Fashion = Fascism

I just finished watching "The Devil Wears Prada". Story-wise it is a light frivolous comedy, which disappointed me, but it did get me thinking about the psychology of the fashion industry.

What is the fashion industry really but an anally-retentive conspiracy against individuality and pleasure? The brittle, mean-spirited and desperately insecure characters who populate the fashion magazine around which the film's story revolves are to be pitied, not followed as arbiters of behaviour.

Clothes can be a fun and richly rewarding way to express our unique personality. It's fun to wear a bright, tasteless Hawaiian shirt, or a pair of tight black jeans or t-shirt with our favourite rock group's insignia emblazoned on it. But the fashion industry is against that. With dictates of "what is hot and what is not" they try desperately to crush the human spirit. And they try to seduce us into wearing clothes which are uncomfortable, expensive and pretentious. Why do so many of us waste our time reading fashion magazines analysiing in anal detail the latest in fashion, when the things we really get the most pleasure from are the things we do when we are naked?

And then you have the dictates of fashionable body type. There is a reason why we have an archetype of the jolly fat person. It's because we realise that it is in sensual pleasures, such as eating and sex, that the joy of life resides, not in impressing others with our looks. But the sad repressed people who run the fashion industry try to use intimidation and flattery to seduce us away from these pleasures and into the hellish prison where they live.

All of this made me think about the parallels between the fashion industry today and Naziism in Germany. In Berlin in the early 1930s society was becoming more decadent, open homosexuality was common and people were engaging in kinky public sex acts in the nightclubs. Then along came the Nazis with their cult of youth and beauty, their forced conformism and their death camps. They felt that it was better that millions of men, women and children be enslaved and killed than to allow people to have a good time in their own chosen way. Today the fashion industry also promotes a cult of youth and so-called physical perfectionism and tries to use intimidation to force conformism. And as a result there are teenage girls all over the world who, instead of enjoying the sensual pleasures of life, are starving themselves to death in concentration camps of the mind.