Why Fashion Matters

''Social observers and columnists - mostly women - announce, yet again, that fashion sucks. They hate everything about it. Its extravegance, its bitchiness, its eye-opening prices, its manic neophillia, its very worldly unwordliness, its eye for PR and profit, its indifference to the poor of the world, its corruption, and its explotation of women, to name but a few.
They talk with comtempt of fashion victims and fashion mavens, and how daggy the fashion editors look in the front seats at the shows. What is more, they say, they are not actually interested in fashion.''

Enter 'The Devil Wears Prada' =
''Miranda Priestly: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.''

The truth is that almost all women, understandabley, love fashion. A women who says she is tired of fashion is pretending, or else she is decieving herself. A women who really is tired of fashion is a woman who is tired of life. The way we look is an essential part of who we are and how we feel. It makes a big difference to where you position yourself, to your feel for the times, to the people you belong with and the way people treat you. Nobody can afford to ignore that. However your look cannot help but give out powerful messages about yourself - some of them voluntary, some involuntary. Fashion is quite literally, what you make of yourself, how you fashion yourself (including how you don't bother to).

At its best, fashion is an art form that transforms the craft of the entire clothes trade.

So fashion, though powerful, no longer has a style strangehold on anyone. It means things to different people, and nowadays, it is alot more accepted to be the individual such as those that walk the streets today.

The legendary designer Coco Chanel understood this reaity. She once Said - ''Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only: fashion is something in the air. It' the wind that blows in the new fashion; you feel it coming, you smell it ...in the sky, in the street; fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.''
The fashion world recognises that creativity cannot be bridled and controlled and that obsessive quests to do so will only dimish its vitality. Other content industries would do well to head this wisdom.