"Ooooo-woah-Fashion! (Spirit Fingers)"... is bullshit.

Whilst leafing through GQ while waiting for my friend man to finish shaving his back on friday night I came to the sudden and startling conclusion that fashion is inexcusable bullshit. Perhaps the most nauseating article (treating the 'So you want to date a supermodel' article where they interviewed a real super model on what she wants in a man as a nauseating-statistical outlier) was where they interviewed ten designers about how to make your style 'unique' with grabbing headlines like 'be a man where jewelery' and 'go short' (about wearing shorts with a blazer and tie to give you that casual feel... if you want an even more casual feel, some may be fascinated to experiment with the even more potent combination of shorts and a t-shirt).

Anyway let me take aim on fashion proper. What I particularly don't agree with is that 'you're clothes make a statement about who you are' or a notion that 'clothing is a form of communication'. Whilst paradoxically I would say at the basest level there is no argument to be had that fashion is a communication, I just don't think it's an important one that deserves to consume all the energy it does and prop up the massive industry it does.

For one thing, clothing is a poor communicative device because it's frequency is so poor. You change the message once daily, unless it conveys things that Sherlock Holmes would pick up, such as 'your shoes are pretty old' or 'you walked here in the rain' that may be different messages than the ones you put on in the morning.

But otherwise it's only really going to change daily, and probably the message rotates through quite predictably as you coordinate outfits and such. So the only messages you are stuck with are the ones you like to communicate constantly.

Now while the most obvious and popular communique is presumably 'status' namely a message that says 'my status is higher than yours' I think in practice it fails.

Time to pull a useful definition of communication out of Drucker's library: 'Communication is what the listener does' it has also been defined well by unspecified individuals as 'a shared understanding of meaning'

Without breaking down communication models too much, let's just say writing and reading are two different things, speaking and listening to are two different things. So too it seems is picking your outfits and seeing someone's outfit.

Whilst most people seem to set out to communicate 'my status is higher than yours' or perhaps more homogeneously 'I am important/valuable/meaningful/interesting' the message that is most commonly embodied by a humans clothes is this:

"I do as I'm told."

It simply has to be this way. Not too that even subcultures are not exempt. Perhaps the most illustrative example being 'punk culture' as a fashion. Because almost anyone in the world can recognise someone as a punk, unless you are a member of the original Sex Pistol's lineup, you aren't really rebelling. You are wearing a uniform.

And the guidance to wearing uniforms is incredibly complex. I'm not sure where the international date line for fashion is, but I have a feeling that if you were to segment the market into age groups you'd find the following brackets acceptable:

0-12 Los Angeles Time
13-25 Tokyo and New York time.
26-40 Milan, Paris time
41-65 Washington Time

Post 66 people become refreshingly utilitarian and are usually so set in their ways and alienated from society in general that they were an odd combination of what is cheap and what hasn't been devored by moths over the past 60 or so years. (Clint Eastwood in tracksuit pants in Gran Torino is one of the few 'Hollywood Styles' I can actually respect).

But at any rate the above is just an estimation from where societal uniform policy is handed down from.

But you see if you believe in ideas such as 'fashion' and 'in vogue' and 'seasons' then there really is no option for you but to do as you are told. And unfortunately with so many people barking at you there's no way you could ever actually be 'in vogue' or get it right.

And why? Why fucking bother. If clothes are truly a communication then why doesn't it apply to other mediums of communication?

Let's switcheroo two scenarios.

If speech (and hearing) were to swap and operate like fashion (vice versa in a minute) then we would buy a glossy magazine that would have a selection of double page spreads every month on which were printed opinions devised by old people in italy that tuck skivvies into their pants.

people would then take a small selection of these opinions such as 'true cost economics is too difficult to impliment' given that much editorial has revealed this opinion is in style. They would 'wear' this opinion on a tuesday, mothing it continuously to everyone they meet. Maybe in the evening they change their opinion into something a little sexier like 'burlesque is a sophisticated artform rather than a striptease' which they would have to hastily strip down and throw on another opinion for work again on Wednesday.

If in turn a costume truly worked towards the communication model of 'a shared understanding of meaning' then like words we would have the ability to ask questions and clarify.

So you would go to a job interview in cuff links and a shirt with a collar pin and silk italian tie and what not, and the interviewer looks at you and says 'So you are a plucky upstart with no real experience?' and the interviewee says 'oh no that's not what I meant, I meant to say this...' and takes off the cufflinks and tie pin and rolls up his sleeves, loosening the tie a bit and the interviewer says 'ah I see...' then takes off his own tie and the interviewee thinks 'touche!'

It just doesn't fucking happen. It's bullshit.

I intend to spend more time picking shit through fashion but to cap it off I'll just say this,

If communication is truly in the ears of the beholder (ironically 'beauty is in the eyes of the beholder' whilst succinctly summing up the fashion fallacy needs to be illustrated through comparisons with speech.)how then can there be supposed 'experts' on fashion?

I understand that you can be considered an expert communicator, but the key trick to expert communication is audience analysis - knowing exactly who your audience is and keeping your message as tight to their personal preferences as possible. This maximises your chance of achieving a 'shared understanding of meaning'

And yet the vast volumes of fashion magazines out there with the vast and often contradictory opinion on what will be the seasons 'big thing' comes under almost no scrutiny at all.

Fashion is worse than other 'expert' forecasts that we have all been learning in the economic downturn are not particularly useful. Each year there are a steady stream of big fashion shows where celebreties watch tens of thousands of ideas be visualised on a catwalk and of these tens of thousands of ideas only a few are whittled down to actual fashion items for the season and I would wager almost nobody predicts correctly what the seasons 'big thing' is going to be at the start of it.

Yet the industry almost allows Versace, Louis Vitton, Burberry etc to decree what the styles are going to be, even though these tyrants of fashion much like the CCP are ignored by almost everyone outside of the party itself.

I appreciate that the 'out-there' designs that hit the catwalk are exagerated semi abstract pieces designed to inspire the lower castes of fashion into devising something practical, but really in the end people go their own way.

Such that a brand like Versace or Gucci is in fact more likely to be late to the party in releasing (this season) a pair of stockings that are overpriced to win some of the young asian melbourne market that are currently sporting the stockings and skirt look (to highly variable degrees of success). Yet nobody seems to notice that in the stakes of the 'I do as I'm told' brand of clothing, the big house brand names generally also 'do as their told'.

Most prestige brands in practice are often so risk averse and thus consumed by risk averse people that they only adopt something new (for them) once it is proven and old (for teen fashion).

Much in the same way that being a punk, nearly 40 years after it was actually rebellious is now a very safe and certified way to feel rebellious and shocking, without the inconvenience of having to be rebellious and shocking.

I shall further my attacks! Onwards.