A Low Blow To High Fashion

The first (and only) time I saw Signs (i.e. the subpar M. Night Shyamalan effort, not a religious experience or whatever) I freaked out about the idea of the alien for most of the movie – What’s it going to be like, what’s it going to look like, will it speak?! But at the end, when I finally saw it, I was like, Huh. It’s not so bad. I actually kind of feel sorry for the thing.

I had a similar revelation post-watching 60 Minutes’ Profile on Anna Wintour. Those sunglasses, that disdaining tone, the fact that when designers discuss her, they kind of sound like Death Eaters praising Lord Voldemort – eek! Seeing her up close – sans shades – made something abundantly clear: The carefully crafted image is a lot scarier than the reality.

I can’t and won’t rag on Anna Wintour for her demeanor, her perfectionism and her penchant for brutal honesty: Character attacks are a cheap means of dancing around the problem in lieu of dealing with it. The problem isn’t Anna herself. The problem is that her editing is shit. To explain why, I’m going to make like a total cliche and quote Coco Chanel:

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.

I’ve always thought of Fashion – in the best sense of the term – as some sort of exchange. A designer creates a garment for us; if we like it, we buy it and wear it and praise the brand. The glossy mag serves as a link between the industry and the consumer, tailoring their content to the interests of the latter. It’s the consumer who keeps both the designers and the magazine in business, after all.

It sounds logical, but if you’ve ever read anything Conde Nasty, you know it’s a pipe dream. I don’t know when Fashion stopped paying attention to one half of what made it relevant in the first place. My hunch is that it happened around September of 1988. When Anna Wintour took control of Vogue.

Ms. Wintour clearly has an eye for sartorial design, one that’s challenged Fashion’s heavyweights to push the envelope. Designers interviewed for her 60 Minutes profile admitted they stake their reputations on the opinion of this one woman. Anna might have raised the bar for the industry side of Fashion but by only communing with designers, she reversed the spirit of Fashion itself. Instead of showing us things we could experience in our own lives, Vogue showed us things we should aim to experience – beauty we couldn’t compete with, things we couldn’t fit into, things we couldn’t afford. So we started believing that we weren’t beautiful enough, or thin enough, or rich enough, and our have-nots became more important than what we already had.

In one clip of Wintour’s profile, Alexander Wang shows her a silver sequined minidress from his latest collection, one that retails for $1200. Wintour deems the price “Very reasonable.” Sure it is… for the top 2% of the snob bracket. For the rest of us, $1200 isn’t reasonable. It’s rent.

Under Wintour, Vogue has always banked on their readers wanting something aspirational instead of something we could personally experience. I don’t know about you, but if I can’t fit into it and I can’t afford it and there’s a 5’10 knockout wearing it, I don’t give a fuck about it. The fact that Vogue’s ad revenue is down 25% tells me I’m not the only one.

Vogue has never left their pewter tower long enough to see Fashion on the streets and in the way we live. They’re as irrelevant now as they’ve always been.

It’s just taken an economic shitstorm to make us see it, to make us realize what Coco knew all along.

In order for Fashion to be good, it’s gotta be real.

It can’t – like its editrix-in-chief – hide behind dark sunglasses.