A Perspective on a Perspective of Style

I am usually inappropriately dressed for any public event I attend. Before I retreat into a stone wall of shame, I try calling to mind Oscar Wilde’s famous quote, “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” As a dandy and celebrity writer, Wilde was an admired authority on the art of public appearances. But as celebrities continue to devolve from decadent dandy’s into drunken disappointments, its time to stop relying on celebrity and popular culture for inspiration.

The Los Angeles Times review of Lindsay Lohan, at her spring 2010 debut as artistic advisor at Emanuel Ungaro, was a “deadly collision of celebrity culture and fashion culture.” Since Anna Wintour’s inaugural celebrity move at Vogue, putting Madonna on the cover in 1989 and starting a trend of celebrity-inspired fashion, an international obsession with celebrity culture has reached plague-like proportions. This obsession has reserved front-row fashion show seats for celebrities and influenced countless magazines (the worst culprits are American: Vogue, W, Harpers Bazaar) to put actresses on their covers instead of models and fashion industry leaders, who invest enough of themselves, to make fashion a career. This shift in fashion, from an elite industry to a multibillion dollar outlet for celebrities to play dress up, has put the average consumer in the backseat with cheaply made bargains while the celebration of exclusive fashion is limited to special industry events, like menswear trade show “Pitti Uomo” or “The Met Costume Institute Gala” (otherwise known as “fashion’s Oscars,” according to the Huffington Post).

High-end fashion houses like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Fendi and Prada started out as luxury leather goods brands, unnoticed for their haute couture and ready-to-wear collections until the middle of the 20th century. At that crucial turning point, when fashion as a romantic self-expression was mutilated into a world of mass markets, young consumers took the power of fashion into their own hands, more concerned with the design, cut and material, than the names of the actresses wearing the labels. Instead of waiting on Hollywood to decide what constituted a trend, sartorial freedom was achieved with high impact streetwear style. Aside from the Brooklyn Flea frequenters and 97 percent of the Parsons student body, this resourcefulness and self-confidence in personal style seems to be lost among today’s youth. A youth who should be shaping fashion, not blindly buying into crappy versions of Rihanna and Diane Kruger’s airport outfits.

The current lack of contextual fashion knowledge has caused criticism of the fashion industry across cultural lines, even by amateur entertainers. The hook in female rapper Kreayshawn’s viral song “Gucci Gucci” goes “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada, basic bitches wear that shit, so I don’t even bother.” Celebrity endorsements, designer accessory lines outsourced to contract manufacturers, and rich people who think they don’t need to hire a stylist when every photo on Page Six disagrees, all give Kreayshawn good measures to be right. But basic bitches (also known as “one who has no personality; dull and irrelevant”) wouldn’t wear pieces from the Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Fendi and Prada collections that haven’t been on models, editors and bloggers, or deemed a ‘hot street-wear item’ by Style.com. The average “basic bitch” Kreayshawn refers to can usually be spotted (often grouped together in even numbers) anywhere along Fifth Avenue, sporting designer statement bags that haven’t changed design in 50 years.

Despite ideals of a world full of unpretentious personal style and designers who are dedicated to the inventive adornment of the human body, I am never going to afford Bergdorf Goodman, and Forever 21 is not going to lose its customer base anytime soon. As a college student fast approaching the poverty line, I’ll stick with stalking the Brooklyn Flea vendors and hunting for clothing stores with an equal square footage to my less than adequate apartment. Because change takes time, and because the NYPD has taken over of Union Square, I don’t propose an immediate boycott of the 14th St. Forever 21 location.

What I do support is informed purchases as a consumer. As retailers and entrepreneurs continue to take advantage of the worldwide online market, sites like UNIF and Karmaloop serve as alternatives to mass chain stores like Urban Outfitters and American Apparel. Along with offering exposure to new and local designers, these online sites help build visibility and awareness of a major separation from supporting large retail outlets.

The availability of a market created by designers and fashion magazines that support their own industry, rather than selling out to pop culture to sell more clothes, gives me hope and reassurance that individuality and personal aesthetic agendas will soon prevail over this over extended period of our celebrity obsessed culture’s influence on fashion.