High Fashion Average Woman

me in NYC 2011.

As a rockabilly princess in the ’80s

I knew something was totally off when, in September (the time of Back-to-School) fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 was showing horizontal stripe shirts, leggings, and boots as the Fall fashion trend.  Then, as I was reviewing the Spring-Summer 2013 shows, I noticed the Grunge look (one of my favorites) start to creep up on us like the ghost of Seattle bands past….

For sure, I thought, it’s me just getting old–seen it all, done it all, and what’s selling to the teens is the kind of stuff they see on Mom and Dad in pictures from their youth.  Is there anything really wrong with wanting to dress like your Mom and Dad?  I don’t know–I did it back in the rockabilly days in the 80′s.

Then again,in the 80′s I’d dressed a lot of different ways, depending on the music I was into.  That lasted most of the way into the 90′s.  Falling off the cliff of fashion into the realm of style seemed to be what all adults were supposed to do once we weren’t part of the fashion mag demographic….

But it’s been more than that.  Since the late 90′s there’s been a massive change in communications technologies.  The changes in our computers and our televisions and our telephones has been astounding and confounding.  Everyone, across all professions and sectors of the populace, has been touched by these changes that seem to some of us like science fiction come true  (come to think of it, even our science fiction isn’t what it used to be.)  Business models have been destabilized,  and the ability to pinpoint a trend is almost impossible because trends change at the speed of light.

Then it’s really no wonder, in the midst of communications confusion and business model failures,  that the changes in fashion have (perhaps) slowed their pace to something close to a  halt.  Nothing seems all that new–or what is indeed new on the runways is not meant to be worn outside on the street by the common woman, man, or entertainer. We have, instead, ironic facial hair, too-tight hipster pants, badly sewn fast fashion, child-like furry hats, crippling high heels (no, wait, we had those in the 70′s too,) and sites that try to sell us on the idea they are exclusive clubs offering us exclusive deals on exclusive fashion items (that somehow seem like fashion items we’d either never wear or have already worn in some other decade.)

What’s left, then?  What do we, the masses who don’t care to spend$500 on a $1200 dress that doesn’t come in our size anyway?  What will we wear in pictures, or remember of the ’00′s and the ’10′s of the 21-st century?  Will there be anything like the nostalgia for the look of this time the way we have nostalgia for those different decades of the 20th century?  What music will we remember, and will we still have friends who remember the same music?  Or will we all be dancing our own tunes, wearing our own ideas of whats fashion?  We may be taking a lot of pictures, loading them up to various social media sites, filtering through Instagram or the Next Big Thing to make them look nostalgic.  But it will be mostly a second-hand nostalgia, a sense of the 21st century, glazed with a 20th century patina.

Time stands still and moves forward.  A woman from Warhol’s Factory has a meaningful conversation with a boy who looks like Kurt Cobain while dancing to Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Velvet.”  The ghost of Buddy Holly talks on his smartphone to a hologram of  Johnny Ramone about the relevance of  three-chord progressions.

There’s a scene in the movie Looper, where Jeff Daniel’s character mocks the fashion style of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character as coming from a century that the younger man has no idea of nor understanding about.  Given that Daniel’s character is supposed to come from a future where there’s time travel, and that the story itself takes place in the future,  what he says is something of a mind-fuck.  A character from the future knows more about the distant past than a character living in that current-day future.  Maybe that’s where we are right now:  that some of us–those of us who have the memory of the history of certain looks–can sit back and bust on the ones who are doomed to repeat them while wearing something from the decade we ourselves find most suitable, perhaps made by our own hands.   It’s a shame though that so many who are repeating those looks in their fashion lines are making beaucoup bucks off of those who don’t quite get how it’s all become some sort of  joke out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

This essay was inspired by What Will We Miss When It’s 2033? in the 1/4/13 New York Times’ Fashion & Style section.

Related articles

• The difference between Style and Fashion is Quality (imanmansour.wordpress.com)
• Weekend read: are we suffering from fast-fashion fatigue? (fashionising.com)
• Grunge-Inspired Fashion: Do or Don’t? (glamour.com)

Tags: average woman, cool stuff, fashion, fast fashion, new york city, personal style, retail, style