Crimes of fashion

The most insightful criticism on fashion is perhaps one that is given by someone with restricted knowledge of the subject or even total lack of what fashion is, as envisaged by designers or portraiture of discerning dressers. Their platitudes make for good entertainment.

It is why watching the likes of Ian Mbugua playing the role of fashion cop with ill-humoured wisecracks on sartorial bloopers on the red carpet is an exercise in understatement.

Granted, he may not be as fashion forward as say, Bernard Ndong, but it was such a big egg he laid when he desecrated the very hallowed red carpet ground he expects others to worship on with workaday wear during the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA).

But that is hardly earth-shattering, not when the interesting times we live in vaunts comedians like Steve Harvey as a relationship expert, an acclaim that he has respectably tried not to disappoint in.

Even the late Joan Rivers, for all her ribald and acerbic take down on celebrities on Fashion Police, was first and foremost a comedienne.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, after all it was Joan’s caustic wit and scathing criticism that shaped the red carpet as we know it, and she is even credited with heralding the age of celebrity stylists.

The difference between Joan and our local critics, if at all there is a fashion critic worth a ball of yarn in this country, is that she lived the life of those she hit with her brickbats.

So whereas she could have been wrong about what designers intended and the portrayal of clothes as worn by the celebrities, she could not have been wrong about herself.

FASHION IS NOT CONFLICTED

And she was just as good at taking a jab at herself as she was generous with her side swipes.

Critiquing fashion is not about two aged men crossing their legs in a TV studio and saying “I love it, I hate it.”

Fashion is more than just love and hate, and definitely totally different from telling young men and women about their diction, diction, diction as if your life depended on it, on live TV, all in the name of turning them in to--- music stars.

That is why seasoned designers and stylish personalities with an eccentric edge will, like the weather, pay no attention to ineffectual criticism.

Even more pointless is when we invoke morality on matters fashion, particularly when the target of attack is two or more generations behind that of the righteously indignant critic whose diction war cry is yet to produce a pop star worth popping champagne over.

You do not throw someone into a poser’s propeller of disapproval for sporting revealing, summery or purportedly provocative attire at a sports event in a dusty and scorching part of eastern Kenya.

Fashion is not conflicted, hence hot pants and sheer dresses are meant to achieve exactly what the “morally offended” critic will be having bellyaches over.

As Karl Lagerfeld so aptly put it, fashion is neither moral nor immoral, but it is for building morale.

This is particularly true in an era, where the only rule seems to be to break all the rules.

Fashion is increasingly becoming more about the individual and personal style, which obviates moral posturing since morality, by its very nature, is a social contract.

Further, morality is subject to action and interaction, hence like faith, it is dead in passivity, otherwise dapper conmen and thieving millionaire politicians in Ralph Lauren suits would be moral by default!

Traditional morality, like the Ten Commandments, is long-lasting and associated with permanence, certainty and truth; which is a misfit since fashion is cyclic and transient.

It is why Oscar Wilde considered it a form of ugliness, so intolerable we have to alter it every six months.

Not surprisingly, those who are overly obsessed with fashion rather than style get tossed between an endless relay between trendy and tacky, where style goes retro, but the pricey tags remain futuristic.

But it is the implied ugliness that must form the basis of critiquing fashion, as it implies discernment of aesthetics and propriety, not morality.

The closest fashion comes to morality therefore is in its expression, what we make others see by our looks, which of course is also subject to interpretation.

This subjectivity and variance of opinion is what should sail a critique’s boat.

Because dressing is a lot like children — no matter how ugly they are, you will always think they are beautiful if they are yours!

FASHION IS ABOUT SELF

So yes, we should be mortified by the relentlessness and hypnotic badness of Dennis Oliech in a skirt, Oyunga Pala’s village-wrestler-in-an-apron AMVCA red carpet horror, and the typical and forgettable denigration of a president in jeans slouched at the airport with a gaping fly that red-faced hangers-on could not summon the courage to ask him to zip.

And yes, our critics should call out pretty girls who blemish events with cheap shoes and limited social graces, with the misguided belief of being “socialites,” as if there is ever been anyone who is well-dressed in cheap shoes!

Neither is fashion about selfies.

It is about self.

This is the kind of criticism we should expect, not didactic sermons.

Our observations need to take to account that women should be proper and sexy all at once.

As Edith Head would say, with dresses that are tight enough to show they are women and loose enough to indicate they are ladies.

BROAD SMILE

That makes a woman’s outfit more like barbed-wire fence — serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

If we understand this, the we cannot condemn women for dressing skimpily to attract the attention of men, after all if women were really to dress for men, then they would have no trouble meeting our expectations, since a man’s elemental idea of a well-spoken women, is one who wears a broad smile and nothing else!

In doing this, we must treat fashion not as a transgression or means of entrenching “pious” dogma, but as a form of visual art, a very expressive one at that, one that deploys the body as a living medium that makes more than just sartorial statements.

The final art work could be a chic masterpiece or a dreary disaster.

But it is just that. Art.

Moral turpitude as such will be extraneous.