I learned very early on that following The Fashion just wasn’t worth the hassle and that it just didn’t deliver what it promised. When I was three years old, I thought it would be super cool to have spiky hair. And for the first little while, it was cool. But every day, I had sit still for 5 whole minutes (a very long time for a young boy) while my mom applied the required gel to my hair to get it to stay in place. Those 5 minutes seemed to get longer and longer, until they stretched out into eternity. And was I rewarded with a new, more exciting life? Were my latent super powers suddenly unleashed due to my fantastically awesome hair? No. All I got for my unfathomable patience was a few seconds of a visual in the mirror only to go the rest of my day without looking at myself, not really caring what was on top of my head.

I very quickly dropped the ‘cool’ hair style and adopted the one I still wear today. I call it ‘short’. It looks the same every single morning, no matter how I sleep. It looks the same throughout the day, no matter how much wind there is. If you wake up a mere 5 minutes earlier each day to fix your hair, each year I get to sleep in a full 30 hours more than you. No muss, fuss, money-gobbling-products, worry, or stress. It is low maintenance and efficiency at its peak.

I apply this early lesson any time I encounter The Fashion. What would I gain? What would it cost? What are the odds this will deliver anything close to what The Fashion is promising? As anyone with a hint of practicality might imagine, The Fashion does not win out on very many of these cost/benefit analyses.

Of course, applying critical thought to The Fashion is quite unfashionable. Dressing according to utility will rarely earn you compliments and even sometimes elicit scorn. The Fashion is a greedy, non-sensical, evil, duplicitous, money-grab run by people who don’t care about you, your health, or your looks.

“What, what? When I listen to The Fashion, I look and feel good. So do millions of others. Back up your claim, you nay-sayer you!”

Glad you asked.

There are countless examples of The Fashion being a superficial waste of materials. I mean, who came up with ties? They don’t cover anything, and they certainly don’t keep you warm. But the example I want to look at makes it blatantly obvious that the rules of fashion are not only indifferent towards utility, but also contrived primarily to conjure up an imaginary need just so they can sell you useless crap. Here it is:

In N.America, The Fashion has a lot to say about skin tone. Tan is healthy. Tan is beautiful. Tan is sexy. Pale is sickly! Look at all of our starlets in movies with tans. Models in our ads have tans. We have tanning beds, tanning oils, tanning salons, tanning magazines, tan tan tan tan tan tan!

In Asia, The Fashion also has a lot to say about skin tone. Pale is healthy. Pale is beautiful. Pale is sexy. Tan is dirty! Look at all of their starlets in movies with pale skin. Models in their ads have pale skin. They have skin-whitening ointments, skin-whitening moisturizers, skin-whitening make-up, pale pale pale pale pale!

pale VS tan

What’s going on? Why polar opposite beauty standards when it’s the same fashion big players in both geographical locations? It’s quite simple.

In N.America, people tend to be born with paler skin. If The Fashion told them that pale was beautiful, then there would be nothing for them to change. People might actually feel good about themselves as they are. That’s bad business for The Fashion. People with self-esteem don’t throw tons of money at tanning oils, beds, and salons.

Meanwhile in Asia people tend to be born with tanner skin. If The Fashion told them that tan was beautiful, then there would be nothing for them to change. People might actually feel good about themselves as they are. That’s bad business for The Fashion. People with self-esteem don’t throw tons of money at skin-whitening creams, lotions, and make-up.

The Fashion has no qualms about indoctrinating populations with exactly opposite ideals, so long as the ideal being shoved down a particular society’s throat is extremely difficult for the members of that society to obtain. This destroys any notion that The Fashion cares about how you feel or how you look and it is a perfect case to illustrate The Fashion’s one and only concern: your money.

To get money, The Fashion has found that a very successful technique is to demoralize as much of the population as they can. The Fashion works very hard to make people think that the way they are cannot possibly be sexy. Then The Fashion can swoop in to rescue us from their concocted crisis.

“The Fashion can MAKE you beautiful. The Fashion can take the ugliness that is your normal state and transform it into the sexy person we know lives inside you! Just send us buckets of cash each year and happiness is yours!”

This, of course, contributes to wide-spread depression, self-loathing, stress, anxiety, low self-esteem, along with wasted time, effort, and resources.

But that’s not all! This constant barrage of a campaign to undermine people’s self-worth also creates the profitable bi-product of perceived elitism. If someone happens to have just the right look and is able to spend enough money, The Fashion wastes no time using these fashion ‘successes’ as exemplars of what you, the ugly, disgusting, and wretched masses could be, if only you shelled out enough cash.

Not that The Fashion actually cares about their poster girls and boys. Sure, The Fashion will give them a few perks, a sense of superiority, and just enough petty cash to make them feel above the rest. This, however doesn’t last.

Sometimes, the opportunity to demean everyone arises, and the Poster Person gets to be shoved down with everyone else. This is why we have things like ‘Stars without their make-up’ features. It is The Fashion showing that even it’s brightest stars are, at their core, revoltingly ugly, just like the rest of us. Indeed, it is only by the Grace of The Fashion, that these stars were able to join the upper echelons of ‘Beautiful’ society. Just a friendly reminder, that if you ever stop sending in the cash, The Fashion will drop you back into the mire that is the grotesque masses, right where it found you.

Of course, all the money in the world can’t keep you in The Fashion’s good books forever. The poster person inevitably loses their grip on the impossible ideal and The Fashion simply drops them and moves on.

“Sensible” in the fashion world has absolutely nothing to do with how much sense a particular product makes. Similarly, The Fashion has twisted words like ‘smart’, ‘healthy’, and ‘sexy’ to mean whatever it is that you are not, unless you pay The Fashion through the nose to obtain those labels from them.

It is no wonder that humanist and feminist movements are continually at odds with The Fashion. Of course The Fashion demeans people, especially women. Oh sure, The Fashion does it’s damnedest to push down men as well, but that’s no reason to waste centuries of patriarchy. The extent and manifestations of sexism in fashion is well beyond the scope of this post (I do want to finish writing this post sometime this decade), but now you know why. In a business sense, The Fashion is just taking advantage of a pre-primed demographic to optimize profit potential in accordance with a highly successful business model. Poly-dimensional oppression, each facet feeding off the others. It’s Bond-villain worthy.

So what to do? If you want to look healthy, listen to doctors, not magazines. Want to know what to wear? Check the weather forecast and your activity list, not what’s big in celebrity land. Want to show off your individuality? Rely on your actions, not your wardrobe.

Above all, recognize that the overwhelming majority of “beauty” ads, fashion magazines, celebrity coverage, and anything displaying “sexy” people have the primary function of making you feel bad about who you are. Any image that The Fashion has of an industry that cares how you look and feel relies entirely on The Fashion’s ability to make you feel inadequate in the first place, something The Fashion is very good at. It’s time people stopped listening.