15 July, 2008

This, Too, has Passed

I don't generally cross-post here, but every now and again someone will nail it so well that I have to prostrate myself in the direction of their URL.



A dear friend of mine allowed once that she consorts almost exclusively with gay and married men because both understand womanliness from the inside out. Simon Doonan (who is gay and married and likely has to deal with prostrations happening in his general direction pretty much constantly) writes ostensibly on fashion - but this is merely a guise for his more evolved talents, which lie with his reverent observation of the fairer sex and the efficacy of same as being and metaphor on the cultural collocution. See his latest opus stupendous here (the good news: skank homogeneity is out, glam eccentricity is back (rewarding the patience of the few, the proud and the faithful)).

2 comments:

Deity said...

Thank God that national crisis has ended! I can now go back to not getting sick to my stomach whenever i see a complete stranger's bulging mid-rift, right?

Mac K. said...

Heh.

Not so fast my friend. Much as the trickle-down theory dries up just as it reaches those whose economic situations are most dessicated, high fashion largely evaporates as it descends the taste ladder from -maker to -less. I'm hopeful, like you, that the Madonna-derived-androgyne-gutter- punk-plumber-crack-muffin-top aesthetic has begun its death throes, but it is characteristic of mobs to maintain delusions of their own wisdom overly long.

Style (which you, for example, have) always leads and then fades to fashion, and fashion is what pauses en route to The Salvation Army to be the blue-light special at K-Mart. Consider: fashion and fascism share a common etymological root; it takes a pervasive and reliable follower mentality (i.e., a mob) for either one to take hold, and then both are sticky.

Add that to the stubborn self-righteousness of the already-clothed and I see muffins on the table for a while yet.