“What seems disorienting about this absence [of a genius designer] is that fashion is no longer a discipline of interest mainly to female consumers and a cult of aesthetes. Like it or not, fashion has become something larger, a viral cultural force that sometimes seems only incidentally concerned with clothes. Cocteau wasn’t kidding when he said style is a simple way of saying complicated things- a point the United States Olympic Committee clearly noted (American teams may not have dominated in the medals, but in the parade of nations they killed the competition in jauntily classic Polo Ralph Lauren uniforms), as do politicos. Were the Dead Sea scrolls subjected to more exegesis than Michelle Obama’s floral print sheath at the Democratic National Convention in Denver? (Thakoon, by the way.) The voices of the blogosphere say, No.
"Yet, contradictory as this may seem, the notion of a Next Big Thing in fashion may itself be culturally discordant. As in film, music, and other arts, consumers have wearied of big names and labels. Except on TV, they are bored with diktats, with taste legislated by self-appointed “experts” and with camphor-scented archaisms like “stars.”
"They have lost the desire to partake of media in hunks: an entire musical album, or a single artist’s whole career.”
It sounds like Marx has predicted the downfall of the designers of 2008, more specifically the New York based designers in Fall 2008’s collections. Marx says, “The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men” (71). He goes on to say, “this fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces- labour’s product- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (71). The power that is independent of the producer, in fashion’s case, must be the individual’s agency over a garment’s representation, associations, and thus socially derived meaning or value. [Hidden] labels mean nothing in society- garments’ meanings endlessly fluctuate as they are relatively created by the wearer and the viewers.
Trebay’s article goes on about a DIY attitude prevalent among young consumers, which ultimately gives more power to the individual over the masses (even though the style of the masses is really composed of an elite club of “Heathers”). I can sense a DIY ethos, or at least a “tweak-it-to-your-one-of-a-kind-satisfaction” ethos. Alienation, or at least a visceral desire to be unique, and express yourself as accurately as possible, has surely created this new DIY ethos. For instance, even among the insanely rich and fashionable, one-of-a-kind dresses, or even custom fit dresses always surpass a “mass-produced” dress, even if (in the case of couture), “mass-produced” only means eight. It seems to me that the alienation Raymond Williams and Karl Marx define is still raging today. An unmatched, truly unique connection to garments, and more broadly the presentation of the self in society, is what our hearts are truly yearning for. Fashion may be breaking down from an oligarchy to feudal markets and homemade garments.
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