all we need is clothes

"In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up with a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth; just as in the earlier predatory stage it is necessary for the barbarian man to come up with the tribe's standard of physical endurance, cunning, and skill at arms.”

The impracticality of this recent purchase (the skirt) is kind of sad really, because as much as I love it I know it's not really going to be a staple wardrobe piece- I mean look at it- it's ridiculous. This one goes in the category of the cowboy jacket- but I love it so much I NEEDED it. 

I really love that quote by Thorstein Veblen above because while he's not talking directly about clothes, its so much a part of the way we think about ownership- for me what I own most of is clothes. This notion that we have to "appear" to have an indefinite disposable amount of wealth is pure trickery of clothes. Today it's easy to own a lot of clothes because they're cheap, made by machines, and there doesn't have to be anything particularly special about it for us to own it. This abundance of clothes is the trickery of looking like you have money to spare and more importantly time to kill. 

The leisure lifestyle that Veblen writes about is far from attainable to most people, but most people can alternate what they wear everyday, they don't look like their in a uniform because of work or social necessity, they can look like they can be as ridiculous as they want. Does wearing a skirt like this make me look like I have an endless amount of wealth the way that barbarians collected skill? No. But it does make me feel rich (because I'm obviously not doing any real work in this look) and awesome (because there's nothing better than vintage Lanvin bought on sale) and that's what it's all about and why I bought it. 

fake it till ya make it

In this case I'll be faking it until I go a little blind- which all in all I'll go ahead and call a little unhealthy.

“If you want to bring about fundamental change 

in people's belief and behavior, 

a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, 

you needed to create a community around them, 

where those new beliefs could be practiced, 

expressed and nurtured.” 

-Malcolm Gladwell 

While I'm on the Malcolm Gladwell train I thought I would bring some attention to how funny it is that I so desperately want glasses that I'm willing to just wear them even though I don't need them. The community around glasses, the stigma, the accessorizing possibility, they're all things I crave. These glasses are Super's the nerd glasses of choice right now and I dig them so hardcore. 

Glasses mean that there's something wrong with your natural state, that you can't perform up to par without the help of an accessory. Who says clothes don't matter? 

(influencer) check (stickiness) check (diffusion) check

“in a given process or system some people matter more than others” 80/20 principle

-Malcolm Gladwell 

Malcolm Gladwell has tons of little theories, that's why middle of the road readers can enjoy his books and why he's become very very rich, it's also why Alexander McQueen is very rich- well, was. 

If the 80/20 principle applies to anyone in the fashion world its probably Karl Lagerfeld first, and then Vera Wang, Alexander McQueen, The Olsens, and all the other people that have gotten smart enough to sell their clothes for cheaper through Target Go etc. This McQ by McQueen dress was basically a steal on Gilt Group and I'm totally obsessed with how weird it makes my body look- I mean I can't expect it to fit as well as a real real McQueen becasue I didn't fork over the cash for that, I forked over the cash for like 5 percent of the 80 percent of the 80/20 principle (oof- bad math). 

To top it all off these heels that I've worn straight through to the core are from Forever XXI who has a little bit of a different take on 80/20- they're probably the winners here- they just copy the people who do 80% of the work- if my math was good enough I'd be able to figure out exactly what side they land on, but the whole numbers thing already has me dizzy. 

Who's the winner here McQ or Forevz?

the modern market

He created the character Woman, 

and then shaped his store to suit their nature.

-The Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola

In the "flip flop" post I alluded to the idea of men and women switching roles in the world of fashion. In Emile Zola's book The Ladies Paradise, he finds a kind of hybrid between fiction and history to really explore the idea of women as shoppers by nature and the industry created for them to live out their desires to dress. 

It totally blows my mind that Emile Zola wasn't a particularly fashion obsessed dude himself, in fact his most famous books is an equally as detailed account of the coal mining industry, which other than in Zoolander has probably never been linked to the fashion industry (haha, good one). The book is about the conception and development of the department store and the main male character, in the above quote, claims to create woman as a character who is inherently thrift, can't resist a bargain and loves to buy, buy, buy. 

Emile Zola would be shocked that a little bit into the twenty first century we've not only expanded our department stores, but we thought of this crazy thing called the internet and then turned that into a giant mall. Actually, he probably wouldn't be shocked at all. 

on value and crap

That last post left me thinking about things that we value for no real reason. Well, that's exactly the kind of sentence that this blog is supposed to be taking on- um, if it happens then there's a reason or at least a story right?
Here are a few more things that are really dumb to value:

Pearls, really? Aren't they just like condensed sand?

Again, animal skin? As in what covers our carcass?

Ugly fabric swathed into bundles.

I may not have a real quick answer to why we like things, why we value them (besides connecting us to other people, which was the point I was trying to get at in the last post. One more note on that: consumerists might argue that the reason we buy anything at all is to make us feel part of human community, more on that later). Here's what I can offer right now, a little historical perspective:

“Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.”

-Old Testament, Genesis 

So, why exactly we gift and value I can't explain, but I can say that this notion that we express ourselves that way and that we have always been invested in the value of goods is pretty clear dating back to at least the Bible, and jeez would I like to get my hands on a coat of many colors. 

metallica

 “the Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread: for howfine soever that may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, that sheep was a sheep still for wearing it. They wonder much to hear that gold which in itself is so useless a thing, should be made everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has it's value, should yet be thought of as less value than this metal.” 
-Sir Thomas More

A friend from Puerto Rico came to New York this week and, like a good, well mannered Puerto Rican (if you don't know Puerto Ricans have impeccable social manners), brought me a gift with her. Come to think of it, I wish all my friends with Boriqua. Anyway, she brought me these earrings from a designer who's store I spotted but hadn't gotten around to visiting. The earrings just so happen to channel this really fab seventies girl who wears wide leg jeans and heels for lunch time who I kind of want to become over the summer- oh, the power of clothes. Anyway, from across the Bermuda Triangle Adriana read my mind and brought me these earrings to get me started. 

It's so funny when people  buy you a gift. It's this kind of admission to trying to understand you and by nature of this gift, your style. When Adri told me the earrings reminded her of me it really got me thinking, what does she think of me. Of course a part of me is what I put on my body, otherwise she'd reallyyyyyy know me. 

Utopia is a kind of funny way to get back to this. The Utopians value nothing except sameness. They make conscious strides to devalue what they know other cultures place an unjustifiable value on- like gold. So, it made me wonder, did Adri know that the gold symbolized value and it would both make me like the gift and prove that she values me as a friend? Did the style alone convince her? Whatever made her choose these earrings, they're really just a hunk of metal, but because she gave them to me they're valuable.  

caricature for comedic effect/appropriation of folk tradition

“Sources based on secondary interpretation inevitably carry with them the dangers of biased or misrepresentation. The inherent moralism and censure of monastic sources, for example, constructs a history of dress based on exaggeration and outrage; whilst literary sources such as the widely-used Chaucer can ten towards caricature for comedic effect, or a sense of broadness and lack of historical specificity in their appropriation of folk traditions and earlier literary forms.” 

-Christopher Breward in "The Culture of Fashion"

Christopher Breward's quote seemed like an okay way to start to talk about this cowboy-like outfit that I was wearing the other day. First of all, lets talk about the belt before the quote. You know when you buy something and you just can't stop wearing it with everything? It matches with your entire wardrobe. You can't imagine your life before this certain piece of clothes. You need it everyday. Around this time your friends, the good ones, the honest ones, tell you you need to chill the fuck out with wearing that thing everyday. That's what's happening with this belt and I right now. We're in a messy love affair. I want it on me all the time. 

The thing about this belt is that is a kind of cowboy belt, but its Ralph Lauren, so somehow it looks like it belongs on any outfits that feels really American. All of this, of course, seriously, of course, is really silly, but that's what Christopher Breward was talking about. We border of parody of other times with our clothes sometimes, we appropriate some old folklore, like cowboys, and this broadness, this lack of specificity is how we draw our own characatures. Our outfits everyday, particularly mine lets not kid ourselves, are borderline sometimes for comedic effect. Our dress is secondary interpretation of a broad history, biased, barely represented at all so that we can tell our own history, kind of like me and the cowboy belt. 

Lately I have a particular penchant for any opportunity to wear dead animals. Now, you must know that I didn't always feel this way, so people just never care, but that's not me. I used to basically sob when my mom would wear a fur coat, then I would try and guilt her into not wearing it, and finally I would resolve to tell her it, and she, was disgusting. I would make a show at family friend's houses with taxidermy tokens from hunting trips. And I pull over, no matter what the circumstance, to try and save a dog, which has resulted in many a scoundrel in my lap while I drive.
But lately, all of that is gone. I've basically stopped eating meat and started wearing dead animals all over my body.
Any word on why this might be happening would be helpful.

hammer time all the time

They say that fashion is cyclical, like there's some magical cycle that pops back up totally randomly- like poof! The 80's are in. Poof! Kitten heels are no longer ugly!
I'd say it's a little more complicated than that.
Like, why is it ok to look like MC Hammer totally seriously? Actually: side note: I have found myself looking like a part of a British 80's girl rap group pretty often lately.
Fashion is cyclical because certain values that we identified with at that time were manifested into the clothes of the time and those values have surfaced again in society. We only know so many ways to outwardly identify the way we feel inside, not to be over simplistic or Hallmarkesque.
So why is it ok to look like these silly pictures above? Well, that's anyones guess, it's probably another over simplistic response, it has something to do with the recession.

label whore

Lil' Kim and David La Chapelle really put the whore in label whore. A long time ago someone told me never to wear labels across your chest because they're just free advertising; someone should pay you. I've remembered that and stuck to it (with the exception of a bad Coach bucket hat phase in middle school, uh.. what? I didn't say that, did you?), but it seems like you never see a fashion blog with out dress credits. 

On one hand, the designers deserve some credit, on the other hand who the hell cares that your white v-neck shirt is predictably American Apparel? 

Credit in fashion is a contemptuous debate due largely in part to the namesake of this blog, trickle across. Trickle across is the idea that fashion moves so quickly now, ideas spreading, inspiration from all over, globalization, mass production- who the heck knows whether credit should be given to the top of the chain, the designers, or the bottom, street culture? 

flip flop

There was a time when men dressed, like, really dressed.

stickiness

Some trends stick and some trends don't. This ridiculous Indian jacket that I'm wearing here, well, it's the kind of trend that you'd only see on fashion blogs, and fashion blogs, and fashion people, basically look like super freak alien versions of people. 

My point is, yes, I do have a point, that the trends an avid fashion blog reader can spot don't always make it to the mainstream, but when they do, you can bet that they were on the fashion blogs months before. 

Malcom Gladwell, in one of his many sociological/cultural critique books for dummies, calls this the stickiness factor. 

Here are some of the reasons why some things are sticky and some... well, they're like this jacket. 

the narrative form- people respond to stories 

influencers- if cool people wear it, other, less cool people will imitate them

the early adaptors and the innovators- pretty much the same as above, people who do things before the mainstream 

utopia

Utopia, Sir Thomas More's pivotal text, is about everyone looking the same in a world where status doesn't exist and uniformity is everything. The book uses clothes as a tool to describe the flattening of a society where all is equal and same. 

This is the seminal book of communist theory, which of course doesn't work, is an alien world in our consumptive world of choice, choice, choice. But is it really? Think about this staple of every trash tabloid magazine: 

“the Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread: for howfine soever that may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, that sheep was a sheep still for wearing it. They wonder much to hear that gold which in itself is so useless a thing, should be made everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has it's value, should yet be thought of as less value than this metal.” 

pecuniary culture

Thorstein Veblen is the master of coining catchy terms used by sociologists, economists, marketers, and fashion students alike- conspicuous consumption and pecuniary culture are just two of his token slogans. Basically, Thorstein Veblen writes, in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class about American's desire to buy, buy, buy.
Veblen Theory is basically supply and demand; we want what there is less of because that in turn makes it more valuable. The Theory of the Leisure Class is pretty bleak. It argues that we're fooled by the trickery of value and that we want to look, above anything else, like we don't work- hence the title. The leisure class are those who don't have to dress in a utilitarian uniform of work, who can choose what they want to look like. In short, it's what all fashion bloggers want to look like- they have it all and it's all they do.

Above are shots of Opening Ceremony, a kind of lifestyle retail mecca, that sells- well, they sell the leisure class.

ABOVE: White box clutch and rope heels by Alexander Wang $795 and $650. 

ABOVE: Jeremy Scott brief bag $415

ABOVE: Christopher Kane lace jacket $1,705

Can you take a good luck at some of this crap? The worst part? I actually want it.

self absorbed sociology

“singularity in dress is ridiculous: in fact, it is generally looked upon as proof that the mind is somewhat deranged.”

saint john baptist de la salle.

It's rare that a saint gets quoted on a fashion blog, but leave it to this Catholic-school-scared fashion blogger to use one to open up the ideas behind this new online-vomit-experiment. Then again, most fashion bloggers don't open up a new blog with a warning that only deranged people are singular in dress.

But this isn't a fashion blog really, it's a sociological look at clothes, a way of opening up a conversation about fashion as a microcosm for culture and society that otherwise goes untold on the brb g2g shorthand language of the internet. There's certainly no lack of fashion on the internet, the fashion blog has become a phenomenon of the internet age, but most of the times they don't really say much, and there is much to say about fashion, decoration, self branding, cultural identity, clothes, post-modernity, lifestyle and pecuniary culture, what better way to start that conversation than to use the standard form of fashion narcissism- the fashion blog.

back to that quote. singularity in dress is a ridiculous fallacy. All those girls posting pictures of their carefully curated ensembles everyday, professing their personal style, well it's all ridiculous. Maybe not, I believe in personal style, and I believe it's important, but I don't believe that any of it is singular and I surely think that if you dress yourself to look truly singular- you probably will look deranged.

Even the most stylish of individuals are not creating singular images, they are reproducing other images that appeal to their personal taste. Some people have better personal taste than others, they pick up on a more cohesive set of images and better reproduce them in their own way. Anyone who doesn't follow a set of preexisting images is probably insane. All we, stylish people (lol I'll flatter myself), are trying to do is look cohesive, establish a "look" for lack of a better term, that makes sense and representations of our inner selves. A truly off-the-rails personal style, I mean bat-shit-crazy, well, that's proof that you're deranged.