Fashion Is, Actually, Mostly About Vanity And Consumerism

Fashion Week is here! And with it, the inevitable Fashion Week-pegged crop of even more inevitable stories about the many wondrous aspects of making clothes: The one declaring the "paradigm shift" underway in the way we avoid nakedness this season; the one about how, thanks to modern technology LIKE EMAIL, knockoffs are making their way into stores before the real thing these days; the one about how, thanks to modern technology LIKE EMAIL (and also, photography, the Gutenberg press, etc. ) "luxury" has found an audience in such far-flung quarters as Austin, Texas; the business story about how rich people from foreign lands where clothes are also worn are "increasingly" investing in fashion companies, and finally and most surely, the New York Times think piece about how fashion is soooo unfairly maligned and misunderstood and disregarded as being vain and frivolous and "like a Satanic cult" when truly it deserves so much credit for being meaningful and historic and, more than ever, used by its consumers as a vehicle of self-expression. More »