Fashion, because it is so visual and people (read: me) like pictures, is the thing to blog about. I have been thinking about this a lot lately because of three things: 1) I finally got around to reading thirteen-year old Tavi’s EPIC FASHION BLOG the rookie, 2) my friend Anna just started a fashion blog, which has all the makings of a fabulous commentary on pop culture, colours that pop, and the popular in general, and 3) I bought these periwinkle blue Uggs for their full price (as a present to myself after killing my feet at work during the Olympics) and I have not yet taken them off. Therein lies the fundamental question about fashion vs. function, i.e., my Uggs are comfortable but probably ugly. Does the nineteenth century have anything to say about this? Well, yes, yes it does:
In James Makittrick Adair’s eighteenth-century medical companion, An Essay on Diet and Regimen (1812), he includes a chapter on “Fashionable Diseases”. According to Adair
I love that fashion and national improvement are co-dependant but in a negative, “excrescences”-type way. An excrescence is an unnecessary addition to something, but also, an enlargement or abnormal outgrowth, i.e., a wart. Adair obvs does not think very highly of fashion; in fact, his whole chapter warns people against getting on the fashionable disease bandwagon because you will then come down with all sorts of hypochondrial and hysterical disorders. However: there is also the excrescence of luxury...Fashion, like its companion, luxury, may be considered as one of those excrescences which are attached to national improvement; and which so far resemble the moss of fruit trees, and the mistletoe of the oak, as not to be always useless, though often very injurious (118)
...which is, I think, the connection to why Uggs are STILL COOL IN VANCOUVER (though not in Toronto): it’s about Luxury. With a capital “L”. They feel luxurious on my poor blistered feets, in a way that is quite different than, for example, the way that clogs are comfortable but not in the least way luxurious. Uggs, on the other hand, are delicious.
