Fashion

I viewed a video recently which featured gay icon, Marc Jacobs, and Anne Wintour, a fashion editor and fashion celebrity. What is fashion? Fashion is an assertion of privilege and wealth in society. Those who live off fashion aspire to the elitism of its supporters. It calls itself an industry. However, it produces little but waste of natural resources and exploitation of human resources. Couture translates to sweat shops eventually, as high fashion undermines the practical needs of the average citizen. 

Perhaps the height of Western couture occurred in the late 18th century in Europe. And its resurgence in the mid-19th century was a re-assertion of royalist power after the French Revolution. In other words, fashion is a parade of aristocratic privilege, currently measured in terms of monetary wealth rather than genetic provenance. 

As a liberated and socially conscious gay man, I have always resented being equated in the (homophobic) public mind with dress designers and hairdressers. I have empathized with intelligent and socially engaged African-American men who are often equated with rappers, drug dealers and pimps in popular (racist) stereotypes. Marc Jacobs is not a gay Nelson Mandela by any stretch of the imagination. Anne Wintour is not a role model who represents liberation from sexism and misogyny. 

Salivating over and collecting expensive pretty things is the privilege of those who do not lack life's basic needs. Those who feed that hunger for extravagance are hardly treading a high ethical or socially responsible path...whatever the charity they may use to shelter their incomes from taxation. The recent events in Bangladesh factories are the end result of the fashion industry's peddling of the different, the new and more of it on an overpopulated and socially unjust planet which is being steered by corporate capitalist media. While Jacobs and Wintour sip champagne in Paris, the vast majority of humanity scramble for shelter, clean water and food. Rome still burns.