Casually doing a bit of window shopping one or two years back in one of Italy’s ‘oh so fashionable’ small lane techniques, I realized that pointy toe stiletto’s were everywhere.
Glancing down at my round toe Mary Jane’s I’d just bought before leaving Australia, I was feeling both rebuffed and concerned. Rebuffed because I assumed pointy toe stilettos were grotesque, and concerned because I knew it was only a matter of time before I might be paying the lire to get them. The trend had gotten the best of me, notwithstanding how daft I looked when the heels got caught in the uneven Italian pavement each time I walked down the road (which was about each 3 steps). So what was it that modified my mind? I suspect the answer is found in the hands of, well, a few folks called ‘Trend Analysts’ AKA The Fashion Police.
Their job: to serve and protect the commercial interests of fashion firms across the world. How? By dissecting the general public’s psychology of what is going to be the subsequent trend will be by way of extensive travel and shopping expeditions (those bastards). These ‘trend analysts’ then report to research corporations, who then go on to consolidate their findings in industry magazines and internet sites for the utilization of fashion corporations. I want to assert that fashion corporations use research corporations because they’re lazy, but it is definitely not true. They are just frightened to make a mistake (are you able to imagine producing one thousand pairs of high wasted thin leg jeans only to find that everybody was going for low rise bootleg? EBay auctioning them isn’t a solution here). There are incredible time restrictions between the seasons.
So most designers design their range around what they are fed, and if they’re fortunate they get to go around Europe and Japan to buy garments to ‘take inspiration from’. This is the reason why we get a slight difference of the trend theme each season; all our designers are shopping in the same store in London. If you’d like to see something actually engaging, just look at the girls with cases in major department shops purchasing size 10 (when they’re size twelve) at the beginning of each season. Are you able to see we are by the hands of a conspiracy? I enjoin you to burn your pleather Fendi bags.
I am going to knit and extended version of the merkin (if you do not know what one is, I counsel you Google it because I am definitely not about to clarify). Yes, it will be a toasty winter for me craggy up in my black merkin cardigan. Which brings me back to my original thought at the start of this piece (merkins also have the power to bring folk back to what they were originally thinking)?
What was it that made me buy those pointy toe high heels I now so dearly cherish? I believe it boils down to one word: agreement. Agreement by trend researchers, agreement by industry mags, agreement by designers, agreement in fashion magazines, agreement across the stores, and eventually, agreement by you. Not necessarily bad, but inside the protection of agreement comes a dearth of creativity. And that’s the reason why we need those quirky fashion revolutionaries; so we are able to steel their ideas, produce them times 1,000,000, and sell the homogenized version back to you. Peculiar world we are living in isn’t it? Now where did I put my knitting needles and my merkin ‘wool’ supply?
Tags: Police Fashion, Window Shopping