Something is really wrong with fashion design.
I went out to get something to wear on my birthday a while back and I found that I was an XL. I’m pushing five foot seven and at my roundest, I had a 33 inch waist. I could stand to lose a few pounds, I have in fact, but extra large? Who are designers making clothes for?
It seems to me that the hallmark of good design of any kind is, working with what you’ve got and making the best of it. I wouldn’t be much of an architect if I could only design buildings that looked great on level, perfectly square lots. In fact I’d be kind of a hack.
Yet in fashion, we hail as genius, folks whose clothes only look good on people who could wear garbage bags with duct tape accessories and look amazing.
With blessed few exceptions, fashion designers are no longer making clothes that make people look good. Most designers seem to be working with Jenny Craig and the cosmetic surgery industry to make us feel bad about ourselves, not good about their clothes. I saw a commercial recently featuring Vera Wang – she’s a noted fashion designer for those who don’t care. In the ad she says that what she values is good design above all things. Her words voice over a series of shots of perfect looking people rocking what can only be described as thrift store costume wear.
Nothing wrong with thrift store costume wear, I’ve got plenty, just ask the folks at my 10th high school reunion. But in the Vera ad there was no “design” involved and again the models would have looked great in anything, especially with hair, makeup and lighting.
Maybe I’m late to the topic, but it seems to me “supermodel” syndrome has overtaken fashion. Rather than buying clothes that make us look good, we feel we much change ourselves to look good in the clothes that were designed by these hacks. I know there’s the delusion that we will look like the guy painted on the wall in Times Square or the lady on the cover of Vogue, but often times, even they don’t look like that. Their bodies are more the product of retouch than real life.
I don’t know about women’s fashion mags, but GQ, Esquire, Details and their ilk not only need to ramp up their dreadful editorial (Andrew Goldman’s work is a welcome exception), but they might want to rethink their definition of fashion. Their pages are peopled by young men who will graduate from high school any day now — if that tape worm doesn’t get them first — wearing suits they will not be able to afford until their parents die and leave them everything. They look great. They also look great in jeans and sweatshirts, their old Boy Scout Uniforms and their Sponge Bob PJs. They are however the only ones who would look great in high water suit pants and three button jackets.
This month’s Details magazine features fisherman’s coats with rope toggle buttons (remember those from grade school?) and shoes that look like they came out of a bin at the Goodwill as their fashion forward for the season. While it may be fashionable to have beat up shoes and to still look good in a kindergarten coat, it does not offer much in the way of design.
I despair for the fashion industry. We are either doomed to look like Maoist China with everyone in the same jeans and chambray shirt or to be victims of the sort of thinking that had Mayan parents hang beads before their babies faces to make them cross-eyed because it was fashionable.
I haven’t seen that Project Runway show that’s so popular with my people. Perhaps there is a new generation of designers coming who are talented enough to design clothes that make actual people look good, not just mannequins. If not, there is a fortune to be made by the person who has the strength of character to withstand the Emperor’s New Clothes design school that has taken over fashion, the vision to remember what true purpose of fashion design and the skill to make us look good again.
Or maybe we just need to invent cosmetic health insurance.
Eric Shaw Quinn 
You’re preaching to the choir, handsome! Let me tell you what a bitch it is to be 5’2″ (OK!! I’m 5’1″ and 3/4!! I lied!!!!) and 125…ok….130 lbs…and try to buy anything attractive.
I’m just glad I got my fat ass outta L.A. before I was strung up by my hair at Sunset Plaza for refusing to get a tan and liposuction. ha!
We are all at the mercy of fashion. It’s a trickle down theory. The designers put out what they think is hot and it trickles down until it is more and more affordable for the masses. If it sells a lot then they make more of it. I think you should be able to walk into clothing stores and find what will work with your body type and your personal tastes, but that never happens. You are forced to choose from what some buyer has decided you should be wearing this season, and that is based on what the store thinks they will sell the most of that season. I am not sure how many years ago that regular tshirts starting becoming so small and form fitting for those guys that want to show off their muscles, but the rest of us feel uncomfortable with our tshirts stretched across our underdeveloped pecs and our flat but not ripped stomached hanging out the bottoms of the shirt because they are too short. I am like you Eric in the respect that XL has now become the size for the comfortable tshirt and sweaters that I want to wear. Also if I am not careful with the size of jeans I buy, they either don’t cover my ass because the legs are so skin tight, or they are falling off in about 30 minutes because they are so bagging all over. For those of us on a budget, and who are not in our late teens and early twenties, it becomes difficult to find stylish clothing without feeling like we are trying to hard to be younger, or looking like we just stepped out of the retirement home. I love fashion, the cuts, the colours, the design aesthetic, but it doesn’t work for everyone, it doesn’t even work for a majority of us…and I will be damned if I am moving into the polyester grandpa pants until they tie me down and force me to wear them. Carrie Bradshaw said on Sex and the City that there comes a time for women of a certain age to cover those babies up and not have everything hanging out…I agree, in the case of men it is not trying to pretend that we go to the gym everyday or just got where we are on our skateboard, or that we just came from a funeral. I saw a few of the recent fall collections for men on tv and how many of us are going to start wearing our dress pants above our ankles, or wear our collars flipped up at our necks and buttoned up…who knows? I love shopping but sometimes I want to cry when I try things on and look in the mirror. Somebody send Marc Jacobs over here for a personal fitting, pronto!!!
“I believe fashion magazines promote low self esteem.” ~Darren Hayes
I totally agree. Fashion is in a really sorry state. Not only is it [mostly] supertrash, but it’s way overpriced. There are So few real designers out there; Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen [RIP], Christian Siriano, Betsey Johnson… but really, how many of those can you really wear on a DTD basis, and how many are sold for day wear?
It’s pretty much typical to have models whose looks surpass the clothes, and can make even the most unimaginative, ugly crap look like it’s High Fashion [poseurs]- because it’s not the clothes that are looking good, it’s the person, and therein lies the problem.
But then again, we have a really individualized society [which I can’t help but love], so I can see people walking by in the most revolting trash and people looking very stylish in the same instance; it really depends where you get the clothes… usually the ones with the cute indie clothes are either good at cherrypicking or shop online. To put it in a nutshell.
Honestly, though, I just absolutely loathe the “sag pants” look. I really want to go up to these guys, grab them by the shoulders, and go, “It’s not hot, or rebellious! You are embarrassing yourself!”
Eric… you think you’ve got problems. Try having an addiction for International Concept, aka I.N.C., a Macy’s in-store brand, only to be constantly confronted with the fact the only ones that fit into this stylish brand are those with severe substance abuse issues. I suppose the drug of choice would be crack, from just how small those sizes truly are.
But I was willing to sacrifice my pride to wear the cool little number they came out with for Independence Day, year before last, at a much greater size. What size you ask? Don’t ask, and I won’t tell.
As we “fashion, damn you!” shoppers all know, we can pay our way into the size of our liking or ego up to a point —-sorry Eric, but we are all going to have to accept that designer clothes are not really made for humans who actually eat food.
Against my own internal Carson Kressley wisdom, I let this blousey white cotton shirt with large faded pastel blue hippie flowers lie to me as it draped across a beautifully chiseled mannequin that it would look just as beautiful on me; This, it said, at a … larger… size, unless I decided to spend six months in rehab to recover from what I would have to inject or deny myself to get into that thing at the size i think i am. Being the drug free soul that I pride myself on, and not really wanting to have to do an Ethiopian magic trick… “but for the grace of God,” as my grandmother always said, I chose the risk of someone in my social life actually finding the size on this lable and saying, “I knew it. You can’t have that many Asian Quickley Bubble Teas with tapioca balls without fitting into your clothes like Glinda the Good Witch on Chemo.” I could just hear them as I pulled it off the rack, my heart racing as I enter the fitting room.
But luckily, I was saved by the fact that the mannequin had no nipples, or at least no color in them. Turns out this number was as shear as Madonna’s birthday panties. I just couldn’t get past my nipples making a bigger statement than the pretty pastel blue hippie flowers would for the 4th of July. I try not to wear my nipples as an accessory. That and…huh… the fact my sleeve cuffs would have to be triple rolled just to accommodate my insistence on wearing this beautifully divine I.N.C. fashion crackwear. But I still think it was the nipple wardrobe malfunction that stopped this party.
So, long story —- short, Mr. Quinn, I feel your pain. If you are lurking around in that front corner section of high fashion Bloomingdale send-downs in Macy’s Men’s Store in Hollywood, don’t. I know that store well. Move to the back of the store near the parking garage to the those kinder, more self-esteem affirming fashions from Perry Ellis and Kenth Cole to Calvin Klein and Polo. But if you really want to feel petite, just step into a Target, or better yet, catch Charter Club on the sale rack. But then again, I think we were talking about higher fashion, that elusive style one needs to wire his or her jaw shut for just to wear.
Disclaimer: This post response is in no way affiliated with Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s Department Stores; all statements are fully the responsibility of this perpetually optimistic, yet recurrently horrified customer.