It is just Fashion Week here in LA, which sounds funny and sad because there is a notion that fashion doesn’t exist here, but oh child, it does, it really does. There is the army of tiny blonde girls with tight, narrow legged bleached out expensive jeans and leather jackets that could have only come from the boy’s department at Sears in 1987, with their strawlike hair held back with pink barrettes to showcase the thin layer of fur covering their faces, one of the symptoms of late stage chronic anorexia nervosa. They are the designers, the stylists, blue jean baby, LA lady, seamstress for the band. Their pieces, tops too small for anyone to get both their shoulder blades into, pants that don’t include the option of ass, fabrics that will not, can not, do not give, terribly uncharitable fabrics as they are. The dresses almost without exception zip up the side, giving the maximum opportunity for any flesh you might have there to get caught in the metal teeth causing a kind of special pain that only a true fascist follower of fashion can understand. They have names like Playdate, Immature, Infantile, Poopoo, Doodoo, Awww, Googoo, Gaagaa and they are all about regression, the Lolita as working woman ready to conquer the world in diapers. The big department stores buy them up like the delicious hot dogs sold from carts by freeway underpasses all over downtown LA late at night, for the li’l girl look never seems to go out of style, and there is big business in the baby-fication of women.
It has been heard through the most reliable sources that my line, High Class Cho, a celebration - not denigration - of women, is not well received in the ranks of the kinderwear clothiers. One ‘celebrity stylist’ was quoted as saying that my clothes were ’soooooo baaaddd’ and pointed out the fact that I had not been renowned for my fashion sense. In their opinion, I dress ‘badly’ because beauty is something that is self defined, not defined by ‘them’ and there are times when odd and outrageous beats bland and ‘just like everyone else.’ Plus, I don’t fit the sample sizes that designers provide the stars with to wear at the splashy Hollywood events that we set the fashion barometers to every few weeks, so why bother trying? No, I cannot lay down with a hanger hooked on a zipper trying to mash my fleshy body into a dress too small for me. I have done enough of it in my life and it just doesn’t work. I have come to know that fashion hates women and so I have decided to hate fashion. Fuck the ‘celebrity stylists,’ the style council, the Emperor’s new hos. Take your little lady bows and deconstructed tops and shove them up your ass, hard, in wadded up balls, no Vaseline. Don’t forget to stick a couple of strappy sandals in there too, heel first.
I buy a lot of things on Ebay because I like dead people’s stuff and it is cheap. The style consultant for Ebay, which is a formidable resource for the truly stylish, doesn’t direct anyone to what would be really fabulous to wear, like velvet opera coats from the 20s or MC Hammer pants, but to what was on the fashion pages months before, and so he sends the erstwhile consumer on a wild goose chase for items long purchased with the “Buy It Now” option and no longer exist. He has no imagination, nor respect for a woman’s body, but what do we expect from the fashion industry? Why would we think that they would want anyone to feel good about themselves? The whole juggernaut is built on the idea that we are unable to live happily just as ourselves, that there needs to be some type of guidance, what needs to be worn this season, what we need to have our bodies conform to, what our hair needs to be, what the Hollywood stars are doing, that we must be fucked with, or at the very least fuck with ourselves in order to achieve happiness in life.
If we were to just accept how we look and dress how we want, know that we are beautiful, know that fashion is what makes you insecure enough to make you spend your money, and style is what makes you feel like you look hot, the industry would eat itself from the inside out. The Tiny Dancers will just shrivel up and die, or at best, eat something. The way I wanted to make clothes was to remember what it feels like to put something on that fits, that feels so good, that you don’t want to take it off, that in your imagination, when you see yourself happy and lovely, walking through a heavenly late morning spring mist just burning off with rays from the noon sun, armed with a picnic basket filled with runny cheeses and baguettes and chocolates, to meet your most adored lover, somewhere deep in a friendly forest, you are wearing that dress. That you will lay down in that dress, that you will be fed in that dress, that you will be kissed in that dress, that you will make love in that dress and never think once while it is happening that something might rip, you shouldn’t be sitting down, there might be a bulge here or there you have to hide, that you will be free to move, eat, love. If that is ’soooo baaaaaddd’ then let it be bad. I don’t give a shit.
