Dilatory

I didn’t wanted to be in the fashion industry for the same reason that I didn’t go into finance or advertising or marketing. These industries don’t provide anything tangible to make human life better; they are based on exploiting money out of people by manipulating desire and need.

I love clothes, but outside of design itself, fashion isn’t really about clothes at all, it’s about the extremely sinister pretension of wealth displaying. Let’s get to the root of it: fashion is for people with money. Fashion is a luxury. People seemed to understand this before the internet. But now that we have all these self-serving information sources like blogs and “lifestyle” sites spouting that one can be a fashionista at any budget, people are starting to believe the lie. 

Places like Refinery29 and the Glamorai try to constantly sell us $1000 coats with consolation add-ons of an affordable $100 version. Are we to be “inspired” by these suggestions or homogenized in our aesthetics? These websites dictate what is chic and what looks stylish—just short of explicitly saying things like: if you don’t desire a $100 Alexander Wang T-shirt, then you’re an idiot.

I see so many girls obsessing over fashion, over these expensive luxury items, as if it’s financially responsible for a broke college student to own them. I have seen so many people desperately in debt from their efforts to keep up their style. And I have seen minimum wage workers slaving over ear-drum breaking machines to meet their demand.

These site are just trying to sell us things we can neither afford or need. Why should we want any of it? 

Why can’t we just accept that fashion is for people who don’t have anything better to do with their money? Fashion isn’t for the poor. It just isn’t. But these sites have us wrongly convinced that it’s not about the money. If you don’t have a lot of money, it’s irresponsible to shell it out for a LouisV. And it doesn’t make us commoners anymore upper echelon to own an over-decorated piece of leather. There are people like the urban poor who are far more deserving of our monetary aid.

And don’t get me started on designer collaborations with budget stores. You’re just getting suckered into paying more for a shoddy version of something you didn’t really want anyway.

Like Kreayshawn says, you may own a Gucci, but “bitch you ain’t no barbie. I see you work at Arby’s.”

I recently read Peter Medawar’s The Art of the Soluble, which really brought my attention to what he refers to as the cause of the “schism between the pure and the applied”. Medawar, a famous immunologist, was referring to science, of course, but what struck me was that this idea isn’t just true about science and math.

It exemplifies a phenomenon so ingrained into the collective consciousness that fashion suffers no less from it than any academic field. I am speaking of the barrier between couture and ready-to-wear, as you no doubt have guessed.

(Alexander McQueen: RTW and Couture.)

Medawar lays the blame for science’s divide on an “unwitting Immanuel Kant” who wrote obscure and difficult to understand philosophy in virtue and language back in the 18th century. The gist is basically that Kant was totally awesome, but also totally esoteric, and so the two began to be equated with each other. Hence highbrow and useless started to equal good.

For fashion, an eerily similar thing happened at the same time. Around the industrial revolution (also 18th century omg!), clothing started to be mass manufactured and so the whole “ready to wear” thing started to equate with common clothing. And so couture began to ascent into its “pure” status of being avant garde and just like in science: difficult and useless.

But let’s not get carried away and start saying Kant had anything to do with the evolution of fashion dichotomy. That’s not the point. The point is that in research, the pure and applied sciences are beginning to play nice again, and I wonder if fashion is to follow similar footsteps seeing as it’s happened once before.

I’m arguing that thinking couture and handcrafted as somehow superior to machine constructed ready to wear is a mindset of the past. In fact, I’d even go as far to say that often times a lot more love goes into the crafting of a ready to wear garment. Couture is a selfish personal exploration by a designer, a one-shot statement made for the sake of speaking, if you will. Couture isn’t made to showcase women’s bodies or to make anyone feel specific things when they wear it (unless you’re Elie Saab and you’re dressing celebrities); it’s a sincere confession of art by an individual. If you like it, that’s just icing on the cake.

Ready to wear, on the other hand, is a gift for you, drafted and re-drafted with you in mind. It’s made for your eye, your body, made to let you make the statement. It’s not sewn onto a dress form with the understanding it’ll never get washed. It’s made so you can wear it again and again, each time looking only marginally worse than when it was brand new.

(Left: hand cast binding. Right: Serger machine binding. You be the judge.)

There’s often a gut instinct that couture is somehow better, but it really isn’t. It’s just less economically viable—human hands need to be paid, machines don’t. In fact, as a seamstress, I can tell you that hand sewn seams are no more sturdy than machine seams. I’ll get engineering and say there’s a trade off between adhering two pieces together and poking so many holes you compromise the integrity of the materials.

So let’s play nice. Couture and ready to wear are like apples and oranges. Just because one is much more expensive and elusive doesn’t make it better. Things you can’t wear are, in fact, clearly not better.

What I hope will happen is that the conversation between the two increases and instead of having ready to wear translations of couture, people can begin to refer them as two separate but equal translations on one idea. As in, designers stop thinking of ready to wear as a chore to be completed so they can make enough money to support their couture endeavors. It’ll be a glorious day when RTW no longer stands in the shadow of couture as some kind of a lesser afterthought.