Entering My Blue-Eyeshadow-Forever Era

The fashion zeitgeist is exhausting and I want to leave.

Edward Gorey’s ‘ZEITGEIST: spirit of the times’ (from Gorey’s The Izzard Book)

Values have shifted. Gross consumption no longer makes sense in the face of shrinking natural resources. Technology seems to have invaded spare time, not expanded it. With the mind cluttered, the body wants relief and a streamlining of stimuli. There’s a new demand for comfort. To “live well” today requires paring down paraphernalia – simplification. The idea is to travel light through life with a suitcase of essentials: real clothes.

I came across this timely-seeming quote in a cute little book called ‘Clothes’ at the thrift store. It was published in 1993. After the excess and opulence of 1980s fashion, the authors, Kim Johnson Gross and Jeff Stone, were trying to pin down what the 1990s would be all about. Comfort, simplification and real clothes sound perfectly plausible for the early 1990s optimistic mindset. It’s almost endearing that the authors felt that technology before the freaking Internet had invaded people’s free time. Fast forward just a handful of years and we were collectively glued to our computer screens, embracing retail therapy, and fast fashion had become, well, faster, than ever before. Things have pretty much just gone to shit since. We now live in a world of consumer tribes, micro trends, ‘cores’ and ‘aesthetics’ that change every few weeks and come at us from a myriad of screens we spend our days staring at. How’s that for “living well”?

Sometimes I’m scared of turning into a cranky, nihilistic middle-aged woman who perpetually scoffs at life, most people, and most things because practically nothing makes any sense to me anymore. Maybe it’s just my hormones – perimenopause is no joke – but I’m at that point where I am entering my blue-eyeshadow-forever -era. You know the one: every now and then you come across a woman who wears her makeup and hair just like she did in the 1980s. Most times pearly blue eyeshadow and a frizzy perm are involved. The style of her clothes is of that era as well. At some point she found her thing and she just stuck to her guns, fashion and the zeitgeist be damned. Most people snicker at her, but I understand her. 

I’m so used to thinking that “I love fashion” that it’s just become a thing that I say, but if I’m being totally honest, the phrase has very little meaning to me anymore. It hit me soon after Dries Van Noten announced his retirement that there really isn’t much in current fashion that I’m interested or invested in. Every season I watch fewer and fewer fashion shows. During the A/W 2024 fashion weeks I watched Dries, Yohji, Issey Miyake, and Sacai. (And McQueen – I’m still trying to forget that one.) I started a few others but didn’t bother watching them all the way through. I didn’t even watch Prada from start to finish, and that’s saying something. I just don’t have the energy to keep up anymore. 

I haven’t gone to shops that sell new clothes in a long, long time. About a year ago I deleted shopping apps from my phone and as a result I’ve become completely oblivious to the merchandise that’s out there. (I refuse to google what High Sport pants are.) I deleted the Vestiaire Collective app recently, too, because I fail to see the purpose of looking at all of this second hand stuff I might want to buy, when a) I can’t really afford it and b) I wouldn’t have enough days in the year to wear it anyway. I can’t remember the last time I bought an issue of Vogue. Heck, I’m at the point where I've started to unsubscribe to style- or fashion-related Substacks because I don’t have enough time or desire to read them all at these head-spinning publishing intervals. (Seriously, people, slow down!) 

Don’t get me wrong: I am still very interested in clothes as subjects and objects, their history, what cultural and social connotations they have, and traditional garment-making. The business side of fashion, the trends, what people in the know are talking about, and what others are buying (oh there’s so much buying) – that’s another story. These things simply don’t thrill me or fascinate me anymore, and I feel that I’d be updating my Do Not Buy Or Wear -list every second of every day if I chose to stay involved. It’s just too much work that leads nowhere. 

I recently came across a thought-provoking quote in Oldster Magazine’s interview with culture journalist Will Hermes:

I have little patience for people rejecting present-day culture because they lived through this or that ‘golden age’. That sort of closed-mindedness is self-defeating, I think – even dangerous, as we’re seeing with weaponized nostalgia in politics. Be here now. 

Fashion as an aspect of culture is certainly vulnerable to ‘golden age’ -thinking and nostalgia, but its sense of ‘now’ is equally (if not more) vulnerable to money and power. Maybe it deserves to be rejected. A lot of what we consider ‘culture’, fashion included, has been hijacked by corporate capitalism and its relentless pursuit of profits and perpetual growth. Rachel Tashjian wrote some time ago that “one of the most fascinating things about fashion is its total embrace of its commercial necessity”. (Fascinating or terrifying, take your pick.) Fashion as an industry is about pushing products for us to consume. No wonder it’s so exhausting, mind-numbing, disillusioning and persistently unsatisfying. It always leaves us wanting more, desperate to look the part, chasing our own tails.

Neela of Of a certain Vintage wrote in her February Resolution newsletter about people who talk about buying less at the beginning of the year only to confess to having shopped themselves into oblivion twelve months later. (Yikes, if I ever saw myself in someone else’s writing, this was it.) I’ve gone back to Neela’s newsletter several times because it traces so well the outlines of what’s wrong with the way we ‘love fashion’ and engage with others who ‘love fashion’: almost everything within the discourse can be translated into a prompt to purchase on the one hand, or some kind of emotional, self-esteem- or status-derived, intellectually justifiable turmoil that follows our gluttony, on the other.    

Everything within the fashion and personal style discourse becomes a temptation, a sin, a repentance, or an absolution. In order to participate in the conversation and to stay relevant you have to keep buying stuff (sin) or to parade designers, brands or products that others can also buy or dream of buying (temptation). We then talk about owning too many clothes and buying too many clothes and how we’re going to focus on buying less, buying sustainably, not buying at all for a while, or managing our wardrobes (repentance). We tell ourselves and each other that it’s okay that we’ve bought all this stuff because we just love fashion and shopping, that we’re not alone, at least we’re trying, and we certainly will do better in the future (absolution). I don’t want to do this anymore.

So what comes after absolution? What’s left if we jump out of fashion’s hamster wheel of ‘now’ and abandon the discourse altogether? The only thing that remains is entering one’s blue-eyeshadow-forever era and hollering from the rafters that the planet is doomed and our consumer culture is at fault. The only people who care or can relate are the ones wearing their own dated shade of eyeshadow. 

That’s all from me today — I’ll see you at the makeup counter!

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Suomeksi:

Ennen pidin itsestään selvänä, että olen kiinnostunut muodista. En kuitenkaan jaksa enää kiinnostua muotiviikoista, trendeistä, muotilehdistä, vaikuttajista enkä kauppojen valikoimasta. Joskus pohdiskelen niitä naisia, jotka näyttävät suoraan 1980-luvulta karanneilta sinisine luomiväreineen ja kikkarine permanentteineen. Olen alkanut ymmärtää heidän tarvettaan pysähtyä ja lopettaa tyylin ikuinen päivittäminen ja uuden etsiminen.

Olen edelleen kiinnostunut vaatteista, niiden historiasta ja yhteiskunnallisesta merkityksestä sekä vaatteiden valmistuksesta. Muoti sen sijaan tuntuu vieraalta, kulutuskeskeiseltä ja uuvuttavalta. Ottaakseen osaa muotia ja henkilökohtaista tyyliä käsittelevään laajempaan diskurssiin on pakko kuluttaa, houkutella muita kuluttamaan, pohdiskella ja analysoida omaa kulutuskäyttäytymistään ja järjestää vaatekaappiaan loputtomiin. Ajan hermolla pysyttely vaatii paljon työtä, jota en jaksa enää tehdä.