blue steel

At the risk of offending Christy Turlington, Derek Zoolander, and all those people out there with "Hollister" plastered across their chestal regions, I would like to take this opportunity to thrust my right forefinger dramatically to the sky and declare that fashion as it is practiced today is pretty much the new stupid.

The old stupid was easy to identify and laugh at, as it included such things as ridiculously starched ruffles choking the neck, pantyhose for men, and possibly a fake bottom or two in the form of a bustle. Or the slightly less old stupid, which had to do with lots of hairspray, pump-up high-tops and neon spandex shorts. We can all agree that the idiot ways our forbears chose to blow their money in an effort to like like large groups of other people as wastefully rich as themselves were, well, idiot (unlike, of course, today. which is different. and cooler).

Ah, today. I'm talking Dolce and Gabanana sunglasses, pre-ripped and soiled jeans and paying someone else (but not their slave-labour, third-world employees) exorbitant sums of money for the priviledge to plaster their corporate logos all over our respective backs, buttocks, thighs and chestals. I'm talking about drawers stuffed with twenty-two t-shirts, thirty-five pairs of pants and closets with one hundred and seventy-nine pairs of skate shoes (I poo you not, I just met someone who boasted this accoutrement accomplishment!). And don't even let me get started on the money, time and effort that gets frittered away in an effort to shape, condition and batter the mass of dead keratin strands that is our hair - the tons and tons of eco-malevolent, carcinogenic hair products that get absorbed through skin and washed into the groundwater.

I'm not saying I think everyone should wear flour-sack guru-suits and let their hair go wandering where it will... not necessarily... but what I am saying is that I'm sick to death of the sentiment that oozes from the walls that to be "stylish" (whatever the effstance that is) is ridiculously important, and perhaps even a moral virtue. I probably like creativity as much as the next effimate-looking guy, and figure it ought to extend to the garment industry, but I hate the idea that fashionable (read: expensive) clothing is an important part of the goodness of self I ought to be trying to maintain.

I know, I know - THEY (that is, the ruthless critics that demonaically possess the popidiot word) would claim to only hold me responsible to dress to the absolute best I can afford - but they certainly don't mean the best I can afford conscienably as a human being aware of the cyclical poverty in which billions of the world's inhabitants live. They understand, these perpetrators of perpetual poverty, that for the runaway stagecoach of our economy to stay upright, the horses (that's us) have to be whipped into an ever-greater frenzy of needless consumption.

The problem is that it is everywhere, as though the north american consumer-machine coach is careening madly through a forest full of pepe-le'pew style skunks - skunks are flying left and right, and the stench infects everything. It is in movies and TV and suchlike and so on and on and on until it has become a part of the attitudes of the populace - so much so that KINDERGARTEN kids who don't dress "right" get valued less as human beings by their peers AND teachers (seriously, it's true. I saw it on TV).

When I get depressed about all this, though, or find myself hopping on the bandwagon of skewed belief that would have me thinking that the clothes actually DO make the man (what brilliant advertising executive came up with THAT one?), I just remember that most of the world's population is NOT a victim of this idiocy, and NOT, as a popidiot would be quick to claim, just because they're too poor to afford it. Some people, believe it or not, happen to have their heads screwed on in approximately the right direction. And maybe, if I try, I can become more like them.