clear-cut
sense of their own style -- just close symbiotic relationships with
designers," writes Lee, pointing out that designers often give clothes to
stars for the promotion.
She also points out that you would never have seen Frank
Sinatra wearing cuffed blue jeans, even though they were quite fashionable in
his day, because they weren't part of his own personal style.
There are a lot of things that seem to bother Lee about the
fashion world, although she continues to work as a writer and editor in the
field.
While she has succumbed to the lure of cheap fashion
knock-offs at such outlets as Zara and H&M, she worries that cheap clothes
make us see fashion as Kleenex. She calls this speed chic. "The fact that
you can buy a dress for $15 blows my mind, but it creates an attitude among
consumers that clothes are disposable," says Lee. "I don't want to
make fun of H&M but the clothes are not that well made. It fosters this
idea that you can wear something once and not feel guilty about it because
it's so cheap."
But the fact that trends change so quickly makes such cheap
stores almost a necessity. Who can afford to pay designer prices for something
that you might not wear twice in a season? It used to be that you could buy
good quality clothes and they would last several seasons. If they were classic
pieces, they could potentially stay in your wardrobe even longer. A good
designer used to be a signal of quality, but few care about that when the life
of a garment has been shortened to a few weeks or months.
"I love shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue and I used to
like looking at the sale merchandise," says Lee. "There are some
high-end designer things on the rack now on sale for $10,000. I wonder who is
going to buy a garment like that because anyone who shops a lot or knows about
fashion will know what season that item is from, so you can't wear it
now."
An addiction to fashion can be hard to break, and Lee
doesn't expect anyone to make drastic changes to their shopping habits
overnight. She does hope, however, that her book will be eye-opening to people
who are susceptible to trend pressure. She wants readers to recognize that
they are being manipulated by a huge industry. Consumers used to be happy with
the four lines of clothing that stores generally stocked -- spring, summer,
fall and winter -- but now most stores receive new shipments and new lines
every two weeks.
It disturbs Lee that shopping frequently appears as a
favourite hobby of a growing number of North Americans. "It's pretty sad
that our pastime is shopping," says Lee. "People go on vacation to
shop. It's a tourist attraction. Rather than go to Rome to see the Coliseum,
we go to the mall." Lee believes that our shopping addictions have been
at the expense of enjoying the finer things in our cultures like art, music
and literature.
"I don't expect anyone to quit playing the fashion game
cold turkey," says Lee. "But if you take baby steps, stop chasing
trends, think before you buy, you will recover from your fashion victimitis."
- Jeannie Marshall National
Post
3 March 2003
