Auntie Fashion

Tase T. Lentil

Since every city on the planet has a Fashion Week (except Moose Jaw – and I’m working on that), I’ve decided that it would be appropriate to name the third week in August Antifashion Week.

Antifashion Week will be celebrated by billions of people worldwide as they eschew the designs of the Evil AntiZob a.k.a. Marc Jacobs.  Although individuals are encouraged to express themselves in a manner which defines their own sense of style during Antifashion Week, participating in group activities is also recommended.

Why not build a beachside bonfire with your friends and fuel the flames with fake Louis Vuitton bags and copies of InStyle?  Or instead of going “from daytime to evening” with your makeup, why don’t you show up at work on Monday morning gussied up like a Las Vegas cocktail waitress on New Year’s Eve?  Perhaps you could plan to spend the weekend at the National Lentil Festival – quite possibly the most unglamorous civic pride event I’ve ever heard about.

Whatever you do, just try to have a good time.  With the 2009 fashion shows looming on the horizon, it could be a lot of fun to forget about the stupidity of the fashion world for a while.  Sure, there are going to be some great shows out there, but there are also going to be plenty of Rachel Bilsons and Steven Cojocarus and Adrian Mainellas and Rachel Zoes and Kimora Lees to deal with.  Antifashion Week is the calm before the storm.  Enjoy it while it lasts.

Katharine Hepburn

Award shows give celebrities the opportunity to let it all hang out.  Unfortunately, most of them don’t take the chance when it’s given to them.  They enlist armies of professionals to give them a red carpet overhaul, then praise themselves on camera for looking chic, as if they’ve had a hand in creating their own look.

It’s an obnoxious convention of show business that encourages a lack of creative self-expression.  Everyone is terrified to be on a worst-dressed list, so almost no one does anything to rock the boat.

That’s why Katharine Hepburn’s appearance at the 1974 Oscars is such an iconic moment.  At that time, Hepburn held the record for the most individual Oscar nominations as an actor.  However, she had never bothered to show up at the event.  She was finally convinced to attend in order to present the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

As she walked onto the stage it became evident that she wasn’t glammed-up.  In fact, she wasn’t dressed up at all.  In black trousers, a black jacket and a white turtleneck, Hepburn looked like Hepburn — I can’t imagine what anyone else was expecting!

Nevertheless, a story began circulating afterward that the living legend had come to the ceremony straight from working in her garden.  That’s a little hard to swallow — she was clean and her face was made up for the stage lights — but the rumor persists today.  Whatever . . .

Now what makes this such a great moment in antifashion?  It wasn’t as if Hepburn had flipped the bird to the academy.  Still, she had nothing to lose by being herself, and she knew it.  She wasn’t concerned what people were going to say about her outfit the next day, because she didn’t give a rat’s ass about what they had to say.

While I’ll heap praise on someone as fabulous as Holy McGrail, whom I blogged about a couple of days ago, I’ll also give credit where credit is due in this instance.  Katherine Hepburn had been able to live vicariously through her craft for four decades.  She didn’t need an award ceremony or a red carpet to tell her that she could be fabulous: She already knew that she was fabulous.

At its worst, fashion is about the will to conform.  At its best, fashion inspires the opposite desire: The desire to be an individual.  Hepburn embraced her individuality.  She embraced the opposite of what most people call fashion.  She is a champion of antifashion.

Talpa europaea

I’ve had the strangest aversion to the color brown for so long now that it has become second nature for me to just ignore everything brown in every store I visit.  I look terrific in dark, earthy neutrals — especially black, charcoal gray and olive drab – but wearing brown just didn’t seem like me.

A few weeks ago I was discussing the color brown with a young man who wears black almost exclusively — a “Goth” type.  He made a point of telling me how much he loathes brown shoes.  Having lived through the early 80s once already, I didn’t give much credence to his argument.  Why would I trust a guy who was dressed like I used to dress more than twenty-five years ago when the style was fresh?

The conversation stuck in my mind.  A few days later I was walking through a boutique where I noticed some shoes that I thought were black.  I picked them up and realized that they were very dark brown — almost black.  I immediately took them to the counter and paid for them.

Last week I was shopping for some pants.  I found a pair that I thought was gray at first and I took them to the fitting room.  The lighting there was quite different than the lighting on the sales floor, and I noticed that the pants were more brown than gray.  I immediately thought of how smart they would look with my new shoes, so I bought them, too.

I wore the combo out yesterday, where I saw my Goth friend.  I told him that brown was my new signature color, and that he had singlehandedly inspired me to get over my irrational fear of the color.  He told me that my pants don’t count, since they are “more taupe than brown.”  I told him to kiss my ass.

Anyhow, that incident made me ask myself if I really knew what taupe was.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia.  Taupe, it seems, is the color of the European Mole, which can be many different colors.  I’ve always considered taupe to be the color of mud puddles, which may be correct according to the article since it cites several examples of the color.

Taupe is a lot like personal style, it seems: It’s whatever you want it to be.  Now that I’ve realized that, I’d like to make taupe the signature color of antifashion.  What better represents the movement than the color that can’t be defined?  How could it possibly be affected by the trends when no one really knows what it is in the first place?

So rise up, you rebels!  I want to see legions of you on the streets in head-to-toe taupe.  Power to the people!  Stick it to the man!

On second thought, just wear whatever you want.  And if you want to wear pink and call it “taupe,” go ahead.  Who am I to stop you from being yourself?

Antifashion is a rebellion against the crass commercialism that turns art into business.  It is not hostile towards beauty or style.  You can renounce the foolishness of the trends while still being chic.  You can observe what the brainwashed masses are doing, and do exactly the opposite — the stylish opposite.

For instance, dogs have been a trendy fashion accessory for the past few years.  As a result, the cost of both purebred dogs and their mutt cousins has increased substantially.  Muddled-up crossbreeds are being given trendy new names so that they can be sold at a price that exceeds their pedigree.

However, Puggles and Shorkies are not Birkins and Kellys– if you know what I mean.  Breeding a purebred dog of exceptional value is an art form, just as crafting a fine leather handbag is an art form.  Breeding mutts, on the other hand, is as simple as getting two dogs to hump.

For that reason, dogs in general have been tainted.  Their current fashionable status has made them less-desirable to someone like me who thrives on bucking the trends.  I’m a cat person now.  They’re less vulgar than dogs, anyhow.  I’m the kind of woman who wears designer labels on the inside of her clothes, and I’m also the kind of woman who leaves her pets at home.  Moreover, I don’t believe my cute little kitty-cats appreciate a photo-op as much as I do.  The paparazzi would hate them.  Look at all the retouching I had to do to little Buttercup’s snapshot!