Is Fashion Doomed to be Fashy?

Some thoughts about display

One of the greatest female designers of all time, some one who changed the way women dressed for both work and play, Coco Chanel was a Fascist or at least Nazi adjacent.. Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War from 2012 is a meticulously researched account of her intimate relationships with British and European anti-semitic aristocrats: from the Duke of Westminster to the Gestapo spy the Baron von Dinklage. Coco was a working girl with a strong taste for survival. The CCs on her purses and jewels might be echoes of the double Ss on her boyfriend’s secret uniform.

Karl Lagerfeld creative director of the House of Chanel from 1983 to his death in 2019 was the son of two Nazi party members. He steered the House of Chanel in Coco’s spirit, with a taste for luxury and a roguish slightly BDSM flair. Chanel herself was a kept woman and traded sexual favors for advancement in Europe’s wealthiest and most right wing circles. Lagerfeld came from a comfortable middle class background but claimed to be descended of aristocrats from his mother’s side. It turns out, his parents both joined the party, not the Communist party, but the other one.

European luxury brands and their popularity in the US, Middle East, China and Russia (despite the sanctions) drive the EU’s entire export economy. Without LVMH (including Hermes, Christian Dior), Kering, which owns Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, without Chanel, what would Europe’s export economy look like?

Europe is exporting not only a tradition of craftsmanship, but also an incredible, almost inimitable feat of global branding.

Nostalgia for the interwar (World War I and II) European aristocracy with its anti-Semitism, its arriviste love of luxury, modernity, ease, saddlery, leisure and other forms of unproductive life seem to permeate, at least in style and scent the fantasies of the global capitalist class.

Don’t give me the quiet luxury rebrand of rich people. Rich people love showing off the luxury brands to each other. Quiet luxury is rich people subcultural innovation, a kind of Protestant Reformation on Christianity that tries to make capitalism less ostentatious and more powerful at the same time.

I’m wondering if there is non-fashy fashion. What would it look like? What is socialist fashion? The Bauhaus knits? Denim? Carhartt? All of these fabrics styles and brands are just styles now, ripped away from their original working class contexts.

Is there a fashion of the people that isn’t fast fashion? What’s wrong with wanting to rip off a piece of intellectual property hoarded by LVMH, redistributed by H&M?

There is a SoCal look that I can’t understand: Lululemon athleisure or even an Adidas track suit paired with this Louis Vuitton bag. The bag is about 2000 USD. I guess that’s pocket change for your average gazillionaire these days. Athleisure I’ve already decided is the end of the world, but paired with the LV bag is the look actually fashy? Is it the pure flex of the market in a world that has destroyed social life and intersubjectivity. Because that bag with your expensive work out outfit, is not by stretch of the imagination fashionable.