fashion designers are vacuous idiots

Sometimes I write a title to debunk it in the post.  This is not one of them.

If fashion wasn’t taken so damned seriously by so many damned people, I wouldn’t get so irritated, but I just think of the horrible amount of money we spend on clothing ourselves in what some tosspots who struggled through school but managed to get a degree in fashion decree is “this season’s look” but two or three years later, for we are the plebs and not the mindless drone celebs who are nothing but mannequins with brain stems who are dressed by those feeble minded fools.  I’m annoyed at the amount of power the fashion business wields over us all… you go and try to buy some clothes that weren’t designed specifically for prepubescent girls, modified (badly) to fit the rest of us and tell me if you think that that the self important idiots who design the stuff don’t have too much power over you. Can you find anything that doesn’t make you look ridiculous/silly/frumpy? Can you make your own clothes?  Can you afford to pay a tailor to make you stuff? No. Probably.

Take, for example, this delightful shirt I recently bought. Lovely rustley cotton (as in, it rustles) in an almost flattering shape, with its empire line bust and a slightly gathered lower half, skirting the flabby tummy bit, which covers but also give old ladies of the village the idea that, as you’re not wearing skin-squeezing lycra, you MUST be pregnant.  I bought the biggest size there was for this big (but not THAT big) chest of mine.

a. Pretty.  Especially if I stood in a particular pose and sucked my cheekbones in.  And pouted.  And stopped breathing.  And wore lipstick. And black evening gloves, apparently.

b. But then I had to put up my hair. Or get something from a high up cupboard.  Or put my hand up in class, say “ooh, ooh, I know the answer”.  As in real life.

c. And the shirt stayed there.

I can’t wear a shirt like that.  That’s just stupid.  I can’t go walking round Lisbon/Azeitão/Setúbal constantly pulling my shirt down from above my tits.  How elegant is that?

How difficult can it be to make a shirt that fits a woman with big norks and a great big expanse of childhood-swimming-induced back?  Not that difficult, actually.  I know, because in my vacuous late teens I started to study as a fashion designer (basically, because it’s so goddam easy to draw pretty ladies… see several previous posts on the matter… here, here, here and here  … Luckily I quickly saw the light, and realised that making and remaking calico toiles all day would be the end of me and because fashion designers are vacuous idiots and even at seventeen, when I was QUITE vacuous, I wasn’t vacuous enough) and I’ve decided to give up looking for clothes that look good on me in shops and to (really, this time, I mean it) go back to making my own clothes.

I’m not just talking about shirts that don’t fit like this one, but the other normal button up women’s shirts, the size 44s that still gape because they’re not built for 44s but for 34s then modified wrongly. It’s those goddam disgusting trousers that barely cover your mons pubis, presumably to show off your brazilian and your celtic bum badger arse tattoo when you go to work.  It’s the trousers with legs so narrow even an eight year old couldn’t get into them.  It’s the narrow sleeves that prevent your arms from moving in more than a 10º arc. It’s the POLYESTER for god’s sake… when did that become acceptable again?

This is not a fat/thin thing (although, in her sweeter moments, my sister accuses me of suffering from reverse anorexia… that is, I see a thin person in the mirror where there is, in fact, an elephant). It’s a SHAPE thing. I don’t want to look crap. I don’t want to dress like a hippy. I don’t want to dress like an old woman.  I don’t want to dress like a frump.  I WANT to dress like a slightly overweight goddess, if you don’t mind.

If you can’t design clothes that fit NORMAL shaped people, that don’t function as clothing because (see. fig.1) a person has tits, then bugger off out of it and become a manga illustrator.  The world will always need another eighteen million of them.

I would suggest that we all boycott the stupid fashion houses, but unfortunately there are just too many prepubescent teenagers and pubescent ones who don’t care that their flab is hanging down to the floor (when it doesn’t even need to be) that our boycott would go unnoticed.

So, instead, can we just all publicly acknowledge that fashion designers are a bunch of mindless fools who can draw pretty ladies to whom we gift FAR too much power over our lives?

There.  I said it.

(and I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again, the next time something I put on looks shit).