Fashionista

When I was younger, I hated being called a “fashionista”. I hated any connotation that meant I was girly or loved clothes and fashion. I loathed it. I despised it. I wore the same hoodie and jeans and ratty pair of converse with my hair in a ponytail all of middle school just to prove how unlike this fashion girl everyone hated  I was. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I got over this, but obviously I have because here I am writing to you from my fashion blog! 

But this thought had been bothering me for awhile: why had I wasted so much time trying to be the girl I thought everyone wanted, when I so clearly wanted to wear crazy clothes and experiment with fashion? What was so bad about this that I felt the need to curb my creativity? 

The answer came to me as I was walking home from class earlier this week. I was waiting at a cross walk and a little girl and her father were walking around behind me. The little girl was in a pink, sparkled dress with sparkly pink shoes to match, which she was walking on very cautiously to avoid all the puddles. Her father kept making comments about her dragging her feet, being too slow, needing to “stop being such a little fashionista and get her rear in gear”, and other things of that attitude. Obviously I do not know these people personally, I do not know what kind of day they where having, but I do know the way he told her to pick up the pace was with an heir that if kept up, would cause this little girl to not care about clothes and feel bad for caring about them later in life. Which should not be the case. 

In this world, liking fashion and wanting to look good, and valuing style is something that is generally frowned upon, which makes very little sense. Fashion is something everyone does in their lives every single day. You cant leave your house without putting on clothes and even if you are a thrown on whatever smells clean type of person, that is still your sense of fashion. That is still your style. But people are never getting put down for an “I don't care” style.  And after all this consideration, I have found out why. 

If you love clothes and fashion, you are automatically deemed a shallow airhead. 

First of all, I want to point out that the fashion industry is one of the biggest in the world. Its a multi billion dollar industry that thrives on everyone. Every single person who wears clothes contributes to it. 

Second, to be able to survive in the fashion industry, you have no room to be an airhead. There is so much competition to get the job you want that you have to work harder than you have ever worked in your entire life to hopefully stand out just enough that the person in charge of hiring you noticed you even just a little bit. And even then you may still need to go above and beyond  continue to work harder and that will not stop when you get the job.

Being a fashion student has shown me how intelligent you actually have to be to survive in this business. It doesn't matter if you want to become a designer, work primarily in business and marketing, work for a magazine, photograph fashion, or work as a fabric producer, you have to be knowledgeable about every single area. And let me tell you, there is a to to learn. 

We get this funny idea that working in fashion is all free clothes and tickets to the front row at Paris Fashion Week, and where as that does happen now and then, it is not in any way the primary thing happening. It is a lot of long hours and dedication and creativity to make things happen. It is a lot of standing up for yourself and pushing yourself to do better and to get the job done, whatever it may be. Its taking  the love of getting ready and shopping and turning it into a career, something people do all the time, but fashion is one of the only one criticized for it. 

Maybe because the industry is heavily female, maybe because for such a long time models were blamed for unrealistic expectations of beauty, maybe because this society doesn't want to admit that we place a high expectation on appearance, but for whatever reason, people don't want to believe you have to be smart and creative and hard working to wok in fashion. I encourage you to go and do some research if you are one of these people, or even if you are not. A lot has change din the industry recently, and a lot is in the process of changing. I encourage you to go an look up all the various aspects of the fashion industry, to get and idea of the many levels of it. Before you criticize, do your research. It can’t hurt right? 

Madey 

Photos Taken by Kyle Odesha