Fashion and Mode

[alden]

Fashion and Mode.

"Fashion is what goes out of Fashion", said Coco Chanel.

Fashion is what is created in Marketing departments driven by managers with fierce intensity to ensnare the unwitting and add significant value to shareholder equity.

Mode is the manner in which Elegance is embodied in any epoch. Clearly it is not the manner of men today to wear Doublets, powdered wigs and rouge. These accessories are not consistent with today's Mode. It is, however, consistent with today's Mode, born in the early years of the last century, for men to wear suits, jackets, tailored trousers, overcoats, and neckties etc.

Fashion follows in the sillage of Mode sniffing the air with flared nostrils tracking Opportunity. Mode saunters jauntily forward oblivious to Fashion's snooping presence.

"Elegance has one mode, ugliness has a thousand." H. de Balzac

Elegance is timeless. Mode evolves, as it is the manner in which, in any period of time, Elegance is embodied. Fashion is fleeting, so many grains of sand in the wind.

Elegance is immediately recognizable as is its contrary state. It always has been and always will be so. There were undoubtedly Adams who had a particularly brilliant way of donning a fig leaf. Of the thousands in Balzac's time who pretended to Elegance, there were probably only a few who were destined to embody it. The same is true today. There is no reason to feel conspicuous by dressing well, according to the Mode of the time, because others do not do so.

Today's fashion, in one of its current manifestations, accords to gym clothes the stature of dress. That does not change the Mode a whit. One lives today in the suit and sport coat continuum even if Fashion has distracted most away from the mark.

Fashion has used the Mode to create the thousand pretenders that pollute the horizon and sting the eye. The suit and sportcoat have been tortured and twisted into unspeakable forms to pay proper dividends to shareholders. Should one to be dupe to same and conform?

"Remember only the dead fish swims with the stream." Malcolm Muggeridge

One is either an individual or not. There are not a lot of shades of gray in this regard.

One acts and dresses accordingly.

M Alden