The End of FaKEshion
Yazar // Rana Solaker

Throughout its history, as can be evidenced in the court of Louis XIV, fashion has always been associated with artificiality and grandiosity. Louis XIV or "The Sun King", himself, was a trendsetter and it might be argued that his obsessive take on style led to the invention of the fashion industry as we know it. With such a vain forefather as “The Sun King” it is no wonder that the fashion world has always had a huge appetite for creating fake personas.

Long before Madonna, the original queen of reinvention was none other than Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel. Born to a market stallholder and a laundrywoman, Chanel was raised in an orphanage. But Chanel denied her past till her dying breath, and fabricated a whole different life story for herself. Certainly Chanel is not the only designer who wanted to escape the harsh realities of life; there are many designers just like her, the designers that created brand new pasts out of thin air for themselves.
One of the principal goals of fashion is to create and sell fantasies, and hence a fashion designer who creates a new reality for her or himself is understandable to a certain degree. But can one claim that fashion’s morbid obsession with fakery and fantasy-invention damages the psyche of the people who work in the fashion industry?

Take Isabella Blow’s case. According to her husband’s biography, Blow By Blow. the late Blow faced many hardships during her short spanning life. Apparently one of her escape mechanisms was fashion. Unfortunately clothes and beautiful Philip Treacy hats cannot fill the emptiness in one’s soul. At the end, Blow took her on life (just like her discovery Alexander McQueen would do years later). Of course, one cannot say that the fashion industry alone has led Blow and McQueen to their demise. That would be a speculative, if not hideous, accusation. But one can certainly say that the fickle and pretentious nature of the fashion industry can sometimes affect its people in a negative way.
Not everyone has machine like stamina like Karl “Kaiser” Lagerfeld. His arch rival Yves Saint Laurent suffered from depression throughout his entire life. And who can forget the recent public meltdown of John Galliano?

Even though we may be grateful for his contributions to fashion, we are not living in Louis XIV’s time and reign. The world has changed. More and more people are looking for some authenticity in their lives, a sincere authenticity which also entails fashion. We want to see fashion designers with a genuine philosophy behind their creations: designers like Rei Kawakubo and Ann Demeulemeester. Both Kawakubo and Demeulemeester are known for creating trends that don't follow the mainstream fashion of the times (and you certainly don’t see these two getting drunk and making racist remarks!). Whoever says that fashion must be ruled by the empire of fake personas is dead wrong.
We also want to see designers that respect both human life and the planet Earth, those that do not engage in neither sweatshops nor fur trade.
We do not want to be surrounded with the pretentiousness of fashion which I call FaKEshion. Next to not being genuine, fashion also dictates us what to wear and not wear every six months in endless continuum. Hence fashion is a great dictator. Style, on the other hand, is egalitarian. So altogether, let’s say buh bye to FaKEshion and scream “Style for all”.
Haberler


