I Still Have Feelings For Fashion

Yet another attempt to understand where I stand in the fashion discourse

I felt that I owed it to Dries Van Noten. I say that I don’t engage with fashion anymore, but due to my emotional investment with Dries for well over fifteen years, last week I took it upon myself to watch the latest Dries show, the first one under Julian Klausner as creative director. One thing led to another. I decided to watch the Prada show and then I looked at pictures from Chloé and then I wondered what Alessandro Michele is doing at Valentino and how the new guy is interpreting McQueen and what’s up with Alaïa and then I checked out a few other shows and read reviews as well as the news that Demna was leaving Balenciaga for Gucci. It was a lot.

After an intense week of looking at fashion, I felt a little perplexed. I saw clothes that seemed fine. The Dries show was fine. But most of the looks that walked down the runways felt, in the lack of a better word, insubstantial. At times I forgot which show I was watching, because everything seemed so bland and interchangeable. I kept asking myself “Why don’t I feel anything?”

It’s not just the fashion weeks. I recently sold a few of my old things on Vestiaire Collective (stuff I no longer reached for that I could make some extra cash with) and as I was going through my closet, I felt a similar disconnect with a lot of my own clothes. It doesn’t seem to matter how much smaller my closet gets, in terms of the amount of clothes I have. I still use only a small portion of it. There’s a lot of filler, always filler, and it’s frustrating.

But here’s the flipside: when I come across pictures of my old favorite fashion shows, or the things I do care about and love in my own wardrobe, I’m certain. I feel an intense connection to my favorite clothes and accessories, and I do still have feelings for fashion. They’re just a lot more focused than they used to be.

For a while I’ve been thinking that maybe I’m just caught up in a whirlwind of nostalgia and I can’t leave. I’ve suspected that I can’t love anything new because the old weighs me down. I’m that middle-aged woman who still wears her make-up the same way she did twenty years earlier, the one who has gone back to listening to the albums that moved her in her formative years, the one who can’t get over Yohji Yamamoto’s spring/summer 1999 show.

I’m starting to think that rather than dwelling in the past, I’m actually revisiting and reaffirming the past rather than going back and staying there. In order to see myself clearly, I go back in time and trace my steps. I see how I’ve become who I am. I’m investigating the long lasting properties of love.

I sometimes forget that in order to have found my favorites, I have had to expose myself to a lot of not-so-meaningful encounters. I had to experiment with smoky eyes and countless tubes of mascara to know that I preferred to wear no eye makeup at all. I had to submerge myself in all sorts of music before I discovered the specific bands and songs that appealed to me. I had to watch many Versace shows before I realized that I didn’t like the clothes.

Sometimes the things that resonated with me in the past still pull me in, but maybe differently, because I am different. Rewatching Jane Campion’s The Piano now at the age of 47 compared to having seen it at 15 when it first came out is a radically different experience. I loved The Piano then and I love The Piano now, but for very different reasons: in my teens I was captivated by the visually and audibly stunning film because I didn’t quite understand it, but as an adult the strange paths of love, loss, self-expression and passion are more familiar to me, and the film opens up like the complex portrayal of womanhood that it always was.

There are times when the old feeling is gone: the boy bands that I listened to in my early teens make me chuckle now, and The X-Files, the show that I loved back in the day, turned out to be disappointing when I saw it again a few decades later. (I was really shocked at how ‘not good’ The X-Files was.)

Many of the clothes that once made me feel something, and I mean, really feel something, still move me, years and decades later. I have kept some of my old clothes that I feel nostalgic about, but it’s rare that they still work for me, for my body, and for the life I have. I’ve grown out of my translucent, low-waist rave pants, both literally and figuratively. It’s clear to me that I don’t aspire to dress like the 20-year-old version of me, or the 30-year-old one, or any other version than who I am now. But it’s difficult for me to find modern clothes that resonate with me. That’s in part why I dabble in antique and vintage clothes. They feel like an adventure, and they push me somewhere I haven’t been before, maybe because they’re so much older than I am. The things they’ve seen!

But I’m still perplexed. I’m able to find new-ish books, TV shows and films that I love with a capital L (recently, Elena Ferrante’s work, Wolf Hall, and Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun – oh how I loved Aftersun!), which leads me to believe that loveable fashion should be out there, too. It’s just slim pickings.

My hypothesis is that what connects all of my “really felt something there” experiences (the fashion, the clothes, the music, the books, the movies) is seriousness. Before I get ahead of myself, I do have a sense of humor (and is that not the most humorless statement ever?). I just don’t like anything ironically. I love what I love with my heart on my sleeve. It’s never a wink-wink, nudge-nudge situation. It has to be my heart laid out bare, or nothing. I’m pulled in by things that feel authentic, and authenticity is hard to come by these days, because everything seems to be a self-referential joke or a meme, or if it’s not, it can be turned into one at the drop of a hat.

Don’t get me wrong: jokes and memes are necessary. They help us get through the hard times and they allow us to discuss and dissect societal or political problems quickly and lightly. The problem is that we increasingly use jokes, memes and irony to avoid attachment, to avoid exposing ourselves to the big feelings: love, awe, fear, sadness. It’s easier to sit on the sidelines and to deconstruct everything down to its smaller parts rather than to actually believe in something and stand up for it. It’s easier to wear “the wrong shoe” than it is to commit to wearing the right one, the right one for you. If we don’t take our hearts seriously, if we never really have to take a stand, what’s left but cynicism?

I want to state this as clearly as I can: this is not about seriousness as opposed to fun. Fun is good, but good fun requires guts and vision, too. Fun shouldn’t take the easiest route. It should be original, ambitious, and vulnerable. I was recently thinking about the movie The Producers in general and “Springtime For Hitler” in particular, and how I don’t think it could be done today. It would be too big of a risk. It might upset people. But in 1968 (can you imagine, only twenty-some-years after WWII!) they went all in and they had a story to tell. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less.

That’s what I want from fashion, too. I want clothes that are more than products. Clothes that are all in, clothes that mean something.

I don’t feel invested in current fashion because I don’t think it takes itself seriously enough. It’s too busy deconstructing and playing the devil’s advocate rather than creating something meaningful and proposing answers. Above all, fashion is an insipidly commercial enterprise. The pursuit of endless growth is what’s dragging down fashion. Everyone’s playing it safe, out of fear of falling profits. As a result, fashion has become stale and repetitive. I don’t have time to invest in it any more than I have time to watch yet another big budget superhero film that’s only out there to make a lot of money.

And now, a disclaimer: having said all the above, sometimes we all need a little bit of frothy, meaningless escapism. You can still enjoy a superhero film, or a nice piece of clothing that doesn’t have a deeper meaning. You can, and sometimes maybe you should. But you don’t have to surround yourself with nothing but.

My favorite thing about getting older is that I can stop keeping all of my options open. I can opt out of following trends or observing brands that don’t speak to me, if it feels right. I don’t have to keep up. But I don’t have to shut myself out from everything either. I can keep looking, if I want. There are moments when I’m ready to declare that I’m done with fashion forever! And then a month or two later I’ll take a look at some shows and maybe there’s something that I like, or more likely, there isn’t, and that’s fine. The best thing is when you learn to recognize the things that serve you, and these things might not be constants, and they are most certainly not universal.

So there you have it. And what about the fashion weeks? You guys, I don’t know. I tried to play a game inspired by Kelly Williams and asked myself if money wasn’t an issue and I could have anything I wanted, what would I buy from the runways. I struggled. I don’t know what the heck I’d buy!

I could see myself wearing these looks from Issey Miyake…

…and these from Yohji. I guess I’d always buy Yohji!

Are these bold, ground-breaking suggestions? Fashion that tugs at my heartstrings? Well, probably not. But I do like them a lot, and sometimes that’s enough.

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