why fashion and writing feels 'stagnant'/everybody is obsessed with STEM
i am a lot of things. Today, I'm inspired.
There is a typical type of poem that places in competition. it'll have a clear metaphor, clear speaker, clear emotional arc, etc. Clarity is the key word here.
This poem is often well made. It is often sincere. It is often about loneliness, memory, grief, or becoming. It does not demand too much time. It does not require rereading. It does not make the reader feel lost, implicated, or uncertain of their footing.
It is, above all, legible.
Most competitions, workshops, and institutions prefer this legible writing style. They like poems which behave in neat ways and demonstrate skill without stepping out of the box and challenging the sheer markers of skill.
This is not a complaint about judges, but an observation of the systems in which they operate in.
I understand. Systems are neat, easy to categorize, and need rules to function. Rubrics require clarity. Time limits require efficiency. When hundreds or thousands of submissions pass through a small number of hands, work that can be “understood” quickly will always have an advantage over work that asks the reader to sit, to stumble, to doubt their own reading.
But the problem is, poetry, and writing in general, is not born from rules.
Poetry comes from pressure, and fracture, and language breaking under the weight of what it’s trying to hold.
The poems we now idolize were rarely respected in their own time. Shakespeare invented words because the existing ones were insufficient. Dickinson tore syntax apart. Whitman ignored meter entirely. None of them were writing with a rubric in mind. None of them were optimizing for clarity as it is currently defined.
They were not trying to place.
They were trying to say something that did not yet have permission to exist.
When we teach emerging writers that success looks like "sticking to the rules", we risk training them out of the very instincts that make their work alive. We ask them to write poems that will be rewarded, not poems that will cost them something to make.
And when those safer poems succeed, we call it merit.
Meanwhile, the work that is strange, volatile, structurally unstable, the sheer work that might be ahead of its time, or simply outside the current aesthetic bandwidth, often disappears quietly. Not because it is bad, but because it is "expensive" to read.
Rejection becomes especially cruel. Not just because a piece was turned away, but because the writer is left wondering whether the problem was the work or the fact that the work refused to behave.
A poem can be clear and still be empty.
A poem can be confusing and still be honest.
If we only reward the work that fits cleanly into our existing frameworks, we should not be surprised when the field begins to feel repetitive. We should not be surprised when innovation migrates into hybrid forms, into digital spaces, and into places that are not yet legible enough to institutionalize.
We live in a world that openly celebrates innovation as long as it happens in the “right” fields.
In STEM, innovation is practically currency. We praise new technologies, new systems, and new ways of thinking. We expect expansion. If someone proposed building the same computer we had twenty years ago, they would be laughed out of the room.
But in areas like writing, fashion, and other creative fields, innovation is treated with suspicion.
In fashion especially, trends repeat themselves in increasingly shorter cycles. Silhouettes, aesthetics, even entire subcultures are recycled, rebranded, and resold. In writing, the same emotional arcs, narrative structures, and aesthetic preferences circulate through workshops, journals, and competitions. The work is often competent. It is often polished. And it is often familiar.
And so, it will come to no surprise to you, that these fields are then dismissed as unserious luxuries, especially when compared to STEM careers that are framed as practical, future-facing, and necessary (and they are, but I am not getting into that whole debate right now.)
The issue is that we no longer reward innovation when it makes us uncomfortable.
We live in what is frequently called a “digital world,” as if that were a natural state rather than a choice. But this world was built. It was not inevitable.
When early computers emerged, people were afraid of them and questioned what this technology would do to attention, labor, and human connection. Expansion was slow, contested, and deliberate.
Now, in 2026, expansion is assumed. We move faster without asking whether speed is the same as progress. We accept constant updates as normal.
And yet, in creative fields, we resist expansion with remarkable force.
True innovation, whether technological or artistic, requires tolerance for confusion, and a willingness to sit inside unfinished ideas. STEM has institutional frameworks that protect this process: research grants, labs, long timelines, and an understanding that failure is part of discovery.
Art does not.
Instead, writers and designers are often asked to justify their work immediately. To 'explain, summarize and make it accessible.' Work that resists this demand is dismissed as self-indulgent, pretentious, or impractical.
We do not ask engineers to make their work emotionally relatable.
We do not ask scientists to ensure their discoveries are immediately comforting.
So why do we deny that same allowance to writing, fashion, and other creative disciplines, which are fields that shape how we understand ourselves, our bodies, and our relationships?
Expansion in writing does not mean abandoning meaning, and expansion in fashion does not mean rejecting wearability.
It means accepting that progress sometimes looks strange before it looks useful.
If we want art that feels alive again, we have to allow it the same generosity we extend to technology: time, patience, and the right to fail in public.
Innovation does not belong to STEM alone.
We have simply decided, for now, to act as if it does.
