Fashion - pointless or essential

What do you think of the fashion industry? Is it right that people are spending so much on clothes? Should be people be so influenced by fashion? Or is it just hedonistic rubbish and the people that follow fashions brain-dead sheep? Do you follow fashions? Do you spend lots on designer labels? Is fashion important or pointless in our modern lives?

Personally, if you wanna do fashion...do it, I prefer to be myself, wear clothes I like the look of and are comfortable, I'ma happy not to spend a fortune on clothes and just feel happy in supermarket clothes that are affordable, comfortable....and last a long time.

Mouse xx

I do think that the fashion industry is grossly overhyped in the west. I don't really think it is all that important how someone is dressed, or what their hair looks like. It's the person themselves that matters and people that tend to spend too much time thinking about how they look tend to be vain, egotistical and not very nice people to know.

To judge anyone based on what style of clothes they are wearing is ridiculous! A mass murderer may wear a business suit just as much as they may wear leathers or jeans and a t-shirt.

In these days where almost anything about yourself can be changed - your eye colour through contact lenses, your height through shoes or surgery, your body shape through surgery or exercise or diet, your hair colour through dye, your teeth through dentistry, etc - what can it really mean how someone really looks? If you like the person, but don't like something about how they look, you can get it changed nowadays if you really want to. But if you aren't willing to accept people as they really are and insist on your idea of physical perfection, then, personally, I wouldn't want to know you.

Much of this stems from the ancient Greek premise that good was always beautiful and evil was ugly. Most of the population still think like this, assuming that if someone is pleasant to look at then they must be a nicer person than someone who doesn't look as nice.

This type of judging people based on their looks can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people that are rejected because of how they look can sometimes become bitter and vengeful against those that reject them because of how they look. Examples of this can be found in such fictional characters as Frankenstein's monster, or Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, where the characters begin as loving, kind-hearted creatures, but become the monsters that people expect them to be through the mistreatment and rejection of people because of their appearance. I have gone through this kind of thing myself, where the constant rejection and teasing by others because of the way I looked made me bitter and hateful towards others for quite some time. When you are always treated as a freak because of how you look, you do tend start to act like one, living up to how you are treated.

I don't think there's anything wrong with expressing your personality through how you look, otherwise we'd all end up looking pretty much the same. And I think that the way fashion changes can be a useful barometer of how society changes. For example, punk fashions reflected some peoples' reactions to society in the mid/late '70s. There's also that theory that the state of the economy is correlated to the acceptable shortness of skirts (e.g. short skirts in the booming '60s, long flowing dresses in recession-hit '70s), but I don't know if there's a serious explanation for that! However, of course many people follow fashion as a substitute for expressing their individuality, which is something different entirely.