Fashion as Art

I've always thought fashion frivolous. This is partly because I hate shopping for clothes. I hate the sea of shirts and skirts and dresses and pants that meets me every time I enter a department store. The sales people with their exhausted faces and fake smiles depress me. I hate the dressing rooms with their stained carpet and the piles of tried-on clothes hanging over the chipped louvred doors. (You can tell I don't shop at Neiman Marcus). The thought that girls and women in some thirld-world country have slaved in badly ventilated buildings without restroom breaks to make all this stuff gives me the heebie-jeebies. And it's ugly stuff, too: bland colors, seams with loose threads, and sized that never fit properly. Beautiful clothes? I never believed such a thing existed outside carefully engineered magazine ads. And if they existed, they cost more money than mere mortals could afford.

I've had a change of heart this past week, small but startling. I was at the library and on a whim pulled off the shelf a book on Claire McCardell, a fashion designer who worked in the thirties, forties and fifties. I cracked the book open, my finger slipping on the glossy pages. And there it was, a dress more beautiful than I had ever seen, a beauty that moved me more deeply than I had ever been moved by pieces of fabric sewn together. There were the colors, blue and turquoise, the sheen and grain of the cotton fabric, the lines of the cut, crisp and sensuous. It surprises me even now that I can talk about the dress like this, that I'm describing clothes as if they were art.

That shock hasn't worn off yet. I found that vintage McCardell dresses are sold online for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Ironic, considering that McCardell prided herself on creating affordable designs. I don't know, though, at what price that affordability came; I haven't been able to find out where her dresses were manufactured. I still haven't tired of looking at pictures of her clothes; I stare and stare at them with a glazed expression on my face, and feel very happy. Here are a few that I was able to find on Google.