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“In the past, even in Western Europe, men had worked to obtain the standard of living traditional to their place and class: the notion of acquiring money in order to move out of one's class was in fact foreign to the earlier feudal and corporate ideology. With the weakening of caste lines and the development of bourgeois individualism the ritual of conspicuous expenditure spread rapidly throughout the rest of society: it justified the abstractions of the money-makers and put to wider use the technical progress of the inventors. The ideal of a powerful expensive life supplanted the medieval ideal of a holy or a humane life, based on human principals and morality. Even the poor, the overworked, the exploited were hypnotized by this new ritual of consumption, and they permitted it to go on at their expense with scarcely a murmur of protest until the French Revolution”. Technics and Civilization.
The money-making individuals killed the ideals of the medieval, feudal life. Today we see the devolution of a capitalist society based solely on material acquisition and waste in the pursuit of profit. And the money-making bloggers who have turned fashion today into a circus. This is born out in what Suzy Menkes of The New York Times calls The Circus of Fashion. She calls it the Fashion zoo of bloggers whose purpose is to advertise products for labels, for profit; not about fashion. "But two things have worked to turn fashion shows into a zoo:
the cattle market of showoff people waiting to be chosen or rejected by the photographers, and the way that smart brands, in an attempt to claw back control lost to multimedia, have come in on the act. Marc Jacobs was the first designer to sense the power of multimedia. When he named a bag after Bryanboy in 2008, he made the blogger’s name, and turned on an apparently unending shower of designer gifts, which are warmly welcomed at bryanboy.com."
There is a genuine difference between the stylish and the showoffs — and that is the current dilemma. If fashion is for everyone, is it fashion? The answer goes far beyond the collections and relates to the speed of fast fashion. There is no longer a time gap between when a small segment of fashion-conscious people pick up a trend and when it is all over the sidewalks" The loss of individuality that has always distinguished people who were actually different; not clone fashion blogger marketing tools of corporate brands. "Or, more accurately in the fashion world, the celebrity circus of people who are famous for being famous". These money-making bloggers seeking fame have turned fashion into an exhibitionist fetish.
Bourgeois individualists dressing up as spectacle to be photographed, to compensate for some inferiority complex that drives them to seek fame; it's not about fashion anymore.
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