A Plague of Zombies: Fashion Myths I Wish I Hadn’t Fallen For

I’ve been blogging about personal style for almost 13 years which is an awfully long time, even without accounting for the fact that the pandemic years alone felt like a decade. It’s not surprising then that my thoughts on the subject have evolved a lot. I used to be much more uncritical – one might say even gullible – in my intake of fashion ideology. Consequently, I fell for a bunch of ideas which, in retrospect, are easy to spot as mere capitalist gimmicks. And though I might have become savvier in the last decade, those gimmicks keep on gimmicking. They are the fashion myths that just won’t die. Fashion zombies, if you will.

French Girl Chic

The superiority of French girls (and women) has been undisputed since at least the 80s. They know what (not) to eat, what to wear, and how to make bedhead look chic. Any attempts to distil their knowledge – and, gosh, countless people (French and otherwise) have tried – are pointless because at the end of the day, it comes down to the fact they are French and you’re not je ne sais quoi. It is elusive but maybe, just maybe, if you finally find that perfect shade of red lipstick, you too can achieve French Girl nirvana.

That’s the idea, anyway.

The reality is that French women are not a monolith and chic-ness of style has no nationality or look.

Capsule Wardrobes

Ahhh, remember the 30 x 30 challenge circa the early 2010s? That thing had a hold on my psyche, like whoa. But that was an almost quaint precursor of the capsule wardrobe, something that continues to be touted in many spaces as the solution to all your style dilemmas. It’s important to distinguish here between 2 things: a wardrobe-building technique and a product.

As a wardrobe-building technique, capsuling has merit. It’s also what most of us do, whether we realize it or not. You know how you have things in your closet that you wear a lot? And then when you buy new things, you pick stuff that goes with those things that you wear a lot? Congrats, you have a capsule!

People who explain their wardrobe-building … I’m sorry … their “capsule-building” approach (i.e. how to edit what’s in your closet and shop mindfully) are doing a legitimate service. They’re teaching people to fish, rather than selling them (overpriced) fish – if you’ll pardon the analogy. Obviously, the fashion industry is not interested in this because there is relatively little money to be made out of informed consumers.

A capsule wardrobe as product is total a gimmick, and this is what you’re generally going to find on social media. Notice that the capsule wardrobe-as-product is never positioned by reference to what’s already in your closet (which reflects what you like to wear, the climate you live in, your job and hobbies, etc.). It presupposes a blank slate. It’s a prescriptive list of items you should buy … and the list will be different a year, or even a season from now.

10 Items Every Woman Should Own

This is just plain bullsh*t. Unless we are talking about BROAD generalities – like, every woman should own a pair of comfortable shoes – this list exists solely in order to sell you something. Probably a white button-down shirt or a trench coat.

10 Items Women Over 40 Shouldn’t Wear

This is the same kind of bullsh*t but with an ageist twist. It might seem counter-capitalist to have a “don’t wear this” list, but it’s not. These lists are meant to instill a sense of inadequacy, which can then be exploited to sell other things.

This is actually at the core of all of these myths: feelings of inferiority or inadequacy –>perceived lack or need –> monetized solutions. Lather, rinse, repeat. It also makes them easy for me to spot now that I know what to look for. If an influencer post or media article elicits a negative emotional response – makes me feel suddenly dissatisfied or restless or just “bad” in some unspecified way – it’s a sign that I need to probe that response further before acting on it. The question I ask myself in that case: cui bono? Cui bono is just a fancy lawyer term for “who profits”. It’s pretty self-explanatory. If there is a product put forward (or implied), someone definitely intends to profit from my feeling bad.

In an ideal world, it would be great to be impervious to negative feelings like self-doubt, inadequacy, jealousy, and so on. The reality is, they can be hard to avoid especially in a non-ideal world that often works very hard to provoke exactly those feelings (because that’s how capitalism thrives). What I strive for is to be aware of those feelings, question them and not allow them to be monetized at my expense. And I think that’s pretty good progress.