Word: fashioned
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every generation indulges in fashion and cosmetic trends which render it laughable to posterity. Today's college students were innocent by standers during the age of the perilous Platform Shoe, but they were willing (albeit junior) accomplices during the reign of Discowear and the Farrah-Do. Their historical reputation will be further pockmarked by the city dwellers who insist on dressing like cow punchers, cattle wrestlers, and bronco busters...
SOME PERSONS try to avoid trendiness by relying entirely on their wardrobes to project distinctiveness Ironically, though, outstanding or outlandish fashions usually end up wearing their owners. The majority of showy dressers look more like inhabitors than creators of style, because they channel all their efforts at self-improvement into surface area: Fashion becomes a questionable vehicle for self-expression when it is wrapped around a hollow tube...
...concept of fashion as social or political statement is as dubious as that of "sartorial individualism," because clothing is an unreliable barometer of ideological sincerity. Why shouldn't a Marxist wear a three-piece suit? Or a feminist, spiked heels and false eyelashes? Would dressing like a Prole or a Libber automatically authenticate their convictions? And, aside from the shock value, what was really so meaningful during the sixties about hippies wearing United States flags on their bottoms? The professional anti-Establishmentarian Abbie Hoffman--who did precisely that--held as archaic a view of women, for example, as any flannel...
Like the Trendy and the Statement Maker, the Dress-for-Success-er undercuts her personal image through a misuse of fashion. The careerist who feels insecure about her prospects within a man's world, and depends on a "Successful Person's" wardrobe to foster respectability, mocks her own professionalism. Her appearances at even minor occasions (say, a career seminar and Kennedy school panel discussions) with a surgically precise manicure; anchorwoman-perfect makeup; and topiaried coiffure, only magnify her self-consciousness. The incongruity between the Dress-for-Success-er's actual and contrived selves transforms her into a caricature...
...Trendy, Statement Maker, and Dress-for-Success-er all belie the expressive significance of fashion, and fall short of possessing genuine style, because they are working from the outside in. It is paradoxical that so many clotheshorses who cherish the notion of fashion as individual "signature" execute forgeries on a regular basis, aping styles without regard to their consonance with personal physique and temperment...