Why personal style hasn't changed: Kurt Andersen's analysis

Illustration by James Taylor courtesy of Vanity Fair's web site

Kurt Andersen's Vanity Fair piece, "You Say You Want a Devolution" attracted avid attention, including a hat-tip from Cathy Horyn, whose own NYT article, "Just Getting On With It" is also worth your time.

Horyn quotes Kurt Lagerfeld advocating "dressing up in jewels" while the Duchess of Cambridge chose a $100 Zara number. O tempora! O mores!

Andersen's thesis: "The world may have changed profoundly in the last 20 years, but stylistically the recent past looks almost identical to the present." For example, clothes in photos from the 1950s look entirely different from those of  the 1970s, but '90's and now? Nearly indiscernible.

He calls the present a Been There Done That Mashup Age, caused by our limited capacity to absorb change on every front. Modernity eyes are bigger than the modernity stomach and all our space has been taken up by technology innovation.

I've been annoyed for awhile that items I wore thirty or forty years ago are trotted out as trends, but unlike Andersen, am less eager for the appearance of the Radical New as far as style goes.

The Radical New is expensive, as I recall from the days when styles changed markedly every few years. Shoulder pads were in, then out; your jacket would not hang right, all your skirts needed to be shortened this minute.

And Radical New on a woman who is not so new herself can look victimy if one is not in firm possession of a personal style syllabus.

Montreal's Souk@Sat event

At the other end of the consumer spectrum are the craft shows now ubiquitous as fairy lights in Montreal.

(Some carefully avoid the c-word, summoning as it does the image of a horde of middle-aged women swarming stalls of felted scarves.) I've visited several, and found high levels of design, even innovation, and reasonable prices. 

The shows are packed with young couples hauling unsteady toddlers, looking to buy locally, to form a relationship that they hope ennobles consumption, if only a little. We many not need soaps that look like cupcakes, but it's pleasant to buy them from a chipper young man who made them over his  summer vacation. They are heavy on reverence for the past: letterpress coasters, home canning, birch bark lamps, upcycled knitted collars.

At one of these shows, I saw a 20ish vendor in a below-the-knee tartan pleated skirt, with a striped vest. I paused to enjoy her colour sense, then thought, You just don't see those pleated wool skirts anymore. I imagined her combing racks at a jumble sale. She looked utterly individual, standing out in a sea of skinny-jeans-and-tall-boots.

She illustrated Andersen's point: the new personal style is formed by recycling the old, these days.

Andersen fears we are losing our edge, that nostalgia and steampunk will clobber our creative energy for making the fresh, the fantastic, the next great thing.

I say, fine. Unemployment is still cringingly high (especially among youth and post-50 workers), families are digging out of debt, the economy falters. How many 40% off and free shipping offers are in your inbox?

Let's continue to borrow from the past without guilt, to wear our coats longer, carry a cloth tote instead of an It Bag, resist the trill of the fashion timer.

There is room for the innovative, always, but the Radical New will not have dominion over women's dreams until more of us are working again, or feeling safer about our savings.