French Press is not a fashion blog, and a tiny part of me wishes it was. Fashion blogs are all the rage right now. I have become addicted to the pages and pages of glamorous pictures of runway shows next to street style snapshots that make even going to the grocery store look like an exciting outing. These blogs beg to be made up mostly of pictures, broken up my minimal, informal writing. The bloggers are expected to have a fascinating personality, a totally unique style, and fabulous events to attend every weekend. Once they’ve developed a strong enough following, even two-sentence posts about being home with a cold seem to receive hundreds of comments.
This recent fascination of mine has forced me to question what it is that makes me so drawn to them in the first place. I like getting dressed up, but I don’t think my style is especially creative or revolutionary. I read fashion magazines, but I still don’t totally understand the purpose of the high fashion industry. But the one part of it I do understand is the desire to express oneself in day-to-day life. How we dress is a direct, creative expression of who we are, and as someone who feels everyone should be expressing themselves as much as possible, there is no way I can ignore an industry with this goal.
Like most teenage girls, I remember a time when I thought I was too good for fashion. Thanks to pop culture, I had an idea of what a typical high school girl was supposed to look like before even reaching fifth grade. Girls who spent their time touching up their makeup in front of the bathroom mirror and having a meltdown when they broke a nail were shallow, ditsy, and trivial. Girls who wore thick-framed glasses, dressed in plain sweaters, and sat in the back of the classroom, were always the ones we were meant to aspire to be. For many years, I refused to wear anything besides a t-shirt and jeans in the hopes of establishing that I was one of the latter groups of girls.
Over the years, I have expericed every trend from very bright and girly to borderline emo. Even though I understood that what I was doing was expressing myself through my clothing, I didn’t realize until recently that what I had been doing all along was experimenting with fashion. As I compared this shift in thought to my initial belief that fashion was synonymous with shallow, I came to the realization that these outlooks aren’t opposites, but compatible. Fashion is shallow, but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it.
One of the most defining elements of nonfiction writing is its instinctive desire to answer the question, “so what?” Writing that is essentially a string of information or arguments can’t only state the facts, but has to explain why these facts matter, or what we can learn or gain from them. I’ve found that many fashion blogs seem to always be striving to answer this “so what?;” attempting to give fashion a deeper meaning than is necessary. This results in statements such as, “the belt draws attention to the most narrow part of your waist, giving you an hourglass figure,” or, “pairing neutrals with patterns will make you look refined and polished, perfect for the office.”
These tips are informative, but the fashion articles I find most interesting include writing like, “this outfit makes me feel like a pirate-gypsy-cat-lady and I had so much fun wearing it!” In these articles, the “so what?” comes down to one simple thing: fun. And when art is all about self-expression, there’s nothing wrong with admitting the true, albeit shallow, reason why someone loves a certain look. Even Andy Warhol said, “I am a deeply superficial person.”
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ELIZABETH GAUGHAN
FRENCH PRESS 