Fashionista

Fashion Design   Apparel Definition

Fashion Calendar

A Partisan for Fashion

The construction of the word explains its tone. A portmanteau of fashion and Sandinista borrows the ending of a political movement's name, so a fashionista is not merely someone who likes clothes but someone with the commitment of a partisan: following collections, knowing designers and seasons, and treating fashion as a subject worth serious attention. That is why the term covers both sides of the industry. It describes professionals, designers, models, photographers, buyers and fashion writers whose work is fashion, and it describes wearers whose involvement is a matter of devotion rather than employment. Both groups share fluency. A fashionista reads a garment the way a film enthusiast reads a scene, noticing cut, reference and intention where a casual observer sees only an outfit.

The contrast with fashion victim sharpens the compliment. A fashion victim's slavish dedication to the latest fashions overrides what is generally considered good taste or actually flattering, and attracts the attention of the fashion police. The fashionista follows just as closely but judges what she follows. Dedication is common to both words; discrimination is what separates them. That distinction is why fashionista can be used approvingly in the industry itself, while fashion victim is an insult even there.

How Fashion Direction Reversed

Fashionista culture cannot be understood without the reversal of where fashion authority sits. Traditional fashion directives were culturally restructured in recent decades. In the 1960s, haute couture designers influenced street fashion through a hierarchy of fashion distributors: ideas began in Paris salons and moved downward and outward. In the 1970s and 1980s, large media corporations in film, magazines and music took over control of the industry, so the images that defined fashion came from screens and pages as much as from ateliers. During the 1990s, Japanese street fashion began to reverse the influence of haute couture, with styles originating in city neighbourhoods and being taken up by designers rather than handed down to them.

Since 2000, weblogs worldwide have promoted street fashion rapidly. Such blogs became a way of life for many, and fashionista blog culture changed the industry, because anyone with a camera and an eye could publish a look the day it was worn, without waiting for a magazine's season. Blog culture also brought a new popular fashionista vocabulary. Two distinctions in that vocabulary matter. Fashionable and trendy do not mean the same thing: fashionable describes a lasting alignment with good current style, while trendy describes following a trend, which may be brief and may not suit the wearer. The Japanese word Fasshonaburu is similarly gaining acceptance, usage and meaning in the non-Japanese fashionista vocabulary, a small example of the same global circulation that blogs accelerated. Even popular song picked the word up: Panic! at the Disco used fashionistas in the lyric about not being able to keep up with them, which captures exactly the quality the term celebrates, someone ahead of the general pace of fashion rather than dragged behind it.