Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style

1 The Fashion Victim's Ten Commandments We Fashion Victims hold certain truths to be self-evident. Without so much as a raised eyebrow, we allow a set of ridiculous, yet compelling, rules to govern our wardrobes, our purchases, our desires, even our own sense of self-worth. It's these unquestioned tenets that have helped bring us to the sorry state we find ourselves in today. 1 THOU SHALT PAY MORE TO APPEAR POOR It takes a great deal of time and money to look as though you put no effort into dressing. Since a garment today rarely remains a popular item in our wardrobes beyond a few months, we require it to be worn out before we buy it. Fabrics are prewashed and grayed out to appear less new. Designers sew on decorative patches, slash gaping holes into the knees of jeans, and fray the hems. Dresses and shirts are prewrinkled. Jeans are stonewashed, sandblasted, acid-washed, and lightened; they're iron-creased and bleached to "whisker" at the upper-thigh as if they were passed down to you by your mother, who inherited them from her father, who had worn them in the wheat fields a century ago. Designers add "character" to clothes by messing them up, like Helmut Lang's famous $270 paint-spattered jeans. Jeans, blasted and stained dust-brown, by CK, Levi's, and Dolce & Gabbana, cost up to $200. In fact, Calvin Klein's "dirty" jeans sold for $20 more than a pair of his basic, unblemished ones. In 2001, Commes des Gareons produced a peasant dress, priced at a very unpeasantlike $495, described by discount shopping website Bluefly.com as "given a chic tattered look." Fashion may be bent on newness, but we apparently can't stand it when something looks too new (who can bear the blinding whiteness of new sneakers?). The industry has taken to calling the shabby, imperfect look "distressed"--a word that carries a connotation of pain and suffering. This fashion agony doesn't come cheap, from Jean-Paul Gaultier's distressed leather pants for $1,560 and two-piece distressed leather jacket and bustier for $2,740 to Versace's distressed ball gowns and midpriced shoe maker Aldo's distressed leather pumps for $70. On most new clothes, a flaw is reason to return a garment to the store; on others, it's a reason to love the garment with even more fervor. The Fashion Victim understands that ready-to-wear clothes are mostly mass produced, and that a handsewn article somehow possesses more soul and uniqueness. Minute blemishes in a fabric's color prove that a gown was hand-dipped by a dressmaker in Paris; slightly raised threads on a vest attest that it was handcrafted by the real wives of authentic sherpas in Nepal. Some clothes, like a sweater I bought years ago, come with tags explaining how the pills and flecks you may see in the fabric are not flaws at all but rather intentional imperfections, there to add to the garment's charm. In our hunt for substance in style, we covet clothes that evoke the blue-collar world, like the Authentic Prison Blues shirts (actually made by inmates!) that Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton wore in the 2001 movie Bandits. Why do we do it? Fashion is our way of visually signaling to others how we want to be seen, and even though we all want to be considered stylish, we don't want to look like we've put too much planning and money into doing so. Glamour and neatness have their place, but premeditated nonchalance is the Fashion Victim's Holy Grail. We shop at stores like Filthmart, the Manhattan vintage store co-owned by Drea de Matteo of The Sopranos and featuring Hell's Angels-meets-Jewel wares. Hip-hop fans spend exorbitant amounts of cash on urbanwear to prove they're still "street": a pair of denim and Ultrasuede pants from Phat Farm for $150, an Enyce "bulletproof" nylon vest for $97, puffy down jackets from the North Face for $199. Even a simple wifebeater tank top can sell for over $1Lee, Michelle is the author of 'Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style' with ISBN 9780767910484 and ISBN 0767910486.