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On Style: Filler
Dec. 19th, 2006 11:44 pmWell the style section of Denver's Sunday paper was bereft of articles proclaiming fashion trends. There was hardly any free advertising for fellow corporations announcements of new places to shop aside from one for a website run by The Gap's corporate parent. A piece on politeness on Light Rail (and the lack thereof) and a profile on Colorado's next First Lady. Nothing about clothes. So I'll have to make up something about fashion on my own instead.
Fashion has a negative connotation among geeks when it isn't openly derided by the bookish intellectuals and engineers alike. And it really shouldn't be so scorned, particularly if the person happens to be a science fiction or fantasy fan. Fashion is all about visual cues to what kind of person the wearer wants to be perceived as. This does not have to be just be about keeping up with some trust fund baby social set where having the right label on ones clothing means being part of the group or not, it can also be about saying, "Hey I'm an intellectual, an engineer, a reader, or otherwise a really smart person." Faded black tee shirts with scruffy ill fitting blue jeans does not do this.
The so casual that it goes beyond sleeping through dressing to a "I was comatose when these clothes appeared upon my body" look doesn't proclaim the wearer's intellectual prowess because it is also favored by drug addicts, high school drop outs, and the gormless. Because these other people dress in the extremely casual way they do everyone who doesn't want to be associated with them must choose a look and expend a minimal amount of effort on maintaining it. It can still be tee-shirts and blue jeans, they just have to be unfaded tee shirts and clean blue jeans paired up with a neatly trimmed head of hair and/or beard. Then the wearer doesn't just look like any old computer programmer, he looks like a computer programmer with his shit together.
The whole point of this is that filth and shabby clothes don't proclaim a person's liberation from lesser concerns, they're too common. So get ready to pick a look with Mishalak. Why? Because I suspect until New Years I'll need to fill my journal with stuff on this until I have something new to critique from fashion sites sometime after the Yule.
Fashion has a negative connotation among geeks when it isn't openly derided by the bookish intellectuals and engineers alike. And it really shouldn't be so scorned, particularly if the person happens to be a science fiction or fantasy fan. Fashion is all about visual cues to what kind of person the wearer wants to be perceived as. This does not have to be just be about keeping up with some trust fund baby social set where having the right label on ones clothing means being part of the group or not, it can also be about saying, "Hey I'm an intellectual, an engineer, a reader, or otherwise a really smart person." Faded black tee shirts with scruffy ill fitting blue jeans does not do this.
The so casual that it goes beyond sleeping through dressing to a "I was comatose when these clothes appeared upon my body" look doesn't proclaim the wearer's intellectual prowess because it is also favored by drug addicts, high school drop outs, and the gormless. Because these other people dress in the extremely casual way they do everyone who doesn't want to be associated with them must choose a look and expend a minimal amount of effort on maintaining it. It can still be tee-shirts and blue jeans, they just have to be unfaded tee shirts and clean blue jeans paired up with a neatly trimmed head of hair and/or beard. Then the wearer doesn't just look like any old computer programmer, he looks like a computer programmer with his shit together.
The whole point of this is that filth and shabby clothes don't proclaim a person's liberation from lesser concerns, they're too common. So get ready to pick a look with Mishalak. Why? Because I suspect until New Years I'll need to fill my journal with stuff on this until I have something new to critique from fashion sites sometime after the Yule.