High cheekbones, long legs, pale skin, extremely skinny women wearing glitzy, glamorous clothes that no sane person would wear. You feel sick. You’re entranced. The clothes and the models are as beautiful as they are unattainable. Are you really fit to be looking at this?
It’s no secret that runway fashion is nothing like what we wear in our day-to-day lives.
Last year, a Viktor & Rolf fashion show went viral because the models were wearing dresses sideways, upside down, diagonally — pretty much in every way but how you’re supposed to. It looked ridiculous and was obviously completely unwearable in any real-life situation, but I thought it was so captivating. Even if I couldn’t figure out exactly what, I knew it was saying something.
It’s difficult to analyze runway fashion without acknowledging its exclusionary aspect. Runway fashion has a history of being extremely narrow-minded and often toxic. For decades, models were almost exclusively white, tall and skinny.
Even now, when we have started to see more diversity, there is pushback and reminiscing on “the old days.” The culture around models is infamous for being detrimental to people’s physical and mental health.
It’s easy, and frankly not completely untrue, to say that runway fashion is absurd and pretentious. It isn’t functional for the average person to be wearing out. It’s trying to be cutting-edge, ahead of the curve and it is being advertised to the absurdly rich. The whole concept feels dystopian.
But still, I think there’s something more to it. The point of runway fashion isn’t for normal people to love it and go out to buy it. It’s trying to make a statement and leave a lasting impression on people’s minds. It’s impossible to judge runway fashion off just the idea of whether it’s nice to look at or if we could wear it in our everyday lives — because that isn’t what it’s set out to do.
It is its own form of art. It’s impossible to assign an objective description to something as subjective and diverse as this, so I can’t really say if it’s good or bad. What I can say is that it’s interesting, and it makes you think, and isn’t that what all art is supposed to do?
