The dream of fashion?

Fashion can be something really, really enjoyable. I sometimes can surf on internet shops for hours and when I do, every five, six minutes I see a piece I could imagine owning. But if I bought every piece, I would be bankrupt after a few “shopping attacks”. In my opinion, that’s the “fashion melancholy”. So much you could buy but so little you can buy.

A few days ago I read an interesting article on the website of the GQ magazine. The author told about his friend, an architect, who described shopping as “the small, ugly sister of fashion”. Shopping would be like sex – for the moment it’s the best feeling of the world, but it generates the craving for more. Again and again. The persons who start with shopping will need it over and over again. But the abstinent people, like the friendly architect, the persons who consider fashion as something adorable, although it is out of reach, the persons who have a relation to fashion on a platonic level – these people never have problems with the fashion melancholy.

shopping, the "ugly sister" of fashion

photo by antwerpenR

Furthermore the author described that for him and many other, non-abstinent people, fashion would be an effective and legal drug. So consumption would be just an instrument to compensate the own depressions. But with the first consumption, the fashion melancholy arises and with it new depressions. It’s a plausible train of thought, even if it is just a construct of ideas, because: real abstinence is quasi impossible. Sooner or later I have to go shopping. And nobody how looks upon fashion as something admirable and beautiful will buy anything ugly just to keep his platonic relationship. 

So altogether you can say that there’s no way around the fashion melancholy. But maybe we should sometimes abort our drive to buy something new. Just as an exercise. And in the process we should think “yeah, that piece is really nice, but I don’t need it. My stuff is enough. But I can rejoice in it as a beautiful artwork”. Maybe this temporarily abstinence can help us to handle better with our melancholy and with shopping as a psychoactive drug, because we cannot win this fight – at best we can go the distance.