There is something I absolutely loathe about fashion content on the whole.
"What is your color season? Buy a whole new wardrobe." - I assure you that I am not throwing out perfectly good things I already have.
"Find your aesthetic and build a whole wardrobe around it" - again, this involves getting rid of things and buying new ones.
"Instead of buying this sweater, buy one that is pure wool." - I have news for you about how affordable pure wool is.
"Just go thrifting!" - Thrifting is not the gold mine that people seem to think it is. A lot of influencers are getting lucky because they live in cities where there is a relatively high turnover of stock at the thrift store. My average thrift store visit ends with me buying one or two things that 1. I like. 2. Are reasonably priced for the condition they're in. 3. Are actually my size.
If I had to sum up my irritation with this, it's that a lot of fashion content (and interior design from what I've seen) is that it is built on the idea that your life should have a unified aesthetic. But I would wager that most people have pieces and parts of different aesthetics cobbled together across different periods of their life. And there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to start over every time your "aesthetic" shifts a bit.
I wonder if this is (somewhat, partially) influenced by how people view history (and relatedly, how we learn history or how it is taught).
If you'll bear with the tangent, the last sentence (and paragraph in general) reminded me of this bit of Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork about models of historic kitchens:
Sometimes, you see mock-ups of historic kitchens...These mock-ups almost always have the same subtle mistake...A mock-up 1940s kitchen, for example, will include no item that wasn't made in the 1940s: there will be a 1940s toaster, 1940s pots and pans, a 1940s gas oven, a 1940s radio and 1940s chairs. Real kitchens aren't like that. In the kitchens we actually inhabit, old and new technologies overlap and coexist. A thirty-year-old housewife of 1940 would have had parents born in the nineteenth century; her grandparents would have been high Victorians, toasting bread by a grate with a fork; are we really to suppose that these earlier lives left no trace on her kitchen? No salamander? None of grandmother's cast-iron pans?
Before reading this, I hadn't seriously questioned any similar kitchen reconstructions or compared them to the real kitchens of my personal experience. I wonder if other people have had similar blind spots with fashion, and if those blind spots smooth the way for capitalism and commercialism to lie and tell people they need a new outfit every season. If your history describes outfits as being current to that time period's fashion, if you've never imagined a thirty-year-old housewife of 1940 wearing a pair of slippers she's been wearing since the mid-1920s or 1930s, why would you ever wear something that's not In?
Wilson, Bee. 2012.Ā Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. La Vergne, TN: Basic Books. pp. 395-396. For editions with different pagination, is the leadup to the "With Coffee" end of Chapter Eight: Kitchen.
