In Defence of The Fashion Freaks

Other Half is getting really good at the gift selection. For Valentine's - (totally unnecessary but very sweet) he got me STREET, The Nylon Book of Global Style which looks at street style in the six cities they deemed in 2006 (when the book was published) to be on the cutting edge of fashion: New York, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Berlin, Tokyo and Melbourne.

It's a fascinating look into the unique energy of a city as it filters through its people and manifests in the way they dress (who mostly happen to be within a certain age group, 18 - 30). Each subject came with a blurb describing what they're wearing, who their icons are, what they love most about their city. (A then unknown Rob Pattinson got snapped for London, this was before Twilight, of course. He looked not unlike a vagrant. And still he got into the book.)

Some people (just a mere few really) made a point of telling the world that they don't follow the runways like those "fashion freaks" and that they are "untouched by the evil hand of fashion." There's a great divide between those with 'real style' (as they see it) and those 'runway watching', 'Vogue reading' types. But are they - we - really that different? And it is that black and white? (I'm not including the WAGs here, though I'd be very interested to hear their response. Wait - no I wouldn't.)

Here's my retort: What I see on the runways and in magazine editorial inspires me. ALOT. I find it exhilarating. So much that I spend precious hours from my day looking, learning, absorbing it and writing about it. I love the colours, the textures, the cuts, the new ways of mixing and matching and pushing the boundaries of what we consider appropriate for ourselves. References to history, reflecting the 'now', predicting the future. Recycling, reinventing, reinvigorating. It pushes us to explore aspects of our personality and we can pick and choose what we want to take from it. We can be whoever we want to be.

So I'm not going to apologise for this or feel like some kind of blank slate who stupidly follows what's being "dictated" to me because I LOOK and I LIKE. I'm also influenced by art, my childhood, film, my friends, music, sunsets, midcentury modern, the sea, photography, children's stories, the Victorians, Marie Antoinette and the gals from the 20s to the 50s. And as if I have the money to buy head-to-toe looks from the collections anyway!

The street feeds fashion and designers are looking to the pavement, and the blogs (Susie Bubble, to name one of the major forces who brilliantly combines fashion from all available sources to create her style and can even discuss it intelligently) to find out what's happening out there, to take inspiration for their collections. And if one recalls Miranda Priestley's monologue to the style indifferent Andrea in The Devil Wears Prada about how the fashion Powers That Be do in fact influence the choices of what a person who 'doesn't care about fashion' wears, the lesson is that no one is immune to the power of the runways. It's just simply where our clothes come from, directly or by way of the high street or the vintage shop. And it gets fed back.

Can't we all just get dressed and get along?