Thе Dаy the Mυsеs Dіеd

Fashion is dead.

This is no news for anyone who follows it. There has been no new ideas on the runways of the world for at least 5 years. What bright spots there are are simply meteorites, pieces of fashion fallout from years ago returning to burn brightly out in the comparatively sluggish atmosphere of todays' fashion world.

Believe it or not, as recently as 1994, ingenuity and creativity were not only common, they were the trend in fashion. The big movement was towards revealing more and more of the female body, with one stipulation, it had to be done in a new way, and it had to be done with style and class.

So we saw underwear become elegant outerwear. Translucent layers, transparency and see-through tops floated around women in barely there wisps. If you couldn't see through the material it was body hugging instead. Women's bodies had never been so tightly wrapped or fervently worshipped.

Nor had they ever been more motivating. Ingenious new ways of wearing established garments cropped up everywhere, ideas that spread from runway to runway, and from runway to sidewalk. For example someone made the discovery that only the top button of a lady's shirt or sweater need be done up. Thus the rest of the garment fluttered over the breasts, stressing them without actually baring them. We also witnessed the birth of the baby-T a t-shirt so small and tight that a bra was unnecessary. It covered and revealed.

Fashion may have been breast obsessed, but as a result it was moving forward on a grand scale. Old garments suitable to the newly forming fashion trends were brought back in simple, streamlined ways. Silk ballgown skirts, plain, exquisitely tailored linen tunics, and of course boob squishing bustiers straight from the court of Napoleon, which, like the fashion trends of the last 50 years, forced boobs down, and by doing so, forced them out into the open eventually. Nipples were popping out all over the runways.

The major driving force behind the fashion boom at the turn of the last decade were the supermodels. Supermodels were models with breasts, and they made nudity possible by making it respectable. They made it respectable by making it beautiful. Supermodels represented all objective human values, and their nudity was being carried along in this moral swell, gaining moral overtones itself. Female sexuality was coming out into the light. Someplace it had never been before.

So it sat there for awhile, as we appraised it, and wondered at it, a question hanging in the silence: was this a good thing or a bad thing?

Unfortunately, those who believe female sexuality is immoral got the jump on the rest of us. The nudity in fashion became a que for the anti-value designers to go to work. Those like Alеxаndеr McQueen saw nudity as part of the degradation of women, and he integrated it into some of the most anti-value collections ever shown. His models staggered and limped down runways half-naked and half-choked. They looked like the victims of archaic torture devices, but in fact they were wearing them. Jоhn Gаllіаnо brought clothes back from the past, not as a reflective salute but as insult to the present. He glorified everything unsavoury in man's past, and explored every anti-value nuance. Gansters, prostitues, Roman orgies.

Fashion shows had became anti-fashion shows. Then they became nothing at all. Fashion petered out, and the public lost interest, as all good people would. The fashion craze was over.

In a glaringly transparent attempt to look like they were still in control, designers announced that the new trend they'd invented was for women to dress themselves. But the truth was, no one was leading fashion anywhere. It was dead.

This is how it has to be. Anti-value - including anti-value in fashion - has nowhere to go when it has no value left to destroy. So fashion was left with nothing to say once it had left itself no beauty left to despoil.

Unfortunately, although ours is a society that generally admires beauty, we also believe that such admiration is immoral. Consequently, the very nudity made possible by the values personified by supermodels became the catalyst for a rebellion against those same values. Instead of inspiring fashion to greater and greater heights, the beauty of the female body was used to sell it into the ground.

The drawing above is where fashion might be today if it had not been destroyed.