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.

My friend Malissa Long produced a fashion show held on the south steps of the Texas State Capitol and asked me to say a few words. Here’s the text:

Good evening, everybody.

My name is Claire James and Malissa has asked me to say a few words about the fashion climate here in Austin, TX (my home town) and how that might interface with the global fashion phenomenon at large. I do believe that right now and especially in the coming decade that Austin, along with the rest Texas, will offer a unique set of opportunities based on a combination of economic factors and cultural influences you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

But what I’m not going to do is stand here and tell you that if you just do what you love and believe in yourself and visualize success that all of your dreams will come true.  No, think of me more as the critical naysayer of the fashion industry - trying to cut through the hype and glamour and PR and tell it straight about what’s really going on.

Photo: Wendy Corn

While on one hand I’m going to try and offer some useful advice for those of you motivated and determined to try to make a living (or at least a side income) as a fashion designer I’m also going to try to encourage many of you to stop worrying altogether about extracting dollars and cents profit from your creative endeavors and just enjoy designing and creating fashion for its own sake. That the amateur do-it-yourselfer has just as much - and in some instances more - to contribute to the collective visual sartorial culture as the professionals.

So, what business do I have making such proclamations? Let me share a little of my background. Currently I write a blog  - collectiveselection.com. - which is a byproduct of my masters thesis work in the Textiles and Apparel Program at Cornell University. Collective Selection is a discourse analysis of what other writers and journalists are saying not just about the fashion trends themselves, but the intersection of culture, economics and politics that together create the zeitgeist - or spirit of the times - that those trends reflect.

So today here in 2010 I now have the luxury of watching, wearing and enjoying fashion in the evenings and weekends I’m not at my nice secure business casual day job. But from 1995-2002 I did manage to just barely eek out a living as an independent craft artisan - designing, producing and selling a line of hand dyed wearable art.

The name of my micro business was Colorwheels, and maybe some of you (or your parents) bought a tank top or baby romper from me at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar or any number of local craft shows.

Like many of you, my love of fashion and costume (because for me the line was always pretty blurry) was sparked in high school. Luckily for me, my mother had started teaching me to sew in the second grade, and as soon as I was introduced to the glorious, yet still untapped motherlode of thrift stores in the 80s, it was all over.

Since the small allowance from my hard working yet non indulgent parents combined with the meager paycheck earned checking groceries at Randalls couldn’t even get me in the ring with the popular girl mall princesses - and the identical oversized shaker knit sweaters, acid washed ankle zip guess jeans and hair bows they were all wearing were excruciatingly boring anyways, I decided it would be way more fun to spend that bit of cash on giant bags of vintage finds, get out my scissors and sewing machine and see how I could horrify my conservative mother while at the same time making the halls of high school a whole lot more interesting.

25 years ago refashioning vintage was somewhat of a radical and unusual defiance of the corporate mall culture that completely dominated the fashion choices available at the time. How awesome to look around me today and see refashioned vintage sold in stores, taught in classes, featured in television shows. It’s infiltrating and spreading everywhere as an accepted alternative that continues influence the mainstream.

Over the past 15 years I’ve watched the fashion scene in Austin grow exponentially. Every year there are more and more fashion shows on the calendar, more stores featuring local designers and more places to set up a pop up tent and sell directly to the public.

And this explosion of interest in fashion we see in Austin is our own Texas indie flavored microcosm of a global phenomenon. Whether its new green business models of production or an underground line of clothes that editors are buzzing about or a bold and unusual dress turning heads in a nightclub - the momentum is coming from individuals at the grassroots level pursuing their creative visions. The best the corporate conglomerates of brands beholden to the instant gratification of shareholders can do is try to cool hunt and co-opt the authentic innovation of street style and independent upstarts.

And if you’ve been paying attention to the business news and earnings reports of those big labels and retailers you know that the climate can be described as nervous at best. The PR departments might be exuding optimistic messages in an attempt to fake it til they make it, but the reality itself is actually pretty grim.

Now this is where I venture into my Nouriel Roubini style Dr. Doomsday bit, but stay with me if you would because I promise to end on an optimistic note.

Although there’s lots of interest and excitement about fashion in Austin, the level of production and distribution infrastructure designers need to have a viable professional industry does not currently exist here (yet). But I will argue that this might actually be a good thing because the fashion industry proper like we see in New York and LA today is currently in a lot of trouble.

After the economic meltdown in the Fall of ’08, what do you think was the first thing people stopped buying? You guessed it, new clothes and shoes, especially the frivolous and expensive designer kind. I know there’s a lot of economists out there now talking about green shoots and the road to recovery, but my crystal ball tells me that for the immediate future our economy is in for another big hit at worst, and an anemic slump of unemployment at best.

Last year during New York fashion week I found one fashion writer brave enough to say what nobody else would: that at the shows themselves all too many industry veterans were busy working the room looking for gigs. Trouble is, most of their connections were in the same boat.

And more and more the established design houses are eliminating entry level positions and relying on and unlimited supply of fresh fashion school graduates for unpaid internships.

If you are hoping to make it big in the fashion industry as it exists in America today, I’d say good luck and I sure hope you have genius talent, incredible stamina, golden connections and a wealthy patron.

Now for the good news.

The best news I have is for the amateur do-it-yourselfers. The Blue Hangar still has mountains of discarded potential raw materials for $1.25 a piece, old school heavy duty sewing machines can be found used for under $50, (because really, the vast majority of home sewing machines built after 1975 are junk) and classes, books and websites to teach you to sew are within reach.

When you look back at the history of fashion and the changes in the dominant themes, norms and silhouettes, the most dramatic shifts always come in times of economic and social unrest. Now is the time to push it to the walls, and then push it some more. Enjoy the luxury of taking hours and hours, even days and weeks to painstakingly explore and experiment with techniques that may end up producing only one garment. And once you figure that out to the point where it’s efficient….move on to the next thing that catches your fancy.

I also find the social scene in Austin to be more fun and forgiving and far less judgmental and snobbish than cities where the stakes seem to be higher, like New York or San Francisco. The deliberately casual culture promoted by our own Chamber of Commerce means that one tends to find a broader range of social groups and types within the same venue.

At events like the Treasure City Thrift Fashion show everyone is applauded simply for giving it a shot. So go ahead, take a risk. If people think what you’re wearing is amazing, they’ll come up and tell you themselves. And if they think it’s just awful… well at least you’re keeping it weird!

So let’s say you’ve come up with a fun and unique twist on a garment or accessory, you’ve received lots of positive feedback, you’ve made more than you can wear and give away to friends and now you’re ready to try making a little bit of cash on the side to support your habit. The good news is that today there are stores like Parts and Labour and Moxie and the Compound that want to consign your work and have storefronts with systems and clientele already in place.

And of course I’m sure all of you are familiar with Etsy - the online marketplace that’s gotten many a new designer started with a viable business. But you will soon find out that efficient productions systems are essential to maintaining a profitable business of any size. The first hat is fun to make. And the third might be, too. But the thirtieth? Or the three hundredth? Streamlining is essential to preventing burnout.

The other thing essential to getting people to cross the line and fork over their hard earned dollars for your work - instead of just telling you how awesome they think it is - is that it has to be irresistible. And not just to one person, but to lots of them. Your look has to resonate with the tastes and subconscious desires of at least a niche demographic group.

And it must be well made. Period. Or people will pick it up and put it back or pass over the photo or send it back in the mail. Become skilled in your craft! If you’re making garments, learn to sew! I mean really learn to sew.

And what would I say to those of you who will settle for nothing less than making a living as a full time designer? For those of you determined to give it a shot, nothing I can say will talk you out of it because nothing anyone told me was able to talk me out of it. And boy did I show them! But I do believe that at least for me the naivete and boundless energy of being a twentysomething was essential.

Because you are the ones who are going to have to create your own jobs. To be visionary and creative enough to imagine not only new things to wear, but new models of doing business when the old ones are failing. Right now it’s extremely difficult to compete with the fast fashion monster machine churning out mountains of junky clothes at Forever 21 with exploited labor in third world countries. But do realize that this machine is dependent on key factors like the strength of the dollar, the stability of these other countries, and the low cost of international shipping. All of these factors can - and probably will - change into a whole new context in the coming decade.

In my blog I’m continually finding and posting articles about how luxury is being redefined for the 21st century and the focus is away from logos and bling (that’s so 2007) and towards ‘stealth wealth’ and the unique, one of a kind, handmade item that who’s craftsmanship is evident within the piece itself.

So for starters, learn to manage your money and your business. I know, it’s not the fun part. And if your mind is just too creatively oriented to do that well, you must partner up with someone you can trust to help you do it right. Pay your taxes, people.

Second, understand that at least half - if not more - of your time and energy will be spent hustling to get your product in front of your target audience. The marketplace is glutted with stuff, how is anyone going to find your signal amidst all the noise?

Third, go out and get a copy of Kathleen Fasenella’s “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing.” And read her companion blog - Fashion Incubator. Even if you’re a jeweler, she gives you the straight talk about how to get a product manufactured and marketed.

Whatever way you decide to approach making, finding, assembling, deconstructing and reconstructing clothing and accessories, please keep doing it! Give us something to talk about. Give the trend forecasters something to cool hunt and trickle up so it can trickle back down.

What will the fashion scene in Austin look like a decade from now? I’m waiting for you to show me.

Mochila bags featured in NY Times' "Mochila Bags: In the Moment, and Long Gone"

Apparently the latest ‘It Bag’ fought over by ‘It Girls’ isn’t coming from the usual logo ladened corporate conglomerates.

It takes the women of the Wayuu tribe of Colombia and Venezuela up to a month to weave a mochila bag, working eight hours a day, every day. It took no time at all for J. Crew, which featured the strappy satchels in its June catalog, to sell all of them. In fact, they were gone before many customers had even flipped open the issue.

But however wonderful it might seem to be supporting ancient indigenous artisanal craft,  what happens to this new mini industry once the fashionistas abandon these for the next big trend? Karin Nelson writes for the NY Times:

Recently, the mochila has become something of a cult item, toted around town by fashion editors and It girls, and the subject of chatter on style blogs. “It seems to be the iconic tribal bag,” said Anne Slowey, the fashion news director of Elle, who has picked up a few on her travels. “The perfect mix of practical, exotic and chic.”

The PR folks at J. Crew offer the following explanation for the bag’s popularity.

“Craftsmanship is something rare and very valuable,” said Jenna Lyons, J. Crew’s creative director, who was not at all surprised by how quickly the bags went. “There are few things that are still made by hand, much less in a technique that is handed down through generations and is a means of support for a community.” On top of that, she added, “It’s a beautiful bag.”

It’s not entirely untrue, of course, but completely neglects the obvious fact that these amazingly crafted items have been around since long before J. Crew… why now are they all of a sudden so hot? Nelson writes:

Much of the craze can be traced to November when the Vogue editor Lauren Santo Domingo organized the Mochila Project. For it, 40 designers, from Alexander Wang to Oscar de la Renta, were each given a traditional bag and asked to rework it in their own style. The extraordinary results — the Calvin Klein was trimmed in snakeskin; the J. Mendel, in fur — were then auctioned off at a charity event in Miami that left those nowhere near South Florida somewhat envious.

Ah yes, the real truth. Craftsmanship is one thing, but when the fashion cabal creates an elite insider event, carrying around the signifier that marks you as in the know? That’s what the ‘It Girls’ will shell out the big bucks for.

And who knows, given the shift away from corporate symbols and towards the status of individual quality crafts, perhaps some entrepreneur might find a way to enlist the work of of the Wayuu tribe into the next great thing.

Christina Binkley writes for the Wall Street Journal:

Towering brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton may dominate ad pages and storefronts, but small designers are gaining a bigger foothold in fashion.

What Sundance did for indie film—showcasing it for a bigger audience—Web sites like Etsy are doing for the little guys of design.

from Smashingdarling.com

She explains how technology is helping the little guy (gal) rise at the same time the giants slide:

At the same time, consumers are increasingly hungry for independent designs. In part, brand fatigue is to blame. Big fashion labels sell the same products the world over, diminishing their logos’ cachet.

Ah yes, brand fatigue. The corporate conglomerates bought out something with actual heritage and promptly proceeded to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Their designers work on collections a year or more in advance of the clothes’ appearance in stores and rarely—if ever—meet the people who eventually buy them. Moreover, many consumers lost faith in luxury brands after watching prices soar during the boom, then plummet during the crash in the fall of 2008. The slashed sales prices raised questions about the true value of branded goods.

Ah yes, that pesky 08 crash that caught high end retailers with their designer pants down. Kind of hard to regain that snooty image after that season of bargain bin desperation.

Indie designers offer pieces that not everyone has, allowing consumers to create their own style. I’ve noticed that the clothes and jewelry of mine that garner the most compliments are those that come from indie designers. They’re not the same old trendy looks.

’same old trendy looks?’ Talk about inverting status.

Plus it doesn’t hurt your reputation for shopping savvy to admit that you bought something from a young, up-and-coming designer. These days, the “buy local” movement has whetted shoppers’ appetite for a greater sense of connection with their goods’ creators.

Now, even the huge brands are striving to establish authenticity—sometimes trying a bit too hard. British authorities recently banned Louis Vuitton ads that showed an artisan laboring on a bag, saying the ads suggested, falsely, that its bags are handmade.

And how many more potential LV customers saw the blogosphere light up with that juicy story rather than the bullshit ad they wanted them to see? How many of those customers are instead connecting with the actual artisan of the ’statement jewelry’ they’re investing in?

Trish Ginter, co-founder of SmashingDarling, which sells products from nearly 700 indie designers, identifies the site’s typical shopper as “a very professional woman,” she says. “They’re purchasing things that set them apart.”

Of course the corporate media moguls are going to keep the spotlight on the Tea Party movement; the more they reinforce the meme that government is the one taking liberty, not protecting it, then that much less attention can be paid to the real issue - the consolidated corporate giants that control the mass market of consumer goods directed at the middle class that so many of these ‘activists’ are freaked out about losing. Don Monkerud writes for Counterpunch, Tea Partiers Should Be Picketing the Corporations That Dominate Our Lives:

Tom Tomorrow

“Those who control our corporations managed an Orwellian achievement to redefine the use of brute corporate force as ‘market forces,’” says Lynn. “We still believe in a consumer utopia, but we have an illusion of choice. Corporate powers manipulate our decision-making and direct us to buy certain goods at certain prices.”

Institutional power shifted to Wall Street and large financial institutions. Today a small elite runs corporations to serve themselves as they concentrate their power. Some Americans are waking up to the reality of their situation, but Congress lacks the will to regulate corporate power.

…Although some Americans worry about the growing power of the government, few understand the real power that controls their everyday lives.

Private monopolies determine the brand of breakfast cereal we eat, the type of car we drive, where we bank, the medical treatment we receive, the fashion of our clothes, and the kind of toothbrush we use, in addition to the beer we drink, the health insurance we buy, and what we feed our pets.

…”People say we have an uncontrolled free market but we have the opposite,” says Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow at the New American Foundation. “What we have today is a laissez faire American version of feudalism; a private government in the form of private corporations run by private individuals who consolidated power to govern entire activities within our political economy.”

…

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.

Alexander McQueen from Kinho.com

The fashion world has always been one of knock offs and derivatives, today they just happen at an accelerated pace. But in the Post Industrial Revolution world of designers as artists, there have always been a handful that serve as the true channels of zeitgeist that pretty much everyone else riffs off of. Alexander McQueen was such a genius, and the fashion world is painfully aware of the empty hole left by his suicide.

But it’s Stephano Tonchi, editor of T, the New York Times Style magazine, that had the courage to pierce through the veils of insular industry hype and call out the fashion system itself, the system that has been overtaken by corporate conglomerates that are now the only option for high end but envelope pushing designers to finance their endeavors by turning themselves into a brand and squeezing out ever increasing amounts of product.

The following was taken from New York Magazine’s blog, The Cut:

“I think it is just the tip of the iceberg…We all know that this is a very critical moment in fashion, and that basically he is the first victim of what is a conflict between creativity and business. Today to be a fashion designer, you have to be a superman or superwoman. You have to have nerves of steel. You have to be so strong. And if you are a little bit weak, if you have psychological problems or weakness, you end up like him.” When McQueen began in fashion, designers worked on two or three collections a year, said Tonchi. “Now you have to be a business manager, a marketer. It’s, what? Eight, ten, fifteen collections a year. Men’s, women’s, couture, diffusion. Then they want accessories. Then they want watches. Then they want jewelry. It’s a machine, and I think that killed him.”

Tonchi also comments on McQueen’s move from working on his own to Givenchy (owned by the LVMH conglomerate) and then to the Gucci Group:

“He is really someone who has been chewed by the system,” said Tonchi. “I think all these different bosses are part of the pressure that we are putting on our designers. And also the pressure on creators of topping what they have done before. But not once a year: Every three months, every six months you have to be better than what you have been. You always must feel like you’re running behind.”

Fashion’s transformation into a big business, Tonchi said, reminds him of the end of the Hollywood studio system in the forties and fifties. “Do you remember how many people were getting killed by the job?” he asked. “The Marilyn Monroes, the James Deans. It was the same kind of self-destruction complex that brings you to kill yourself or do something so stupid as suicide.”

Anger at suicide is a common reaction, but Tonchi said he was coming more from a place of concern about what the industry is doing to the people who work in it. “We cannot look at the poor Alexander McQueen, abused child or abuser of substance,” he said. “I think you have to put it in a larger context in terms of the fashion system. He’s just one of the little cogs that got squeezed.”

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.

Daniela Perdomo neatly sidesteps engaging in the content of the theories themselves, but rather takes a step back and asks what their growing popularity means:

promo ad for Jesse Ventura's tv show

“We have got to get to a point where we have leaders who are there for us instead of representing their manipulative, greedy ways,” he told me.

This insight is one most progressives can identify with, and it drives home the fact that people like Jones and Noory are driven to do what they do because they are distrustful of the powers that be. The fear of a government that ignores your constitutional rights or of too-powerful interests controlling the economy is a perfectly legitimate concern. This manifests itself across the political spectrum in the United States.

…That doubt stems from not knowing what happens behind closed doors in government and in the board rooms of the largest, most powerful companies in the country. What we have little doubt about is that power in the United States — and everywhere, for that matter — is monopolized by small, associated groups that do not represent the interests of the great majority. That’s why there is at least a grain of truth in every bit of conspiracy theory, even the most delusional ones.

The fear of concentrated power is valid and brings up important questions that mainstream culture is often unwilling to ask. Conspiracy theorists ask those questions, though their answers may lead some astray.

This is sort of where I’m at with all of this - can’t say too much about the specifics, aware that anyone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out is still seeing through their own filters, and since I’m still awaiting my invitation to the next Bilderberger event know that I’m so far outside elite power circles of any kind I’ll never have a chance to draw first hand conclusions.

But what I do see is a growing populist discontent with whomever is in power, and as the Supreme Court’s baffling decision to grant giant corporations with multi billion dollar arsenals the same rights of the individual ‘persons’ that have nothing near the means to compete on that playing field shows us, whomever that is sure isn’t governing ‘for the people.’

So the question becomes not ‘is there a shadow elite intricately tangled up in corporate and government trying to manipulate the masses for their own ends using mainstream media bombardment to frame the reality they want everyone to believe?’ (see the film Orwell Rolls in his Grave for an excellent expose on the specifics of that). The question is ‘what are people going to do when the system of consumer supply that keeps us comfortable and compliant begins to falter?’ It’ll be then - and only then - that we’ll start to see any widespread challenges to said structure that go beyond watching tv shows.

Following up an earlier post…

Trendy retailers might be hastily hiding their garbage, but disgruntled former employees continue to expose them to the public relations nightmare as the habit of destroying clearance merchandise rather than mark it down too far or donate it to a ‘less than aspirational’ clientele lights up the blogosphere. Jezebel.com cuts right to the chase about the interface between hyperconsumerism and our current fashion system:

But what the problems boil down to is this: for a very long time, the retail economy in the first world has been flooded with product. Inventory was allowed to outstrip demand, because margins were so high that waste became tolerable. (Consumption was rising anyway, because of easy credit and planned obsolescence.) This is true both of disposable clothing chains whose business model counts on an endless cycle of new stuff, and high-end stores whose end-of-season 60% off “sales” don’t even start to bite into wholesale, anyway. In a worthless economy like that, where products that are understood both by their sellers and their buyers to be fundamentally without value are moved around the world to make some already rich men even richer, epic levels of waste are not even an unintended consequence. They’re a design feature.

And over at Alternet, Liliana Segura features interviews with former Anthropologie employees describing the practice:

I was on stock and we were clearing out a bunch of sale items that hadn’t sold. I asked the manager what I should do with the clothing and she said “destroy it.” Destroy it? I asked. Shouldn’t we donate it? ‘No,’ the manager replied, ‘we are only allowed to donate certain items. Corporate policy is to destroy everything else.’

I didn’t have a choice so I did it. Perfectly good shirts, sweaters and pants got ripped, torn and generally wrecked. It was really depressing! Another associate told me they destroy furniture too — almost everything that doesn’t sell. We couldn’t figure out why. Later on another manager told me that Anthro does it to maintain their brand integrity. They don’t want their brands at discount stores or anywhere that would cheapen the brand. Nothing is too common and they want to keep it that way.

NY Times reporter Jim Dwyer who first exposed the story continues to follow the trail with a story profiling an organization set up to provide retailers a systematic way to donate leftovers to the needy. Those who run the clothing bank offer a lot of insight into their suppliers, in particular the role that our familiar friend, aspiration, plays in the fashion retail game:

The reasons are complex. No business wants to compete with its own garbage, or risk having people show up at a store seeking refunds on clothes that were never sold. “That’s why many retailers will damage unsold garments,” said Luis Jimenez, the director of the Clothing Bank, which is now operated for the city by Peter Young Housing, Industries and Treatment.

Some businesses do not want their goods worn by poor people. Ed Foy, the founder of eFashionSolutions.com, said that brands invest billions of dollars in their images, using models and athletes, which makes them cautious about where donated leftovers might end up. “They want us to see that the people wearing their brands are the people we aspire to be,” said Mr. Foy, a board member of the Clothing Bank. “They want to know, ‘Who’s wearing the clothing and how can that hurt my brand?’ ”

From the outset, the Clothing Bank tried to address the business concerns, Mr. Jimenez said. The warehouse is secure, lowering the chances that the donated clothes would be stolen and resold; only not-for-profit groups receive the distributions, so that, for example, no individual can collect a pallet full of Dress Barn merchandise. Donations are tax-deductible. If a donor wants labels removed, they are cut out by volunteers, including inmates on work release from the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem.

But even that isn’t enough for many brand managers, the luxury ones in particular. Dwyer continues his coverage:

New York City officials destroyed tons of new, unworn clothing and footwear last year that had been seized in raids on counterfeit label operations, abandoning a practice of giving knockoff garments to groups that help the needy.

…

A spokesman for the Police Department said that no one asked for the knockoffs in 2009 — an explanation that was bewildering to the operators of the clothing bank, who run a warehouse that supplies clothing to needy New Yorkers. They said they had made many requests.

“It would be hard to justify taking a truckload of perfectly good clothes and incinerating them, but that’s what’s happening,” said William Montana, a commercial real estate adviser who is on the board of the clothing bank. “The people who had control over giving us that stuff had been really good to us. Now the pipeline has dried up.

…
Many major fashion brands have their headquarters in New York City, and Mr. Bloomberg has made prosecution of trademark infringement a priority for his administration. The companies also take actions in civil court against the pirates, an expensive process, to protect the designers’ names.

“These are people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of them millions, to get counterfeit goods off the street,” said Robert Tucker, a lawyer with the firm of Tucker and Lafiti, whose fashion clients include Chrome Hearts, Steve Madden, Zac Posen and Ed Hardy. “Everyone wants to feed and clothe the homeless. But how are you going to spend all this money and then put it back on the street?”

From the outset, the Clothing Bank tried to address the business concerns, Mr. Jimenez said. The warehouse is secure, lowering the chances that the donated clothes would be stolen and resold; only not-for-profit groups receive the distributions, so that, for example, no individual can collect a pallet full of Dress Barn merchandise. Donations are tax-deductible. If a donor wants labels removed, they are cut out by volunteers, including inmates on work release from the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem.