I Won't Allow F*scism To Dampen My Style

If you’re a person who cares about others, who has any foresight or pattern recognition, the weight of the world has never felt heavier. Fear and anxiety have been pumping through my veins since 11/5 and haven’t let up, in fact it’s only grown and spiraled and morphed into an ugly beast laying dormant under my skin. Millions of people are under attack. Every single woman in this country is under attack. Fascism isn’t some distant threat of what’s to come, by definition it’s here.

I want to be very clear— despite working in fashion, style and clothing are truly at the bottom of the barrel of things I’m directly concerned with right now. However it’s human nature to take the things closest to you and allow them to ground you, lead you and use as a lens to understand how everything you don’t understand quite as well will unfold. It feels stupid to even talk about fashion right now but it’s how I understand the world and am able to make connections to everything AROUND fashion. Please don’t take the subject as me declaring this is the most important thing to care about. It’s not. It’s simply how I’m able to think at all.

For years and months I’ve wondered how the rise of far-right politics, idealizations and now manifestations will undo the fashion industry. Fashion is an industry that spends most of it’s marketing dollars convincing people they need something they likely don’t. It’s a lot of RUN DON’T WALK mind manipulation to make consumers think with this piece or this trend or this specific garment will change their lives. To make them whole. To make them stand out. To make them a more complete individual.

Individual.

That’s the word that continues to grate at me while looking forward in time. Fascism does an excellent job at erasing individuality, personality, original thought, conversations, learning, discussion and feeling like a unique person while fashion is a business centered around celebrating (or pretending to celebrate) individuality. Even if you have the most minimal of taste the way you CHOOSE to dress is just that, a choice. A DAILY choice no less. A daily opportunity to put on something that signals to the world who you are, what you value, what music you might like or movies you enjoy watching. Individual choice is the reason why personal style discourse (guiltyyyyy) is a topic that gets recycled over and over and over again because we ALL participate in it no matter how fashion-agnostic you think you are.

The Devil Wears Prada cerulean speech often gets quoted to make sense of the trend cycle but the truth is it’s about power.

That blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

The people in the room deciding what the next cerulean sweater is going to be are billionaires and spineless oath-breaking losers. Just because President Musk and Trump aren’t well dressed or have any semblance of participating in the fashion industry aside from what their assistants lay out for them to wear in the morning, they control the business more than anyone wants to admit. When our autocratic leaders have unchecked economic control they become the shadow creative directors, the shadow seamstresses, the shadow designers, the shadow influencers. And we won’t even know it until it smacks us in the face.

There’s been a ton of evidence that conservatism has more influence than ever over fashion trends and this whole hot discussion topic about how “personal style is dead” feels completely and utterly interwoven in that. Fascism doesn’t want us to make our own decisions and wants us to move through the world more silently, stripped of individual identity. To be good girls and wear our skirts and aprons and stay trim

and obedient

and skinny

and dosile

and ashamed

and submissive

and clean

and compliant

and agreeable

and motherly

and hot but not too hot

and quiet.

They want you to be quiet. Shut the fuck up and stop thinking. Stop learning. Stop thinking for yourself and CERTAINLY stop dressing for yourself.

I won’t comply. I will continue to wear my metallic pink tabis I bought for $300 on eBay. My fw15 Miu Miu coat I spent years admiring before purchasing. My Simone Rocha egg bag I wore to my wedding to marry an amazing man who votes with his wife and friends futures in mind. I will continue wearing my sparkly turtleneck I thrifted in 2018 after ducking into Crossroads to escape the rain. My Marla Aaron chains with an old Celine “M” charm dangling off it because my name is Mandy not woman #53,165,001.

I am and forever will be an individual and you are too.

*I’m not proofreading this post, it’s incomplete and not fully formed. I needed to get this off my chest. Please excuse the brevity and grammatical errors.