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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN August 29, 2004 Issue 
Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style by Michelle Lee Broadway Books, 2003 
The Heart's Eternal Quest I know exactly why from the moment I set foot in America I have subscribed to fashion magazines. Never mind the atrocious writing, the tableaus of seemingly drugged, deranged and emaciated models or the circus-like clothing and makeup. Never mind the pure waste of money. To me Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and Elle are the epitome of capitalist decadence, which those of us who grew up in that workers' paradise called communism were not allowed to look at. Since communism repudiated everything bourgeois (fashion was considered a frivolous bourgeois pastime and antithetical to proletarian needs), fashion magazines were unavailable to the people behind the Iron Curtain. Occasionally we did get to see the Soviet magazine Lada, across the pages of which hefty, stolid women posed artificially in simple clothes and big fur hats. There were only a few stores selling ready-to-wear clothes and those were rumpled and ill fitting with a distinctly industrial quality about them, very much like the industrial chic fashion trend of the 1990s. Most people had their clothes made. Since private businesses were not allowed, tailors', seamstresses' and modistes' home ateliers flourished underground. Finding fabric for a suit, a coat or a dress was perhaps the biggest hurdle to dressing. Every so often two or three designs of fabric would arrive from the regional textile factory to the local "Narmag" - an acronym for "People's Store" -and women would queue up to purchase a few meters of whatever available for a new dress. Within a couple of weeks the town would fill up with women wearing dresses of the same fabric. Decidedly, this was a very effective way to discourage individuality, considered by communism a social malady. And that is precisely why I marvel at American fashions and fads, which have worked and continue to work relentlessly to obliterate individuality. "Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style" by Michelle Lee is a provocative look at how and why we dress and the dichotomy of fashion. The author, who has worked as editor of fashion magazines, casts a critical eye on some of the more ridiculous fashions through the ages, examines "how fashion has become enmeshed in our everyday lives and illuminates the many ways it has affected society." In the beginning, people wore animal skins and furs for protection. Lee does not go into why and when people began to turn the necessity of dressing into a fashion. But she does make comments on some of the fashions of bygone eras that were not only absurd and made the wearer look stupid but were also uncomfortable. In fact, the author points out with numerous examples that fashion is not designed either for comfort or practicality. Consider the 18th century wigs aristocrats wore. The most fashionable of them extended up to four feet and often rodents and insects found a cozy home in their tangled mesh. Once upon a time fashion was a symbol of one's social standing. The more uncomfortable, ornate and complicated the clothing, the louder it bespoke a person of leisure and money. Utilitarian clothing of course, denoted a working person. But fashion no longer makes these types of distinctions. With ready-to-wear designer knock-offs and designer label clothing, anyone can wear fashions very similar to what is worn by those who can afford couture. According to the author, "a Fashion Victim is someone who follows trends slavishly, a person who is not necessarily captivated by the beauty of a new garment so much as by the mere novelty of it and the social standing it conveys." In short, to most of us Fashion Victims do not look good in the clothes they wear. On the contrary, most often they look ridiculous and pathetic. This is especially true today. Fashion Victims disregard rules of class, elegance and style. Instead they copy blindly what celebrities wear regardless of how the item looks on them or on the celebrities for that matter. This, coupled with what the author calls McFashion, the proliferation of uniform dressing sold by the Gap and the likes of it all over the world, have produced a conformity of dress communism tried very hard to enforce. Lee also discusses the way models and designers influence, or rather, brainwash us about what we wear and think of current fashions and fads. She also allocates a fair amount of space for discussion of the deplorable conditions within the garment industry - the sweatshops and the inequitable wages. "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics," Lee writes, "the average American garment worker earns $7 per hour, compared to 15 cents per hour for workers in Indonesia." Yet, most people close their eyes to these labor brutalities and continue to buy clothes incessantly. If they are to protest anything, it would be protesting the use of fur and advocating animal rights rather than to protest the use of humans as slave labor or to advocate human rights. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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