Can somebody explain fashion to me? There we were, prehistoric people in all our glory, proudly running around naked when we weren’t huddling in our caves, and all of a sudden, one bright fellow looks at a woolly mammoth and thinks to himself: ‘Hey, that mammoth looks quite warm, and this ice age is lasting longer than we expected, I wonder if there is a way I could borrow that mammoth’s coat.’
Well, since they were planning on eating the mammoth anyway, this inventive fellow decides to take the skin… with the wool still on it… and wrap it around himself. He did it just to be warm, but in this way, fashion was invented.
Now, at the risk of getting sidetracked… and even possibly offending some of my female readers… I could make a joke that, at this point, one of the women in the tribe looked at the guy wearing the mammoth skin, and asked him if he could get her something warm to wear too… but maybe it could be a tiger skin, because stripes are so slimming, and the colors would really make her eyes pop… but I’m not stupid enough to make that mistake.
In my opinion, clothes performed only two valuable functions since their invention. They protected us from the weather… and they gave us pockets so we could carry stuff around. How, then, did we evolve from that very first animal skin to a business worth billions of dollars, with its ever-shifting looks and fads. How did it become so ingrained in our collective outlook? How do we even take fashion seriously?
I mean, even on the face of it, it is pretty silly. They dress models up in clothes and have them parade along a cat walk… which, I am fairly sure is only called a catwalk because of that first girl who had to have a tiger skin to wear… and people say to themselves: ‘hey, look at that, that girl looks very pretty, it must be the outfit, I should get that dress’… uh, hello… people… that are models… they already look pretty, that is what they get paid for. You could dress them up in a barley sack and they would still look pretty good. It doesn’t automatically follow that the rest of us will look good in a barley sack.
Someone once said that, if women’s clothes down through the ages had been purposefully made to keep them in a position of inferiority, they could not have been better designed. I have occasionally wondered how many women over the centuries have been killed because they were wearing shoes and an outfit that made it difficult to run away from some disaster… I am not making light of this subject, but if you were in one of the twin towers on 9/11, and had to race down a few hundred flights of stairs in high heels, it might have decreased your odds of making it out before the buildings collapsed.
I can see why women fall for the ideals of beauty that the fashion industry spends billions of dollars throwing in our faces constantly, but I don’t like it. I am appalled at the mixed messages we are sending to our young girls. I am aware that, to a degree, life is a big game of dress up… a costume party that goes on and on… but, guys, you too?
You aren’t a peacock… you don’t need to parade around impressing the world by having the biggest and brightest display… you can’t really be that shallow, can you?
The thing about fashion… and this is a thing I may have mentioned before… but you know who I respect? The very first person who comes up with a new fashion. You know who was cool, the very first person to walk out of their house dressed as a punk rocker. Everybody else who saw somebody with a big mohawk and a safety pin in their nose and decided to show their individuality by copying that person, I just feel sorry for them.
And kids, one last word of advice. Whatever fashion you think is cool right now, the droopy pants or whatever, someday, you will look back at pictures of you and your cool friends and wince in pain and embarrassment. Just sayin’.
(As a norte of historical interest, the very first person who went out wearing their pants that low was either too poor to buy a belt and pants that fit, or was so busy leading an interesting life that he didn’t even notice his pants were falling down… either way, that guy was much cooler than you are)…
Pouring My Art Out 