Fashion Victim

Fashion Design   Apparel Definition

Clothing Model   Fashion Calendar

Faddishness: Crossing the Line of a Fad

A fad is an intense but short-lived fashion trend. By nature fads sit at the extreme range of currently acceptable style, which means they commonly cross the line from the sublime to the ridiculous. Following a trend is not the failing; every fashionable wardrobe responds to its moment. The fashion victim is the person who cannot tell where the trend's useful range ends. Because a fad burns brightly and briefly, it demands the most judgement exactly when it is most exciting, and a wearer without a sense of boundary adopts the extreme version, at the extreme moment, in the extreme combination. Sarah Jessica Parker and Sex and the City are cited as the popular illustration of that line being crossed, where the styling itself became the joke the audience was invited to notice.

Season-to-season change is the related test. Versace's observation, that a woman who alters her look too much from season to season becomes a fashion victim, identifies dependence rather than variety. A personal style can absorb new pieces because it has a stable core: preferred shapes, colours and levels of formality that new purchases must fit. Without that core, each season's marketing replaces the last season's wardrobe wholesale, and the wearer is dressed by the industry's calendar rather than by her own judgement. The expense follows automatically, because nothing is kept long enough to earn its cost.

Materialism, Labels and the Walking Billboard

Keeping up with fashion is often very expensive. Expensive clothes signal that the wearer is financially successful, but they are not necessarily cool or fashionable. Designer labels have become an important part of how style is identified, and shoppers have grown accustomed to the social acceptance that comes with wearing the right brands. The label has in many cases migrated from the inside of a garment to the outside, with sports and leisurewear makers such as adidas and Kelme as common examples. A fashion victim, able to recognise this phenomenon but unable to determine its boundary, may become a walking billboard, advertising a brand at full volume while believing the volume is taste.

Branding is sometimes associated with higher quality of manufacture and a more expensive price, and the ownership and display of such products is frequently marketed to suggest that the wearer will automatically embody a personal characteristic of quality by association. Designers have identified this and in some cases can exploit it to the extent that prices escalate to surprising proportions without reference to the cost of manufacture. Extreme examples are found among accessory makers such as Versace, Gucci and Burberry, scent makers such as Chanel and Guerlain, and watch makers such as Rolex and Bvlgari. Accessories lead the pattern because a logo is easiest to display on a bag, a belt, a bottle or a watch face, and because an accessory can be carried into every outfit, multiplying the display. The victim aspires to the extreme end of what is available, seeking expensive products, or copies of them, believing outward display will draw admiration in proportion to actual or apparent cost. That is why the term became the ultimate insult to the aspirational: it accuses the wearer of spending the most and judging the least.

The Boundary Is the Skill

Both halves of the definition point to the same underlying skill, which is recognising boundaries. In faddishness the boundary is between a trend and its caricature. In materialism it is between a well-made branded product and a logo bought as a substitute for taste. Fashion itself does not create victims; it creates a fast-moving, heavily marketed environment in which a person who outsources every judgement to trends, labels and price will be exposed. The remedy implied by the term is not dressing plainly or avoiding designer goods. It is developing the stable personal judgement that lets expensive and fashionable things be used on the wearer's terms.