I was reading a lovely interview with Dallas Shaw on the Everygirl, and felt so soothed and happy looking at the bright, pretty pictures. Head on over to get the full story.

Fashion is often shrouded with negative or ambivalent images of mindless consumption, elitist ideology, and an obsession with image. For years I tried to deny the fact that fashion endlessly fascinated me, out of a fear that loving runway shows and glossy magazines would brand me as one of the “stupid girls.” While I have now embraced this aspect of my personality, as with all other elements of culture, I am very picky about what aspects of fashion I integrate into my life. As a fat girl, I’m not particularly obsessed with unrepresentative models. As a closet hippie, I am uncomfortable with disposable “fast fashion.” But the overlapping shades of femininity and masculinity, tradition and exoticism, practicality and fantasy that are present in the fashion world have never ceased to spark my curiosity. Also, I really, really love shoes.

I recently posted a RuPaul quote that says, “You’re born naked and the rest is drag.” This at least partially describes the reasons for my interest in the world of fashion. If you believe, as I do, that gender is constructed by one’s actions supporting or subverting cultural assumptions, then fashion becomes one way to play with your own personal definitions of gender and self. I admire individuals like Dita Von Teese who purposefully and specifically construct a gender paradigm that is entirely personal. I applaud carefully considered artifice and creative rebellions. I love Jean Paul Gaultier’s lavish menswear and redefined corsets. By mediating between the unprotected self and the gaze of the other, clothes do indeed seem to make the man. Or woman, as the case may be. After all, Mark Twain was at least partly correct when he joked that “…Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

My dream is that people all over the world will learn to enjoy and play with fashion, not just as a sign of status or means of consumption, but as a vital and living technique for exploring and redefining their own identities in a world that is largely governed by visual considerations. As the philosopher Epictetus once said, “Know first who you are; then adorn yourself accordingly.” While adornment is neither an essential or serious matter, it is one way to know yourself, and to communicate that self to those around you. So enjoy it. Mess around with it. Unlike the animals who are born with the only coats they will ever wear, humanity is blessed with the ability to construct their own bright and changing feathers. You are free to create yourself every day, in the endless game that is a culture’s visual dialogue. And in this act of intentional creation, hopefully you will be brought ever closer to your truest self.

To Whom It May Concern,

I am disappointed with the current state of affairs in the fashion industry. While I desire exceptional aesthetics, delicious luxury, and exhilarating innovation, I am usually confronted with stale, larger-than-life personalities, uninspired nostalgia, and degrading standards of quality. If I’m going to spend my hard-earned money on a pair of shoes, a dazzling dress, or even an imaginary “lifestyle” purveyed in a glossy magazine, I want the product to be worth the cost. Why in the world I would pay through the nose to advertise the logo of a multimillion dollar corporation (I’m looking at you, Louis Vuitton), or join the lucrative personality cult of the latest celebrity “stylist” is beyond my ken. Instead of at least the honesty of nakedness, the emperor now sports a tiresome mishmash of polyester H&M throwaways, cheap canvas tote sacks embellished with Karl Lagerfeld’s sneering visage, and mass-produced skull accessories that couldn’t be farther from edgy.

While there has been bad taste in every decade (double-knit polyester springs quickly to mind), fashion’s current era of celebrity designers and declining luxury standards is especially disheartening. I am tired of tepid and unoriginal editorials shot by photographers who confuse slick and stylized with artistic and beautiful. I am bored to tears with the growing gap between the two falsely constructed polarities of Marc Jacobs-esque, underage, vulnerably sexualized couture urchins, and the “real women” that fill every year’s Vogue body issue with exposed and exclaimed-at curves, while fashion editors everywhere pat themselves on the back for featuring the token plus size without having to find actual clothes for them to model. I want my luxury goods to be created by skilled craftsmen who are paid fairly for their labor; I am not interested in shoddy trinkets mass-produced in an offshore assembly line and gilded with the false glow of clever advertising. I want women in my magazines that are both inspirational and authentic, un-airbrushed please. And for the love of all that is sacred and holy, please stop with the hyperbolic language of swoon and squee. We are grown women here, not hormonal prepubescents at a Justin Bieber concert.

Finally, let it not be said that I am unappreciative of the richness that fashion brings to my life, even with these irritating caveats. I am inspired by the genius of  designers like Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier, who taught me that fashion could sharpen itself into societal critique. I am grateful for new clothing lines like Damn You Alexis, that allow fat girls like me to wear the high quality fashion we have long been excluded from. And I am overjoyed to see designer collaborations that I can really get behind, like that between charming newcomer Mary Katrantzou and the venerable house of Lesage at this spring’s London Fashion Week. Here’s to you, ladies and gentlemen of the fashion universe. May you continue to create fantasies and illusions that foster in our world a larger, richer, more beautiful reality. But I swear, I’ll cut the next one of you that tries to sell me a three hundred dollar logo tee.

Much Love,

Missie Sue