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Loading ...Fashion: a mere fantasy??
And then it hit me. As we entered the park, people were most definitely not thinking about my attire. Children’s faces were aglow with excitement at the heart stopping rides and the myriad glistening colours, parents were flustered with keeping their flock in line and exasperated at the price of normal coke extortionately sexed up by gaudy plastic beakers. Nobody batted an eyelid at my outfit. Or anybody else’s for that matter, even despite the bountiful comedy hats and the abundance of fluorescent cagoules. I was free: liberated from dressing how I was supposed to; free from critical eyes that evaluate the essence of me based on my adherence to the latest catwalk commandments.
This made me think: what if we didn’t scrutinise or judge each other’s dress sense? What if we just ignored fashion, and wore what we wanted for the love, or practicality of clothing? What if every day, instead of considering whether those favourite shoes were on trend, we just wore them anyway? Simply because we love them, and because there are so many other things to see, do, and worry about in life. Such as sickening rollercoasters and ‘meet and greets’ with underpaid men pretending to be popular cartoon characters. Or on a more realistic level, careers and families. But you get my drift.
Just as I had decided that this was in fact the answer to my eternal stressing over outfits, and that I should toss aside any life long dreams of buying a pair of Laboutins (no pair of shoes should cost that much- and red ‘Crocs’ had started to acquire a similar aesthetic value with twice the comfort factor) I started to notice a couple of familiar tendencies of haute couture within my relaxed kingdom of fashion irrelevancy. The queues at the dress-up shops for example. Mothers and daughters lined the pavements, desperate to make it in time to bag that coveted princess gown before they sold out. (Surely everyone knows that the ‘Aurora’ sells like hot pink cupcakes darling!). The very fact that girls wanted particular dresses in order to imitate their favourite icons began to remind me of our own obsession with copying the stars. I even saw some minor skirmishes over the last sizes of certain chiffon creations, evoking Bloomingdale’s annual wedding dress war.
And there weren’t just dresses to be had. Just as real fashionistas need complete outfits, there were matching tiaras, wands, bags and pairs of shoes for each princess costume. Even Louis Vuitton, that age old institution of accessories, doesn’t make a matching wand for each of their collections (maybe this should be looked into). I also began to notice a few exchanged glances between the little darlings who were wandering round dripping ice cream down their fronts, and realised that there was in fact some sort of secret underground princess hierarchy going on- the more of the outfit you had, the more you were to be envied, and you didn’t even get a second look if you had opted for the demure Snow White look, plain old Minnie Mouse, or dare we say it… Mulan… who’s ever heard of Mulan?
Then we come to the parade. Supposedly an opportunity for the Disney characters and dancers to strut their stuff down mystical Main Street, it was in fact an opportunity for the aspiring princesses to eye each other up and evaluate just how high up the royal ladder they had crawled. Those whose parents had only bought them the dress glared at those who had the whole shebang, and the girls that only had the tiara felt positively underdressed. Suddenly I found myself seat side at a catwalk show.
Perhaps then, regardless of abstract situations, fashion will always be engrained in us. Whether we covet designer or Disney, envy fellow colleagues or queens; fashion will out.
Charlie Byrne
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