Whether we are sending a child back to school or just responding to our own internal clock, autumn shopping is now.
Throughout the stores today we will complain about prices and commiserate about what children insist they “have to have” but the odds are good that adults will also want a new shirt or sweater at this time of the year.
The pull to shop is powerful; it is that New Year’s feeling that is built into us from years of preparing for school. But there is also a strong push from advertising.
Buying spree
It is easy enough to take cheap shots at the fashion industry, imagining the marketing wizards who pull our strings to make us head out to shop.
Just take a look at the August issues of women’s magazines insisting that “brown is the new black”, and “low waists are out”.
And we can sigh that we are slaves to materialism who base our identities on what we wear and how we are turned out.
But the truth is that what we wear is a form of constant and important communication.
So if we are going to cover our nakedness as a way to communicate, we may as well have some fun doing it.
Truth be told, I did not always feel this way.
For years I bought into the idea that virtue was to be found in the equivalent of wearing sackcloth and ashes.
I hid my love of clothes and felt ashamed when I bought the autumn fashion magazines. I believed it was politically incorrect to know the names of designers as well as I knew poets and their works.
Childhood craving
And then I remembered why clothes became important for me: What I recall from seventh grade, in addition to Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, was my obsession with another girl’s shoes.
My parents allowed only one pair of new shoes: nice, neutral penny loafers. But that autumn, I sat near a girl whose shoes matched her clothes oh-so-perfectly.
For weeks I stared at her feet and the navy kidskin flats trimmed with bright green piping.
The many shoes that tumble out of my closet today are futile attempts to fit the hole that exists in the past. But there is another factor: I stopped believing there is only one way to be a feminist, and I decided it’s not politically incorrect to love clothes.
Although fashion is commerce and marketing, it is also art. After all, colour, shape, line and texture are the ingredients that sculptors work with, too.
Clothes are a form of self-expression and communication, and even stylistically, freedom of speech.
Feminists for Fashion? Sign me up.
But where do we draw the line? How do we balance the role of clothing in our own culture against the fact that “I have nothing to wear” is an actual fact in other parts of the world? How do we shop and dress conscientiously? How do we find the middle ground?
Is there a way to manage desire so that it inspires our creativity and doesn’t shame us — or young women who are enjoying this part of life? There is an emotional centre in which we can enjoy clothes and not be dominated by them.
Judicious buying
The answer is in discernment; stilling the internal voices — our own and the ones piped in from advertisements — and making conscious decisions about what we buy and why we buy it.
It would be a great gift to instil in young shoppers. And it is one we can practise with them, too.
We might do this by talking to young people as we watch advertisements together or asking when we see billboards or print ads: “What do you think they are really saying here?” or “What do you think the person who made this ad wants you to do? And can you tell when one ad or story makes you feel a certain way?”.
Ad-ding to education
In these ways, through these kinds of conversations, we can begin to teach a kind of image or media literacy.
Our time in this world is brief; there is more than enough pain to go around; we don’t need to dress grimly in determination to get through life.
Go shop; celebrate your awareness of life with something new, colourful and artful — and enjoy what you wear.
