In fashion, but not seduced by it
Im so bored of luxury content...
I think we can all agree, there are 45 days in January. No matter what you’re doing it’s a long, very long month. It’s early days as I type this, the 4th, and I want to launch my phone out of the window of a twenty storey building.
I can’t open any kind of social media without being bombarded (yes, more than usual) by commentary on what the new “trend” or “luxury” will be. I hate these predictions type pieces because they are written with unnecessary authority by people who are observers, not participants. I know it sounds a lot like “us vs them” but Im not being judgmental. People who understand luxury don’t usually concern themselves with selling their opinion of what it actually means, because it can’t be acquired like an object.
The biggest luxury is something that can’t be sold, and owning something no one else can buy.
Look, the internet as we know it is changing: we are witness the decline of influencers and the rise of AI, and let’s be honest, this plays out in our favour on both counts.
Ive been talking for a long time, about how influencer marketing was soon going to expire, because it is fundamentally incongruent.
We are fatigued by people turning up online to sell us onto something, and the phenomenon has quickly swung from “insider secret” to “paid actor”. It’s not just the gap between the aspirational luxury they're selling you and the reality of our lives that is growing more and more dissonant, but the influencer act itself.
Whether you have money or not is irrelevant to an extent because you’re not getting a recommendation from a trusted insider, you’re watching a 20yr old sell you a $5000 handbag she didn’t buy. Its jarring, especially when it happens ad nauseam.
I don’t care what others are wearing, or what’s considered trendy. I’ve been in the industry long enough (and in the world in general) to know that everything deemed cool this season is quickly exaggerated into a caricature of itself, by the next. Something accelerated by 24/7 exposure.
AI on the other hand has so quickly taken over every aspect of our online world, that it is fundamentally forcing us to question everything we see, which in turn is a huge blessing because it is forcing us to get back into the real world. The fact that AI has made us want to go more analogue (if I see one more post about living analogue but documenting it online, I swear to god…) is a parody that writes itself.
Soon the fashion week circus will begin, and I’ll be packing my FW clothes to join the travelling carousel. My life looks nothing like my work, and for a long time I struggled with this. Not because I don’t wear designer clothes everyday (I could) or because I don’t go to insider events (I don’t want to), or hang out with “cool” fashion people (I have the coolest and realest fashion friends) but because my beliefs have long contradicted that reality. Wanting a slower life, wanting things that were not trendy, that were different, needing to connect with nature, believing in sustainability, but also loving beautiful things, craftsmanship and rarities.
But you see, I will be 37 soon-ish and the beautiful thing about aging is that you begin to see everything clearly. As my eyesight declines my minds eye becomes sharper. I finally realise that these two worlds are not incompatible, I love the industry I’m in, I’m just not seduced by it, or by what other people tell me it.
Just as money can’t buy taste, real luxury can’t be bought.
Real luxuries are things like time, skill, attention (shout out to my sister who’s written a whole book on this: Mental Currency), authorship, patience, originality, a sense of self, I could go on and on. Things which are nurtured and cultivated. Of course for me personally, this notion ties into craft, and the idea of making things from my imagination, or from inspiration, with time, by hand, slowly, and inevitably with mistakes.
Even if I stood in a room with somebody who had made the same sweater, neither of us would be wearing the same thing. Objects that are made by hand, exist because that version of us existed, in that moment in time, with those abilities and skills.
Im not saying that design or craftsmanship are bad or that you shouldn’t desire tangible objects, I just don’t want to be sold something on the pretence that its going to make me feel like I belong to a special pool of people. Birkins are expensive but there’s so many of them, I want things that can’t be replicated.