Saturday, October 29, 2011

on Kate Durbin on the omnipresence of fashion.

From an interview of hers found here.

I’ll start with her nub first:

“…Fashion is seen culturally as the most ubiquitous and feminine and therefore the lowest of the arts, the most shallow and market-driven. Teenage girls are obsessed with fashion, as are drag queens. Serious people, “authentic” people, do not care about fashion. But the whole of life is a costume show, and it is one with deadly serious consequences…”

“Also, it is crucial to note that the costume show -- that is, life itself -- is unavoidable. So anyone who thinks he is not “into” fashion is fooling himself. Even if you live at a nudist colony, you are part of the show. If you have a body, you are part of the show.”

Right, I’m willing to grant for the sake of argument that one must have some kind of fashion and that one must have some degree of concern for her fashion. But surely it doesn’t follow from this that everyone is “into” fashion in the same degree and in the same respect anymore than we could say that everyone is gluttonous because everyone must eat food and thereby must have some concern for it. Again: it’s certainly true that in some utterly trivial sense that an Amish person is “into” fashion, but if we try to conclude from this that the Amish person’s preoccupation with fashion is thereby the same in degree and in kind as that of Madonna’s, we’re simply equivocating.

“Fashion is seen culturally as the most ubiquitous and feminine and therefore the lowest of the arts, the most shallow and market-driven. Teenage girls are obsessed with fashion, as are drag queens. Serious people, “authentic” people, do not care about fashion. But the whole of life is a costume show, and it is one with deadly serious consequences.”

From what I said above, apparently the whole of life is not a costume show, or at least it doesn’t have to be.

“While there can be deadly consequences for our fashion choices, fashion is a way to both play with and debunk the cultural narrative.”

Right, one tyrant often overthrows another. But pure and unadulterated virtue can and will break the thesis/antithesis inertia. Thus is the power of Faith, Hope, and Love.

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