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A word or two on fashion
Commentary by Joe McWilliams
South Peace News
We’ve come a long way baby!
Yes, indeed!
I’m reading a novel written in the early 19th century. It concerns the absurdly fussy social mores of the period, among those who considered themselves of the ‘quality’ in rural English society.
Snobbery reigned supreme, if Jane Austen is to be taken as any authority. Who you were seen with, how you dressed, how well you observed a thousand little arbitrary mannerisms – all these determined your reputation in ‘polite’ society.
To me, much of it seems petty, phony and downright annoying. When your main concern, 24/7, is how you appear before your neighbours, you’re putting yourself into quite a box.
But that was 200 years ago. We’ve spent at least the past 50 of those two centuries giving ‘tradition’ the boot it so richly deserved. We’re free of all that now, right? Wear what you want, do what you like and to hell with what the neighbours think about it. We’re free and we’re enlightened, having chucked all those suffocating social restrictions back in the 1960s, or thereabouts. Having one’s life controlled by phony social conventions is a type of slavery we’re better off without.
But we’re not without it, are we? By and large, we’ve exchanged one sort of conformity for another, or others. We may think of ourselves as ‘free’, but we are still hugely influenced by prevailing fashions and trends.
Young people are particularly susceptible. There’s a tyranny of ‘coolness’ out there. Where it comes from is anybody’s guess. Television? Internet?
Anyway, youth know what’s cool and what’s not. Large numbers of them (and their adult friends, let’s face it) seem incapable of seeing how goofy some of the dictates of coolness are.
For example: tight clothes on girls and baggy clothes on boys. These, in my opinion, have gone to ridiculous extremes. They’re impractical, must be uncomfortable and more often than not could not to any reasonable human being be considered attractive. But they are ‘cool,’ and that, apparently, is the only justification needed.
It’s also considered very uncool, I understand, to tuck in one’s shirt these days. Well, fair enough. Let’s not stand on tradition, having debunked it earlier in this rant. But if you find yourself unable to even consider tucking your shirt into your baggy jeans because of what your peers might think about it – guess what? You’re a slave of fashion. You aren’t free to be yourself at all, in that way or probably a hundred other ways, big and small.
How about fashion in the vehicles we drive? Ha! Too late to get started on that one. Not enough space left. Let’s just say that the companies that produce the vehicles (and clothes and all sorts of other stuff) absolutely depend on the power of fashion over our lives. And they take it to the bank every day.
So at first glance, our society is very different than that of 200 years ago. If, for example, a daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock the family’s reputation is not destroyed. Thank goodness.
But at second glance, although the details have changed, we’re very much the same.
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