Fashion: Educating the Youth towards Insincerity and Taste

"Your very nurseries are seminars of falsehood," says the misanthropist in Henry MacKenzie's Man of Feeling, "and what is called Fashion in manhood completes the system of avowed insincerity" (74). Why is fashion insincere? I feel like this is at the root of why people so eloquently elaborate on why they hate fashion. Insincerity, as related to hypocrisy and deceitfulness, is pretending to hold beliefs or principles which you do not really hold. Fashion then, is accused of two things that exemplify its insincerity: it is it is repetitive and it changes too quickly.

1. On Repetition: French editor of Purple Fashion, Oliver Zahm, says in an interview on Style.com:

"The fashion system itself is a mega copy machine. Fashion doesn't stop copying-- the past, the tribes the workers, whatever. Fashion is just a way to copy, copy, copy everything. I don't think in a bad way."

2. On Changing its Mind: are not "new" and "collection" the two most exciting words in the industry? Especially if prefaced with Mui Mui?

Could it be that fashion appears hypocritical because it does two opposing things simultaneously: it repeats itself, and it keeps changing its mind.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Sir Brooke Boothby, 1781

TATE,LONDON 4132/BEQUEATHED BY MISS AGNES ANN BEST, 1925

But what MacKenzie means by fashion is not only clothes, but the creation of a person of fashion:

"...a raw unprincipled boy is turned loose upon the world to travel; without any idea but those of improving his dress at Paris, or starting into taste by gazing on some paintings at Rome. Ask him of the manners of the people, and he will tell you, That the skirt is worn much shorter in France, and that everybody eats macaroni in Italy. When he returns home, he buys a seat in parliament, and studies the constitution at Arthur's [Chocolate House].

"Nor are your females trained to any more useful purpose: they are taught...that a young woman is a creature to be married..." (75)

The problem, it seems, is systemic. Fashion is insincere because the social values and expectations under which it falls are also insincere. And repetitive. And changes its mind.