Fashion

As summer moves into fall, the days get shorter, the leaves change colour and our wounds from that game of lawn darts gone horribly wrong have stopped bleeding. I nearly killed my brother during one of these deadly yard games. How my other brother nearly killed me with a Nerf boomerang is another story entirely. But I digress. As these wounds heal, this magazine moves its focus towards fashion.

Fashion is what separates you from the flock. Or fashion is how you blend into the flock. Either way it’s a decision you make on how you want the world to see and perceive you. Fashion is a large part of our lives, be it putting on those Gap khakis and hoping you don’t get noticed or walking around with a lawn dart sticking out of your head and gushing blood out all over the place (huge in Japan. The norm over here in three years). Even the biggest slob you know takes a moment every morning to ponder what to wear, because what you wear is a conscious and intentional decision. It is something that demands discussion, judgement, praise or bitter humiliating lifelong emotional scar-inducing ridicule. Birkenstocks and wool socks. I thought I was being next level. Never again shall I make that mistake.

Fashion is at the forefront of most cultural movements of any significance. Be it jazz, punk, hippy, grunge, hip-hop, Amish or Goth. Were the Goths a movement? I let that one slide but it’s debatable if wearing eyeliner and writing bad poetry in your “book of tears” could be considered a movement. What all these groups wore (and what the people who just won’t let it go still wear) is as important as anything they ever said.

I’ve racked my brain long and hard and the only place I could come up with where fashion isn’t relevant is prison. No one in prison gets made fun of for the outfit they’re wearing cuz criminals don’t get a choice. Discussions of why one decided to wear orange coveralls when in prison are rather moot as they’re forced to wear them. How bad ass your tattoos are and the speed at which you can make a shiv out of your lunch tray is what will get you props in “the yard” when you’re doing time.

But I can’t ever dress myself so what do I know. The majority of my week is spent wearing, or “rocking” if you will, Shady brand sweat-pants. They’re black, they have Shady patches all over them, they cost $30 and for some reason have a fly. I don’t really get the point of a fly on sweat pants. The main reason people wear sweats is they’re easy to put on and take off thus not really requiring a fly. But fashion doesn’t need to be functional and I’m not one to question Eminem’s design aesthetic either.