Diary #5: Fashion (Turn to the Left)

One of my pettier observations during Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore’s brilliant and chilling new film investigating gun violence in America) was that Michael Moore is no fashion plate. I noticed that his wardrobe was almost always jeans, a flannel shirt, a baseball cap -- his hair a little wild and unkempt, with practical sneakers, I imagined, down below where the camera could get. But it’s a powerful statement, if you think about it.

I thought of Michael Moore’s critique of the American media’s fear-mongering, his call to bring corporate criminals to justice, his picture of American foreign policy that draws a straight line from American supplied arms in Iraq and military training in Afghanistan to September 11 and Bush’s crusade against Saddam Hussein. I imagined how his political views might be received more openly because they came from someone you might brush shoulders with at Wal-Mart or at a baseball game. Someone who blended in more at a local bar than the university down the street.

Is that fashion magic?

(And if you were doing it, would you want anyone to know?)

I’ve been wondering about the ethical boundaries of fashion-as-magic. I’m living close to the concerns I’ve heard voiced on what it means to sell clothes that shape identity. All fashion shapes identity, all fashion shapes the Self. How do we use that for good, when so many feel so surrounded and smothered by the use of such things for nothing but gain for the very few? I don’t want to think feelings of inadequacy and our need to be accepted are built into fashion in oppressive ways. Can fashion set you free, I wonder all over again?

What happens when you put on underwear or a t-shirt that say WITCH or AMERICAN GODDESS? Does that Nile River image of the Goddess have the potential to become just another corporate brand? How is the Starbucks logo not the Goddess, then? Where does that image become a symbol for liberation, where it also stands for commodity coffee culture? When one person’s liberation is another’s oppression... what can we learn there?

I’m not sure I know what freedom is anymore. I thought my freedom guaranteed me the right to expressing myself. (But where? And to whom? And at what cost?) What an intangible freedom, so tenuously strung between myself and the other millions of people in this America where we are all supposed to enjoy that liberty. The freedom that feels most concrete might just be the freedom to choose which brand of toilet paper to buy, which cell phone provider to patronize, which TV network to watch.

In a world where freedom feels more like an ad campaign and a soundbite, why not use those tools to bust open what freedom has been confined to? Why not fashion magic? Why not hijack a logo? Why not make your own? Why not sell your vision of freedom? (These aren’t rhetorical questions -- tell me why not in The Pillowtalk Salon.)

Freedom’s clearly bought and sold, redefined with each press briefing and security alert as if it were this winter’s new hemline and haircut. Freedom is no longer sacred. Freedom is a t-shirt. Freedom is on a few radio stations. Freedom pays my bills. Freedom fades every time its spoken of. Freedom is fed up with us. Freedom, can we endure you? (In a cute dress with a Fair Trade mocha, just maybe.) Freedom, what can I do?