the alephes @thealephes-blog - Tumblr Blog

I have to go back to art school soon. My head’s really heavy with this.

I get into this argument with a good friend of mine a lot. He says, ‘You are in no way different from anyone. There is nothing at all different about you.’ I say, ‘I feel like a fucking weirdo, that makes me a fucking weirdo.’ He’s says that I’m really grasping at straws.

I started making art full time when I was 17. I’m 24. I took two years out from my degree to have a nervous breakdown and clean up a nervous breakdown. I was a weirdo and then I was normal and then I was pretty and now I’m impatient.

I spend a lot of time trying to flush all of school out of my head, try to get that way of looking out of me. I’ve spent the past six months in Southern California working at Hot Topic- this is really important. I’m going back to an ultra elitist fine art environment in the middle of a giant city.

I always get too angry and too frustrated to really work a system. It isn’t that I don’t know how. And it isn’t that I don’t get it- because I do, but it’s really dry and really clinical and it’s boring, it is so absolutely fucking boring I don’t even know what to do with myself.

I know how to talk the way I’m supposed to, but it makes me really mad. I’m really mad about the work I’ve got to look at, about the work I’m being compared with. I’m really mad about the way the people around me treat making things, about the way my professors deal with making things.

I’m really mad that working in a shop in a mall in the suburbs was really inspiring, a thousand times more inspiring that art school, not because of the fucking irony or something, but because obsession and enthusiasm are so great, and so amazing and being fashionable and intellectual are so stupid.

I’m really mad that even after all this time, after being a goddamn grown up and doing what I was supposed to, after totally falling apart and piecing myself really slowly and clumsily and stupidly back together- that I still sit in a stupid art studio with stupid art students and I still feel like an alien and I don’t when I’m helping a dumb fifteen year old boy pick out a Ramones tshirt.

I am anxious and embarrassed and agitated and angry. I totally get what and who and why I am and I put on my dumb clothes and my dumb boots every morning and make stuff that I really like and I really feel proud of and am really passionate about, and I still feel really weird, still feel really isolated, still feel like I’m fighting something stupid, something really useless.

I stand behind the counter at work and put on a Stooges album and some kid says, ‘This is so great’ and I say it is. I go to school, listen to the word ‘microcosm’ a thousand times, drive pencils through my eyes. My friend says, ‘You don’t even do anything. What are you even complaining about.’

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Why is the fashion industry full of elitists?

If by “elitists” you mean people who don’t accept wool instead of cashmere, who emphasise the superiority of haute couture over ready to wear, who understand the difference between “cost” and “worth,” who don’t believe that because what you makes ends up on someone’s back it is inherently valueless, pointless, and purely functional - then the industry is full of them by its very nature.

Vivienne Westwood once said she believed in elitism because fashion isn’t about pleasing everyone all of the time. It’s about the few pushing forward, doing something brave, and new, and exciting. We don’t have nations of brilliant people. We have an elite few who pull the rest of us, kicking and screaming, into the light. You get that in science, literature, art and fashion.

I suspect you mean elitism pejoratively, though. In which case I’d like to point out that fashion’s elitism is intellectual, or rather creative. John Galliano is the son of a plumber, an immigrant from Gibraltar. Lee Alexander McQueen was the son of an East London cab driver. My father is an electrical foreman, my parents are working class. I am working class. And I worked for my success. So did John and Lee, and many many others. There are privileged people in fashion, as there are in all trades. But you’re only as good as the clothes you put on someone’s back. Plenty of people have tried to buy their way into fashion, most have failed.

And besides, fashion ends up on people’s backs. All kinds of people. It affects the lives of the masses, whether they realise it or not. That must be one of the least elitist things in the world.

thealephes-blog

Um, the fashion industry is elitist because it operates under the premise of distinction. It is necessarily elitist, because it posits itself as being superior to non-industry forms of stylistic leadership.

It is elitist because that is precisely how it obtains its influence. If it didn’t create a group of ‘fashionistas who are in the know’ and ‘common ignorant folk’ then its status would be rendered inert.

It is is elitist despite its preference for fabrics that only in the last 50 or so years have become incredibly scarce, desirable and therefore luxurious. And even when it uses inexpensive materials, it’s still elitist because it states that they are now cool again; as opposed to when ordinary individuals use them, since they’re just doing it out of ignorance ofc.

It is elitist even if those who operate within it come from a working class background. Literally, this has zero relevance to the topic and the fact that it was brought up serves to prove the idiocy of Fury’s answer.

Regardless of whether it ends up on people’s backs or if it trickles down into department stores. The reason why it is permitted to do so is because it posits itself as the only one who is suitably allowed to do so.

Fuck this bullshit. I love pretty clothes and the inventiveness of designers but let’s not forget that fashion, in its current state, is about pieces of cloth, money and class distinction.