mall-communism:

mall-communism:

Being poor and into fashion sucks, not just for the obvious reason of not being able to afford anything, but also because, since high fashion is so derivative of what’s just normal everyday shit for poor folks, a lot of fashion “statements” become just fucking embarassing when you live in a poor area. Like, jeans with rolled up cuffs at the bottom are considered cute and trendy among like, yuppies, but I try rocking the look and I get random strangers at my apartment complex making audible jokes about my “highwaters.” Another good example is how camo is this high fashion thing but if you rock it amongst any crowd in a below middle class tax bracket, its immediately seen as like the most trashy redneck thing bc we all have embarassing hick family members who wear that shit daily (bought at walmart, not ssense). There’s a really interesting point to be made here about floating signifiers and the increasing dichotomies between working class and bourgeois culture in the US, but I’m sleepy and just wish fashion culture was genuinely self-expressive and accessible, rather than predicated on really perverse dynamics of class demarcation and appropriation, with the added problems of the way specific (dark-skinned and/or disabled) bodies are either marginalized or fetishized. Democratize fashion 2k18.

And you can say “well fashion was never meant to be liberating, its just another invented market with no real substance” but the thing is that’s true for the fashion industry, but you can’t say that fashion, as in the use of clothing and other aspects of presentation to define oneself within society, doesn’t predate the fashion industry, and also continues to live on outside of it.