Did Tom Wolfe have it right when he claimed that much that is strange and crazy and wonderful in American culture has a way of starting out on the West Coast and eventually filtering East?

For those of us far more fascinated with the inception and dissemination of fashion trends than the consumption of them, the neighborhoods of San Francisco have always been a buffet of people watching for the street style destined to seed the runways and department stores. And Guy Trebay of the New York Times nails it in his opening line of Fashion Diary: The Tribes of San Francisco:

IF a decade spent following the fashion flock will teach you anything, it’s that fashion people seldom have much to do with generating style. This little-appreciated truth naturally comes to mind as the Fashion Week juggernaut lumbers toward Manhattan, a rolling, continuous loop of live-streamed, Tweeted product-placement set to ambient glamour-buzz cranked out by the Industrial Hype Machine.

…What she likes about San Francisco style, said Ms. Grim, who is in her early 40s, is that the town is remarkably free of fashion hierarchies and in-crowd tyrannies. There is no shoe of the season here. There is no It bag. Except perhaps for the pulp-novel heiresses Vanessa and Victoria Traina (who anyway are almost New Yorkers), there are no Vogue-anointed darlings-du-jour.

Photo: Heidi Schumann for NY Times

One thing notably absent, however, in Trebay’s analysis is the influence of Burning Man culture on the San Francisco fashion scene. Given the thousands of key Burner players whose default world residence is the bay area yet keep their culture alive and well year round, I find it hard to believe that their DIY radical self expression anti-corporate style wouldn’t permeate out onto the streets.

Interestingly enough, even though the quirky, innovative aesthetic is pervasive, my handful of trips to San Francisco hunting for the corresponding retailer sources - especially local designers - have left me standing mostly in resale shops or malls in tourist destinations. Ever so often there will be a brave entrepreneur opening a collective of local designers, a curated vintage store in a high rent district that mixes in refashioned pieces, or a boutique carrying avant-garde designers from NY… but those are the exception, not the rule.

Even locals tend to concede, unasked, that San Francisco has historically been an also-ran in fashion terms. “Every time a designer from here has a little bit of success, they disappear to New York,” said Gladys Perint Palmer, executive director of fashion at the Academy of Art University, whose fashion department has an enrollment of 2,500.

Allow me to digress for a moment… 2500 fashion students? That’s about 1000 graduating a year, and that’s just one school in one city. A private, for-profit school with 5 digit tuition. Are there enough jobs in the industry for all of them? Um, no. Back to San Francisco…

Ms. Perint Palmer was referring specifically to Nice Collective, a San Francisco-based label founded in 1997 by Joe Haller and Ian Hannula in part to capitalize on distinctive elements of a local style that, like so much else in the Bay Area, seems to be generated by some loopy organic collective impulse rather than an editorial cabal.

It’s so good I have to restate it: “generated by some loopy organic collective impulse rather than an editorial cabal.” But really, especially since the ‘youth revolution’ of the 60s, has that editorial cabal really dictated much? I’d argue that the best they can do is distill and co-opt the shapes, colors and styling that settles out of the collective choices of the loopy ones. And where do those loopy young ones go for the raw materials of their sartorial expression, especially when their piled into shared bedrooms in sky high rent apartments? You guessed it - thrift stores. Which has over the past couple of decades seeped into the mainstream to the point of becoming a standard style option, perhaps even one with far more cred for the find than the spoon fed trends of the big stores. Trebay quotes a former department store buyer:

“The stigma attached to used-clothing is gone,” she added. “You can either spend $300 on a top at Neiman Marcus or go to the thrift store and buy a bag of clothes for a tenth as much.”

Exactly. And this leaves one with far more time and disposable income for living, not just posing like a well dressed doll.

…Or you can do both and then mash up the results, as the women of the Mission tribe do.

“Those girls are the local Holly Golightlys,” Mr. Ospital of M.A.C. said of women like Rachel Corrie, a waitress at Tartine, who as she left work last week hopped onto her bike wearing what looked like a gingham onesie, feet shod in gladiator sandals and a velvet equestrian hunt cap passing as safety gear perched atop her head.

Girls like her are all over the Mission. You see them flying down Valencia Street on Vespas, their wildly improvised get-ups composed of, say, rags scavenged from the Bay Area’s fabled thrift shops (Out of the Closet in the Castro, Eco-Thrift in Vallejo, the Goodwill outpost just off the 101 Freeway in San Rafael), Marni skirts, vintage SM leathers culled from an eclectic assortment of goods at Marc Josef’s locally legendary antiques shop, Tradesmen, and wingtip shoes.

…“People will wear vintage with some D.I.Y. thing they made themselves with some piece that they couldn’t resist in a boutique,” Ms. Grim said. “They’re not afraid to mash things up.”

Because it might be that one innovative, interesting piece from the boutique, something that might have been inspired by vintage, might even have been made from vintage, but definitely didn’t happen prior to this decade… that’s the piece that communicates that subtle status that signals to other members of the targeted tribe that you’re doing well enough, and care enough, for bits of investment dressing.

“It’s a very difficult city to read,” Mr. Lopez said, owing largely to the local distaste for ostentation and hype, a suspicion of anything that requires a high-degree of difficulty to pull off and that people spend a lot of their lives in cars.

“San Francisco is definitely about quiet style,” he said. “People care. They have the clothes, but they wear them in private. They bring in the most amazing stuff for consignment and I’m always thinking, ‘Where did you wear this thing?’ ”

Stealth Wealth indeed.

When Women’s Wear Daily features ‘Cheap Week’ as a branded theme, that’s a sure sign of the times. Rosemary Feitelberg writes Frugality in Fashion Amidst Economic Slump:

While restrained spending has always gone hand-in-hand with a shaky economy, now, more than ever, Americans are bragging about their rock-bottom fashion finds.

Really? I’ve been doing that with my friends since the 80s. Apparently cheap chic has gone fully mainstream. And ‘fast fashion’ outlets are all too happy to provide alternatives to the traditional department store outlets.

Forever 21 - Times Square flagship store from Sugar Rock Catwalk

While the average American may not be glued to London’s FTSE or Japan’s Nikkei, he or she is more inclined to acknowledge the reality of his or her own financial situation. At Forever 21’s new 90,000-square-foot Times Square flagship Friday with her teenage daughter, Donna Georgio said she is definitely shopping at stores such as Marshalls and TJ Maxx more than Bloomingdale’s like she used to. “Part of it is due to clothes being too expensive and I’m afraid of losing my job or getting into debt,” she said. “I’m 50 years old. I’ve had all the clothes and have gone from having Audis and BMWs to a Volkswagen. My priorities have changed. But I can still hook it up and look good.”

What is interesting to note is that nowhere in this article does Feitelberg mention, even in passing, the essentially slave labor necessary in this race to the rock bottom price. Not that designer labels are above exploitation, mind you. It’s just that, ironically enough, the big names have been the target of enough high profile anti-sweatshop campaigns to force them to implement at least minimal supervision of their subcontractors. But the Forever 21 customer is highly unlikely to care about much beyond getting that trendy dress for $12.

Consumers have plenty of reasons to be frugal and will keep trading down and saving money for years to come, according to Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates Inc., a New York-based retail and consulting banking firm. “People are looking for value and the consumer mind-set has changed forever. All you have to do is look at what’s going on with Mango, Zara and H&M [financially],” he said. “The most dramatic example is Japan. I have a home there. It used to be the biggest place for luxury [shopping]. Everything has changed there because the standard of living is declining and that’s what is going on here.”

W. David Marx noted this shift in Japan back in 2008 at Businessoffashion.com in a blog post titled Japanese Women: From Luxury to Yuru Nachu:

Just five years ago, the Japanese luxury market looked like it was headed for an era of permanent dominance. The economy had finally started to uptick after a long decade of recession in Japan. In came a relatively-unprecedented New Rich — mostly, internet millionaires and employees at foreign investment banks — who ushered a wealth-obsessed zeitgeist into the popular culture. Conspicuous consumption was in.

As an analogue to this movement, female style gravitated away from the street fashion of the 1990s to a style called O-nee-kei (“big sister style”), popular among mainstream females in their early twenties. The O-nee-kei girls were convinced that the only chance at future happiness was a rich suitor, and the bibles of this fashion movement — magazines CanCam and JJ — told them exactly how to dress in order to snag a man in a decent income bracket. The styling was mostly cute office conservative, but instead of designer fashion like in the 1990s, the clothes came mostly from cheap domestic labels. Handbags, however, needed to be from Louis Vuitton or Gucci, and jewelry meant Tiffany, Bulgari, and Cartier. The bling was all in the accesssories.

These O-nee-kei girls would not think for a microsecond about Parisian mode. In fact, these girls started to openly preach a love of “real clothes” — a term to describe inexpensive, trendy apparel from exclusively Japanese companies, mostly designed by young women the same age as customers. Although CanCam‘s focus on looking “classy” to attract rich men kept the luxury handbag on the menu, the “real clothes” rhetoric of “unreal foreign fashion labels vs. real Japanese brands” offered omens of wide-scale luxury rejection.

Ah ha. Keep the easily recognizable status symbol, but skimp on the quality couture clothing that the men they were chasing didn’t care about, anyway. What happens, however, when the supply of rich young men dries up with a global recession? While some girls just step up their game, all too many decide to play a different one.

Yuru Nachu style featured on Businessoffashion.com. W.David Marx photograph

With the less robust economy and a visible rise of underpaid young workers, the New Rich Pageant of 2003 has gone out with a whimper, making the princess-y O-nee-keilook appear somewhat shallow. In this recession-adjusted cultural atmosphere, everyone wants inexpensive, low pressure, and comfortable clothing. This year has thus seen the rise of the Yuru Nachu (“relaxed, natural”) style, which could be a long-term challenge to previous luxury attitudes. This “fashion ethic” is based on relaxed silhouettes, muted colours, and layering organic textiles. From loose “Bohemian” flower print dresses to off-white linen tunics, young women from all taste and consumer subcultures have embraced some variation of this fashion look.

Although Yuru Nachu reflects many of the global industry’s spring trends, the look has succeeded wildly thanks to its ability to connect with young women’s need for a less consumerist take on fashion. Out with the exclusive leather handbag, and in with the $12 “eco bag.”

When the cheap canvas tote replaces the Louis Vuitton as the anti-status status symbol, something is afoot. Back to WWD:

“If you look back at the boom years, a lot of that spending was accessed through credit. Debt-fueled affluence or aspirational consumerism is going to be challenged to return and is not about to get us back to where we were.”

Needless to say, he is not counting on shoppers to start spending more freely anytime soon. “From a big-picture macroeconomic standpoint, we are expecting a very sluggish recovery in the economy that is probably not conducive to consumers waking up one day feeling a lot better about everything and willing to spend again,” said Tuhy

This is bad news for big name ‘luxury’ brands that depended on the aspirational consumer to provide the bread and butter by overpaying for logo laden bags cranked out in third world factories.

“Conspicuous consumption is not very chic right now,” Christopher said. That behavior is counter to the Veblen effect, named after economist Thorstein Veblen, who first noted that decreasing the value of high-end goods only decreases people’s interest in buying them, he added.

Obviously Veblen wasn’t around long enough to witness The Gilt Groupe website. What’s different about now versus Veblen’s Victorian age is that the ‘democratization of fashion’ has 21st century ‘aspirational’ (translate - can’t really afford it but buy it anyway) consumers going after the same luxury brands as the actually rich, which in the long run turns into a cannibalistic effect of sorts. Decreasing the price doesn’t necessarily increase the interest - for it’s safe to assume that, by definition, far more people are interested in these items than can afford them - but instead increases the accessibility of the brand. Which will, in time, decrease the interest of the truly rich who establish the status of the item in the first place.

Consumers are kidding themselves if they think fast fashion distinguishes them from the masses, said Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.” Topshop may have certain status for being London based and the same might be said of the Swedish chain H&M, but the reality is that neither is all that different from Wal-Mart, she said. “Frugal chic is kind of a label in itself now. But I would argue that we are deluding ourselves. These goods are mass produced, sold all over the world, available to everyone and they don’t involve a lot of creativity,” Shell said. “Truly fashionable people are able to go to thrift stores to find something stylish.”

Yes! Count me amongst the truly fashionable, then.

Although I stubbornly managed to avoid the whole affair last year, I did manage to get pulled into a little bit of second annual Austin Fashion Week this year to support friends and even write and deliver my very own speech giving some advise to indie designers. So while fully ‘fessing up to my own lifelong distrust of the hype and posing inherent in such events, I’ll also try to take a step back and look at AFW with an objective eye and appreciate how this echo chamber of self congratulatory promotion interfaces with the grassroots innovation and experimentation that I enjoy so much.

Red carpet fanfare sizzled in the Texas sun

What I realized last night dressed to the nines while eating cheap hamburgers at a picnic table post red carpet award show is that AFW isn’t really about the actual clothes (the part I’m into) but is about cultivating the consumer. Oh yeah, that part. See, if no one is buying clothes from local designers and boutiques, how are any of the creatives supposed to make a living? I can snark about sorority girls (current and former) all I like, but if they’re not compulsively overstuffing their closets with higher end designer labels, what treasures would there be for me to discover at Buffalo Exchange once they trade in their excess?

AFW producer Matt Swinney introduces the big budget stage production for the awards show

A friend of mine who participated as a designer offered me an extra ticket to the awards show and I thought ‘what the heck?’ at least it would be good people watching. And I do have to offer some genuine respect and acknowledgement of the insane amount of work that goes into producing and coordinating all of these events. Thank goodness other people enjoy that kind of work and are willing to do it because I’m certainly not.

Having fun with the Bentley photo-op. That's me on the left and my friend and fabulous Austin designer Chia on the right. I'm wearing a top, shorts and vintage shoes from odd and various thrift stores while Chia is sporting Tina Sparkles' prize winning Little Black Dress.

That being said, I can’t help but chuckle over the irony of trying to tout Austin as having viable potential for this kind of formal (and profitable) industry when the fashionability of Austin as a hip place to live has been inexorably tangled with the slacker casual look that was advertised as a refreshing alternative to the big city pretension. Oh don’t get me wrong, the slacker hipster had a whole different flavor of pretension, but red carpets and Bentleys were not it.

Although the hipster slacker look might contribute significantly to the success of many local thrift stores, it’s not going to keep boutiques of triple digit party dresses afloat.

No, if you’re going to get the Real Housewives of Westlake to slap down the Platinum Amex for enough dresses, hair and makeup to keep these high rent boutique and salon storefronts open, then you need to give them enough opportunities to play dress up. Such as attending the AFW awards show…

In fact, for a mere $300 ($550 for two) you could get one of the ‘extremely limited’ VIP ticket packages that included not just special seating at this event, but personal shopping and princess attention. Which leads to the question that both the Austin American Statesman’s newcomer fashion writer and longtime cultural commentator Michael Barnes posed in his blog review:

Inevitably one must ask: Who is paying for all this? Surely not the starving creative class, which, in Austin, includes many of the seemingly high-end retailers in their pristine boutiques. (Just ask about their rents.) Fashion reporter Marques Harper has posed the crucial questions about what holds Fashion Week aloft, and what will do so in the future: Fees or sponsorships; ticket prices or donations?

Tina Sparkles & friend at afterparty

Insider sources (aka my designer friend with the extra ticket) told me that originally the designers were not given tickets to the $60ish per person after party. But then the producers, realizing that it would be weird to try and pull off a fashion week after party with no designers, decided to go ahead and include tickets in the packet. I also heard rumor of a kerfuffle that erupted over asking models to pony up $45 to participate. Producer Matt Swinney of event planning company Launch 787 reportedly spends upwards of $100k of his own cash each year to make this event happen, with the hopes that as it grows those tables of income/expense will turn in his favor.

He did have the cahones to jump out and claim Austin Fashion Week as his own, so it’s not as if some other event planner can do it, but truth be told I remain skeptical of anyone’s ability to turn a profit from an event of this flavor in this city in this economic climate. If you own a print shop or sell beverage napkins I suppose you saw an uptick in sales as a result of all the parties and promotions, but fashionistas everywhere are notorious moochers and as Barnes noted the “chronically underpaid creative class” can barely afford to sustain their craft, much less the hypebeast needed to promote it. And earlier that day, mere blocks from the Long Center itself, I noticed a clean cut young man standing on the side of Lamar Boulevard waving a sign offering 2 months free rent for one of the dense urban living buildings that were all the rage during the boom. The sign didn’t mention it, but I’m sure they have walk in closets and granite countertops.

When Simon Doonan, Creative Director of Barney’s, (one of the handful places where fashion forward designers have access to the rare slice of edgy yet wealthy clientele that can afford their pieces), the extremely influential guy who the rest of the fashion industry knows to pay attention to… when Simon Doonan declares The Death of Trends then it’s a zeitgeist shift worth pondering. There are still going to be shapes and norms that we collectively select (whether you follow them or rebel against them) but I see this as more of a backlash against the accelerated cycle of the spending on disposable clothing hamster wheel and a coalescing around an iconic vocabulary of modernist elements; classics that are tweaked and revised with the times.

photo by Roxanna Lowit for the Jewish Daily Forward

Doonan writes for the Observer:

Fashion is no longer icy and aloof. Fashion is a massive, forgiving, ambiguous melting pot where people and trends can dig in their Lee Press-On nails and hang on for years and years without ever being out.

He goes on to list a few examples:

Uggs. Style pundits may have broadcast their out-ness for years, but last week’s snowy streets were packed with Uggs-sporting fashion plates.

There is a delicious personal irony in this example given that back in 2004 Uggs were cited in a lengthy discussion in Fashion Theory class as an example of trendy for trendy’s sake. Even though this trend might have been initiated by celebrity sitings, (so awesome to slip on between takes on outdoor shoots) could it be that they’ve had staying power because those who bought them discovered they were super comfortable and well made and lasted forever?

Skinny jeans. Despite their supposed out-ness, they have managed to become a fashion staple, especially when tucked into riding boots. Tally ho!

Key term, “Fashion Staple.” So they became ‘in’ a few years ago as the bootcut finally reached mass market saturation, but could it be that one fashion staple was traded in for another? Could it be that people want fashion staples?

Filson clothing, used as an example of 'American Workwear' trend on brand consultancy blog "We Are The Market"

Of course, now that the skinny jean is headed for eventual  mass market saturation, it will eventually go the way of the mom jean (which has been ‘out’ almost long enough to be revived…), so it’s not as if the trend cycle is no longer. But given that ‘fast fashion’ retailing cycles had accelerated to the point of new trends every six weeks, could it be that more and more consumers are weary of this and seeking alternatives?

These alternatives - especially to spending too much - have been found for the past few decades in the ‘indie’ and ‘alternative’ subcultures continued fascination with vintage. As these ‘trends’ arise in the vintage industry about which items are hot and eagerly sought after, it was a natural progression for designers to use said items as inspiration for re-issues.

Wordsworth Boot in Moss Green - John Fluevog, from Libby's Steampunk Gift Guide at Steampunkworkshop.com. Someone buy these for me! *covet*

For buyers, designers, retailers and marketers wondering what the new face of consumption might look like in a post meltdown economy, Jake von Slatt and Bruce Sterling offer a vision of steampunk philosophy so eloquently stated I had to include it in its entirety. It’s a challenge to voluntary simplicity, which he claims as boring. And can be a lot of work. (no kidding!) The steampunk philosophy allows us to embrace and enjoy and even spend a lot of money on beautifully functional well crafted things things in our daily lives. What is disdained is the excessive, the filler, the junk, the disposable.

I stumbled upon this on the Steampunk workshop site:

The definition of steampunk is still a fluid and flexible thing, and that’s exactly how I like it.  When we talk about what steampunk is we talk in generalities and we leave a lot open for interpretation and thus creativity. But there are some memes in steampunk which are recurring. One of those is the rejection of a disposable economy, a belief that there is value in the finely made, and that participation in today’s race to the bottom, to the lowest price, to quantity over quality, is ultimately injurious.

Bruce Sterling (a steampunk icon in his own right) wrote about the value of fine things in his Last Veridian Note:

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it is “what is going on.”

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it’s the opposite of the legendary of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too much money on a bed – (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I do not). You’re spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious notice. See it. Replace it.
…
Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.” There is nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Leather for women becomes mainstream everyday wear while young men rebel against their parent’s generation by… wearing a jacket and tie?

http://crossanda.blogspot.com/2008/07/look-of-week.html

Two NY Times articles side by side offer a telling glimpse not only into the generation gap, but into shifting gender roles as well. From David Coleman’s Dressing for Success, Again:

“Today the well-off 55-year-old is likely to be the worst-dressed man in the room, wearing a saggy T-shirt and jeans. The cash-poor 25-year-old is in a natty sport coat and skinny tie bought at Topman for a song. Young men are embracing the “Mad Men” elements of style in a way that the older men never did, still don’t and just won’t. The result is a kind of rift emerging between the generation of men in their 20s and 30s and those in their late 40s and 50s for whom a suit was not merely square but cubed, and caring about how one looked was effeminate….

Between those schlubby baby boomer guys delaying retirement, the fact that Gen Y twentysomethings are the largest demographic group in history and thanks to the successes of feminism young men also have to compete for jobs with their female counterparts in a way their fathers never imagined, the boys motivated to make it in this economic climate have to use every tool they can to distinguish themselves and get ahead.

But what are the girls up to? Ruth la Ferla writes,

Hermes Fall 09 from Style.com

A disdain for such sweetly conventional trappings of sex appeal has trickled down of late from tastemakers like Ms. Watson to scores of followers who are swapping their baby-doll dresses, spindly heels and lace for the flinty attractions of studs and leather, mannish jackets and rock-star jeans. Their embrace of a pointedly aggressive, street-smart style suggests that the more adventurous are rethinking the tenets of female allure.

Hallelujah! I’m having a flashback to my teenage years,

Women now want to project a “more powerful sexuality, not a damsel in distress,” said Sharon Graubard, a senior executive with Stylesight, a trend forecasting firm in New York. The look, streamlined and armored for tough times, reflects a distrust of trends and a skepticism toward traditional gender roles. Most tellingly, perhaps, it also represents a pragmatic response to a hobbled economy.

“So-called luxury — people are tired of it,” said Tatsugo Yoda, the owner of Aloha Rag, a fashionably progressive Honolulu boutique with a New York outpost. “They want more utilitarian pieces — military jackets, track pants and classic white shirts — that they can wear more than twice a year.” The look is assertive, Mr. Yoda said, but recognizable at the same time.

Actually, I’d like pieces that I can wear twice a week, and if my male counterparts can have it, why can’t I? As the propects of a banker boyfriends financing fussy fashion habits grow thin right along with jobs in the fashion industry, it’s not surprising that those still standing carry a survivalist chic aesthetic about them.

These notions of sexual allure can be traced to the utility gear adopted by self-styled survivalists, the funky regalia of old-school rockers, even the lingerie-and-leather of Parisian streetwalkers. More Patti Smith than Fergie, current variations on sultriness are thorny and faintly androgynous. These rebellious, antifashion messages, blunted over decades of exposure, have been picked up, inevitably, by the world of high style.

Today shapeless, and sometimes shredded, T-shirts, combat boots and aviator caps reminiscent of a Mad Max epic, are proliferating on runways, as are leggings, fatigues and bicycle shorts.

Of course, no talk of Mad Max survivalist style would be complete without a nod to Burning Man. But how interesting that while the girls are moving towards the rugged and shredded tough girl look, the boys are getting cleaned and pressed. These two phenomenon side by side also indicate to me another nail in the coffin of a world where modern young women could automatically assume that finding a man as a breadwinner was the rule and not an exception. Given that most of the jobs lost in this recession have been to men and thus women outnumber men in the workplace for the first time in history, young men have another reason to dress for success and it ain’t just in the office. Their dating pool might very well consist of women who are doing better financially than they are, and now it’s role reversal time - they’re the ones playing the looks card.

One thing both genders share is a rejection of disposable fashion. Back to Coleman:

“There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he said. “It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.””

In Irony and the Old Lady, a semi-autobiographical pondering of what women over 50 can and can no longer get away with in fashion, Cathy Horyn ventures into a succinct history lesson:

Irony is harder to part with — for the simple reason that many of us who are now in our 50s grew up with that kind of cerebral fashion and were happy to have clothes that made reference to ideas, worlds, that only those in our orbit could understand. Our mothers (mine, anyway) did not see the point in adopting flannel shirts or rummaging through Goodwill bins for just the right filthy cardigan.

And why would they? Grunge and deconstruction, which provided a counterpoint to the slick, aggressive fashion of the late 1980s, were our peculiar trip.

Except now the tacky colorful excess of the eighties - and even the nineties - are the new thing to be ironic about.

But now that every sitcom re-run look has been re-hashed ad nauseum, how much longer will this irony be truly ironic? Will sporting the ugliest thing in the thrift store (like the early nineties floral dress blech currently selling for $40+ at the local ‘vintage’ store) finally lose its cool? Horyn muses:

It may just be that we’ve had a bellyful of abstractions like irony and now hanker for something direct and concrete. This desire for clarity isn’t limited to an age group — young people seem to crave it, too — and it’s not a defense against the standard complaint that you’re not cool enough to get the joke. Who cares if the joke is available to everyone through the Internet?

Madonna’s bunny ears are just the last gasp. Fashion needs a new antidote for modernity.

“It’s impossible to think of something you can drag out from the land of naffness and make cool,” Mr. Doonan said, referring to the process by which banal or out-of-date styles are brought back and, after much analysis and decoding and finally brand approval, become fashionable. He offered up the drop-waist denim dress, a wholesome style from the ’80s, saying it was rife with ironic potential.

I laughed. That was really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

He thought for a moment. “To be overweight and not care, like Beth Ditto, is the most transgressive you can be right now.” But he only said that, I think, because plus-size stories were in a couple of newspapers that day. And you know what they say about newspapers.

from S+ark by Ballantyne

Jasmin Malik Chua writes for Treehugger, Anti-Fashion Designer Philippe Starck Creates Sustainable Fashion Collection:

French designer Philippe Starck is broadening his reach to include ready-to-wear clothing for men and women. Just don’t call it “fashion,” s’il vous plait.

“Although the work of [its] creators is fantastic, I will never be idiotic enough to do fashion,” the father of the Juicy Salif juicer and the Louis Ghost chair told Le Figaro newspaper just before the collection launched in Florence last week. “The public will take maybe three years to understand the concept. It’s not fashion. We won’t be very big in the newspapers. The clothes are non-photogenic. But intelligent people will know to discover us.”

He claims he’s sidestepped fashion. I say that’s not possible if you’re trying to sell expensive clothes to the “intelligent” people (translate: hipsters with advanced degrees in creative fields who can afford designer cashmere). Slower under the radar fashion that is inaccessible to the masses, perhaps, but fashion nonetheless.

Because the essential ingredient of fashion - be it a garment, electronic gadget or even an idea - is that it is of the moment and somehow captures the zeitgeist. What Starck - and presumably his clientele - are trying to dissociate themselves from is the garish, trendy, disposable frenzy of junky garments of malls and H & M’s across the globe. But he still can’t escape the imperative to offer something novel that will inspire those with discriminating tastes to buy.

The real anti-fashion?

Johnston's of Elgin men's cashmere v-neck sweater

Good ‘ole v-neck cashmere sweater. You can find versions of these that are 50 years old and look just like this one; grandpa cut and all. Now that’s anti fashion.

But if super cool Starck can make investing in, wearing and keeping highly functional and aesthetically pleasing garments that are built to last a concept that catches on and grants status to the tastemakers, then I’m all for it.

Lizzie Davies writes for the Guardian UK:

Convinced that rising concern over the sustainability of mass consumerism will encourage more people to look for longer-lasting solutions to their wardrobe dilemmas, Starck believes the time has come for clothing to develop a conscience. “It’s the right time to launch this collection. We are starting something that cannot not work, and that will be followed,” he said.