My First Post: Fashion & Humanity

So here I go starting my own blog. Never quite thought I was the blogger type...guess I was wrong.



Fashion.



It's a huge part of our contemporary culture. Especially living in Midtown: it's the world.



For the longest time, largely due to my more conservative upbringing (don't get me wrong, I had a wonderful upbringing, but here on blogger.com we are honest), I had a rather skewed view of fashion. It had always been an interest of mine yet always something that I had viewed almost as a guilty pleasure. I had always felt like my interest in fashion was a vain interest and that indulging in fashion was arrogance or self-absorption. I don't think it was until two years ago that I realized that these feelings that I felt were not due to arrogance or self-asorption, but rather a flawed underestanding of fashion.

Interestingly enough, it was at a church on Easter Sunday that I heard a sermon that really inspired me to rethink my views on fashion. The pastor told a story that took place during World War II. The setting was towards the end of the war as an Allied victory was approaching and the libereation of various concentration camps and prisons had begun. The Allied troops had come to a ceretain concentration camp (we'll say in France) where hundreds of barely-living skeletons of human beings had spent the last 4 to 5 years of their lives. These people had been abused, tortured, humiliated and treated worse than animals to the point that they no longer really viewed themselves as human beings. They had been so dehumanized that they had almost completely lost all understanding of their inherent value as human beings.

Victory was close by and you could feel the excitement in the air of the surrounding towns. These prisoners, however, had little to celebrate as they starved to death and waited anxiously for the Allies to rescue them as the Geremans tried to hide all evidence of the mass genocide by starving and killing them off. However, amidst the chaos in preparing for liberation someone slipped in a stick of lipstick into a cell in the women's prison.

By the time the Allied troops arrived to liberate the concentration camp, nearly all of the prisoneres had already died of starvation, malnurishment, or from the chaotic conditions. The sight of hundreds of desolate and mutilated, lifeless corpses was almost too much to bear for many of the liberators. The soldiers came to the cell of the women's prison that the stick of lipstick had been slipped into and they saw something of nearly indescribable beauty: there laid dozens of women heaped on the floor, dead, but instead of a lifeless look of despare on their faces, they found huge ear to ear grins with lipstick smeared all over their faces.

That lipstick, as simple and basic as it was, brought the humanity back to these women...it reminded them of their inherent value as persons, as individuals, and as women. That lipstick brought joy to these women's lives in their dying moments.

In concluding the story, the pastor stated that any animal can fight for survival. Any animal can cheat, kill, and deceive in order to attain power over one another, but only human beings value beauty and the aesthetics. That is a characteristic that is uniquely human. That is a characteristic that separates us from the rest of the world. It makes us capable of enjoying life, of creating beauty and culture and fashion that enhance the lives of others and make life worth living. Human beings are above survival of the fittest.

It was after hearing this story, that my entire perception of fashion changed. No longer did I view it as arrogance or self-absorption, but rather as a form of art and a means to enhance peoples' lives. Obviously fashion can become arrogance and self-absorption but so can just about any other industry. At its root, however, fashion is art.

And that is when I decided to pursue the fashion industry...