Dear Julius, the analysis on women’s fashion
I promised you this, so here we are.
Cargo-culting
I watched a French movie the other day, Masculin Féminin (1966), and the next day when finding an outfit to wear to meet a few people, I put on the outfit Madeline was wearing. Flat shoes, black skirt, black tights, a sweater. Her sweater was white and mine was black, but I was cargo-culting the entire outfit. In the film she explained a little bit about the outfit, in an interview (Madeline was a singer in the film). It’s about youth.
I don’t really know much about how this outfit represents youth, and I don’t really know why I would want to represent youth in the first place, but I liked the outfit, it looked classy, I had everything I needed for it, and so I just went for it. I followed the formula without myself making the derivation.
That’s cargo-culting. And cargo-culting works really well if the culture you are copying is doing a decent job. You can just get away with copy-pasting and have good results.
It leads to disastrous results if what you’re copying is actually awful. That is, I suspect, one reason why American fashion is so disastrous. People don’t want to make choices and derivations all the time, they cargo-cult, and what they are cargo-culting—what they see on TV, is just terribly mediocre.
Some people say that Americans need a return to modesty. I don’t think modesty has anything to do with it. Not really. Something like wanting to project modesty is now a derivation. That’s already too much work for a lot of people.
Cult of Authenticity
When Americans are deriving something, what are they deriving? And from what and for what?
In America, the core value around fashion is individual expression, which leads to some fun and interesting fashion choices, some of which are quite novel and exciting. But most of the time it is a chaos of whatever the person feels like at a current moment. You get blue hair and a green hoodie and purple trousers and clown shoes.
Compare this with the core value in Canada, which is not individual expression, but rather communal comfort. You wear clothes that would make the people around you feel good. You want the people around you to be comfortable, and for your clothing choices to reflect respect towards the people around you. This eliminates clothing choices that are too unusual or shocking. This leads to a conformity of neutral sweaters, but in limiting the options, the general fashion sense of the public.