Yes, high fashion has been hit hard by the recession, coupled with its own self-immolating marketing practices --like teasing impulse buyers with seasonal collections six months before the clothes hit the stores, But the survival of fashion itself is not in question. All school yards, all workplaces and many bedrooms have their trend-setters and enforcers. Everyone's body at some point or another becomes a site of a fashion transaction. Here's Curtis Sittenfeld in the novel Prep:
"Through my senior year, I wore floral dresses that came to my shins, sometimes with a belt of fabric at the waist, sometimes with puffy sleeves, with a square neck, or a lace collar, or a corduroy Peter Pan collar. Everyone wore these, event the prettiest girls -- I wore them because the prettiest girls wore them. A few years after college, I gave away all the dresses, though it was hard to imagine who would want them..."
Like Sittenfeld's fictional scholarship student dressing to pass, budget buyers can't afford to look obsolete or inappropriate to their target audiences. Whether job-hunting, mate-seeking or parenting, we all live in a world of changing styles, of "must haves" and obligatory status objects we get measured by. So, although the term "fashion addict" is usually used semi-facetiously, there's a case to be made for fashion addiction as a shadow syndrome that afflicts modern society as a whole.
Fashion Addiction Is Socially Mediated
Although many mass-market fashion consumers humorously call themselves junkies, sub-cultural dress codes are as much a driving force behind our over-inflated consumption of style as couture. To hang with the Goths, dress goth. To join the Crips or the Bloods, you'll have to shop for their colors. Similarly, a recent career column sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) urged job applicants to dress in accordance with corporate fashions rather than in their own personal styles so that interviewers -- gatekeepers to the vaults of scientific objectivity -- would see them as team players attractive to funders.
There is, of course, no scientific proof that the wearing of jeans rather than "business conservative" is an accurate index of attitude or mind, or even that every corporation will find it so, (1) but it *has* been scientifically proven that interviewers are helplessly in the grip of their first impressions, and that clothing plays a role in their unconscious snap judgments. So if it's a science career you want, young Blood, it's suit up and shut up.
It's Politically Problematic
When target audiences are diverse, the rules of acceptable dress can get whimsical. Sarah Palin's foray into designer fashion - even though she was auditioning for a role as diplomat - struck her critics as a case of hypocritical posing rather than as the sort of strategic dressing recommended by the AAAS. Like Hillary Clinton, who was also excoriated for her costume and grooming choices, Palin's fashion decisions were carefully analyzed by press and public while her policies were not, a crippling habit for a democracy to indulge.
Distorts Priorities based on False Reward
"Shopoholia" is a disorder of consumerist behavior in general and of the purchasing ritual in particular, but very often the trigger that prompts shopaholics to overspend isn't just "buying" or "newness" but stylistic currency - that is, fashion. For many (particularly women and children) the pleasure-surge of a wardrobe update is a super-stimulus, more powerful and re-enforcing than any short-term joy to be had from human interconnection, good works or immersion in nature.
The Addiction Is Physically Punishing
Fashion replaces the biotic environment in more than our hearts. Because the upwards of 226 billions of dollars worth of new clothing we buy each year has so far to wander from mill to mall to closet to dump each year, a great deal of carbon goes up in smoke to deliver it: one more chip off the old polar ice cap.
Leads Innocents to Live Outside the Law
One of the earmarks of an addiction is that, to get their fixes, users will break the law -- supporting international criminal networks into the bargain. On Canal Street it's obvious that budget shoppers are willing to do just that. As the Website, Counterfeit Chic explains, according to the latest OECD report,
"...counterfeiting and piracy are more profitable than trade in illegal
drugs. ..the rough estimate is USD $200 billion in international trade alone; fakes produced and consumed domestically or traded via the internet could add up to several hundred billion dollars more. "
Induces Physical Dependency
But even legal mass fashion exacts high social costs for the thrills it delivers. In factories the world over people work like galley-slaves to manufacture knock-offs for the voracious U.S. discount market. The stagnant wages and constricted opportunities facing US workers have been cloaked, in part, by price cutbacks on apparel. Profits from the resulting trade deficit are now being loaned back to us to stabilize our fashion-dependent economy.
Promotes Moral Decay
New marketing techniques not only accellerate the rate of style turnover but push fashion-dependency towards excess and vice. Alexandra Jacobs in the September 14th issue of The New Yorker reminds us that
"Owning a large collection of shoes in various styles and colors has, in the past decade, gone from being considered a sign of ultimate imperial excess (Imelda Marcos) to a constitutional right of the average American woman, and Zappos is at least partly responsible. (So is 'Sex and the City.')"
Thanks to generous Internet return policies and media hype, it is no longer considered callous or even excessive to own a closet (or two) full of shoes or purses while the people that make them are barely getting by.
With this morally dubious extravagance in mind, the New York Times Magazine's article of September 6th charting the market for personal storage spaces takes on a disturbing poignancy.
Destroys Lives of the Most Vulnerable
Evidently, rented cubicles were originally the end destination for millions of surplus T-shirts, socks, jeans and other identity-markers (now deemed "junk") that U.S. shoppers bought for quick fixes of novelty and self-expression. Alas, many shoppers who invested billions in disposable fashion instead of their mortgages are now disgorging the entire contents of their tragically foreclosed homes into those self-same storage units. Had they only stuck to designing their family's jeans in Second Life's virtual fashion market, where hundreds of thousands of dollars change hands rather than billions, perhaps they'd be able to afford a new car to live out of today.
