A closer look at fash-speak

Fashion writing is popularly understood to be a vapid genre. Most people see it as remote from their daily concerns, referring instead to a fantasy world of runway collections and red carpets. And it's written in a gormless, burbling dialect that I will call ‘fash-speak’.

‘Fashion’, by the way, is not a synonym for ‘clothes’. It's an industrial cycle of design, media and retail, which constantly renews itself to drive demand for new garments. Fashion is a dynamic, wealthy business sector that engages with politics, ethics and social ideologies, and writing about this is not stupid. To intelligent, discerning people, fashion offers plenty of food for thought – and some fashion writers are impressively knowledgeable and analytical.

However, the majority of fashion writing – from glossy magazines to weekend newspapers and the increasingly crowded blogosphere – is explicitly framed as ‘lifestyle’. That is, it’s all about the role clothing plays in an individual’s consumerist fantasies. And because ‘lifestyle’ is still consumed as part of a broad media diet, readers who aren't interested in fashion are likely to encounter fash-speak and find it meaningless.

In the style of Star Trek's Leonard 'Bones' McCoy, let me point out that I'm a cultural critic, not a fashion writer. I don't go to runway shows and industry launches, or follow designers and trends. I've gone to fashion events before and felt completely unwelcome. To be frank, sometimes I see fashion journalists at media screenings of fashion-adjacent films (most recently, The Dressmaker) and experience a mean yearning to make them feel as unwelcome on my turf as I feel on theirs. So it would be easy for me to massage my professional self-respect by hanging shit on fash-speak.

But inevitably I want to defend fash-speak as a legitimate linguistic practice, and to explore what it might do. Like all industry jargon, it's a set of shibboleths that reflects shared concerns and polices insiders and outsiders. Industry aspirants learn to use it, because mastering fash-speak establishes professional authority and credibility.

Fashion writers have been playing with language for ages; Diana Vreeland was an especially inventive wordsmith. Stephen Fried coined the term fashionista in his 1993 biography of model Gia Carangi, as an umbrella term for all the industry people in her orbit. It was a playful riff on the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who were prominent in the media at the height of Carangi's career in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 'Fashionista' was irresistible because it connoted both exoticism and political militancy. It's since birthed glamazon and frock star.

But while Fried now regrets opening Pandora's portmanteau, fashion blogging has supercharged fash-speak. A brand-building exercise for individual bloggers is to create terms that go on to be adopted more widely. Self-declared Man Repeller Leandra Medine is an avid neologist, but she's best known for inventing the arm party: a term for a collection of watches, bracelets and bangles worn all at once.

Fash-speak can operate in two registers. When it's talking down, it's euphemistic and twee, aiming to generate solidarity with the reader. Hair is a mane or tresses; a mouth is a pout; eyes are peepers; fingernails are talons; toes are tootsies. When it's talking up, it's constructing an air of mystique and exclusivity around industry practices. But it does this in a vague, nebulous way that fudges the distinctions between different price points and market positions.

The word couture just means sewing; but haute couture is a trade appellation granted by the Parisian Chambre Syndicale (now the Fédération française de la couture) that entitles a designer to show at Paris Fashion Week. Nonetheless, fash-speak uses haute, couture and high fashion as adjectives that all mean 'labels that show at fashion weeks'. Other brands are described variously as luxe, boutique, cult and niche – all of which imply that they are still expensive and exclusive, but have a small, discerning market. Bespoke, strictly speaking, is clothing tailored to one person's specific measurements; yet fash-speak uses it much more loosely to connote things that are hand-made and customised.

Much of fash-speak reflects the palimpsestic nature of fashion’s trend cycle. The treadmill of seasonal collections moves so fast that writers are flat out just describing how outfits look on models. It's impressionistic rather than contextual, aiming to capture evanescent moments, moods and gestures.

Some words and phrases seem to be deployed primarily for literary effect. Va-va-voom, originally a 1950s term for the sound of a car engine revving, now connotes a buxom, old-fashioned kind of sex appeal. Outfits that are presumably not sentient are nonetheless whimsical and flirty; they're also floaty and flippy and filmy and froufrou. And mute objects have something metaphorical to say: they become statement pieces.

Because of the pace of the trend cycle, fash-speak valorises an ability to anticipate and lead trends rather than to follow or lag behind. We hear of a fashion-forward or directional person or garment. Things are on-trend, or even bang on trend. They're edgy, cutting-edge or even bleeding-edge. X is the new Y. However, you'll often be allowed a sneak peak (always misspelled) at what's coming up next.

Other elements of fash-speak refuse to view fashion as an industrial process of producing and marketing clothing, but instead see it as a rarefied aesthetic practice. I don't think it's accidental that what Alix Rule and David Levine have dubbed International Art English is an industry jargon almost as universally maligned.

When fash-speak is forced to consider the everyday practicalities of wearing clothes, it sounds almost grudging. It assures you that sober yet very costly garments constitute investment dressing, and that sometimes a garment must take you from day to night. Perhaps the most arch word in fash-speak's vocabulary is wearable, which faintly damns a garment as bland and unimaginative, but also contains a note of admiration that a designer has been so bold as to invite non-fashionistas to wear their garments.

By contrast, fash-speak is at its most free-wheeling and grammatically elastic when it ponders aesthetic choices. One of fash-speak's most commonly ridiculed quirks is the Fashion Singular. This is the tendency to depluralise things that come in pairs: a pant, a lip, an eye, a shoe. Could this refer to the fashion writer's own eye, which has to travel so quickly that paired objects merge conceptually into one? The fashion writer's gaze displaces itself onto the things gazed upon, which synecdochically become looks. And because this gaze has a velocity and a direction, fash-speak doesn't have contemplative colour 'schemes'; it has colourways.

Obviously you would never wear only one shoe, or make up only one smoky eye; but the Fashion Singular refers not to the actual object or body part, but more to the act of making a single aesthetic choice, or to the effect of any one element in a successful look. You can make the Fashion Singular buddy up by teaming X with Y. But if you want one element to quickly draw the eye, you make it pop. Colourful items in drab contexts so reliably do this that they become nouns: a pop of colour.

The fashion writer's knowing, expert gaze is also implied in the fash-speak terms for choosing clothes – the prepositionless to shop (never 'to shop for' or 'to shop at'), or the connoisseurship implied by to source (that is, to track down items to the place where they originate). Even the fashion editor's job of choosing garments for an editorial is displaced onto the designer, whose runway collections are an edit – especially a tight edit.

Because the fashion world deals in exorbitantly priced luxury goods, it encourages mercilessly commercial writing that hypes the merch. In grammatical terms, this is the Fashion Imperative. Fash-speak deals heavily in hyperbole: journalists announce their current obsessions, what's hot and not, dos and don'ts, the essential clothes they're really feeling, which you need right now, the It bags and other must-haves they're currently all about. This garment is everything. It's killer. I die.

Here, it's important to acknowledge that a lot of fash-speak is appropriated from the language of people of colour – especially queer people of colour – and that this political redolence is neutralised in its use within mainstream (white) fashion journalism. In fash-speak, as in US hip-hop, people look fresh to death in what they're rocking – their kicks are totally on point, on lock; their brow game is on fleek.

The underground queer ballroom scene is deeply entwined with fashion. Voguing is named after Vogue magazine; its moves are inspired by the poses of models and the performance space of the runway. Ballroom collectives are also called 'houses' – like fashion labels – and many have even been named after fashion houses. Competitors walk for their house, much as fash-speak refers to models appearing in a given designer's show.

The ballroom use of language to commentate on performance emerges in fash-speak when someone is slaying it, worked it, did that or went there. Yaaaaas queen! And fash-speak expresses enthusiasm by declaring the writer is living for or is here for expensive designer merchandise.

Popularised by designer Christian Siriano during his time as a Project Runway contestant in 2007, the term fierce is older; it appears in drag artist RuPaul's 1992 single 'Supermodel (You Better Work)'. To call black women 'fierce' is to reappropriate racist myths that they were savage and primitive, less feminine and deserving of less respect than white women. 'Fierce' became a term of pride in and admiration for a racialised (trans)femininity.

But fash-speak's attachment to 'fierce' has had the unfortunate effect of dehumanising black women, while granting white women access to feelings of playful power.

The terrible irony is that fash-speak is not a very good idiom for citing or paying homage to aesthetic influences. It will freely admit that something is iconic and that certain people are style icons, and will even dabble in spiritualism to suggest that a garment or person is channelling someone or something else. But its ideas of classic, vintage and retro are vague, unmoored from specific periods in fashion history, and relying much more on the reader's emotional stake in the past.

Like any other industry jargon, fash-speak only becomes meaningful in the encounter between fashion writer and fashion-savvy reader. It's a connotative rather than a denotative argot – surprisingly poetic in its use of allusion and onomatopoeia, and intended to create moods – of urgency, of pleasure, of possibility – as much as to actually describe things. But fash-speak's innate elitism means it's troubling that it's so happily adopted the language that disempowered people use to assert their own dignity and sense of style.

Seriously, what is wrong with some people?

An incident happened tonight that has left me wondering why some people are so keen on their own unpleasant prejudices that they want to attribute them to me, too.

It started when the following, anonymous comment on this post came up for moderation:

Number one, was it necessary at all the mention Fashion Hayley in your post at all? And your little passive aggressive dig at Hayleys "dodgy photo" is nasty and sickening.
Also seems that by mentioning her name and site, you might have thought you could up your blog hits.

Number two, get your facts right. The Top Shop dress wasn't designed for Incu. Incu are partners with Top Shop ("Incu Presents Top Shop) and sell Top Shop wares in their paddington store.

And this post on "sitting this one out" is stupid. To say that to consciously boycott a trend due to highly stylistic knowledge seems to be contradictory, sense trends and style are mutually exclusive.

You're just a ugly bitch who looks fucking disgusting in everything.

I was like, "Whoa! Whoa!" I was totally not about to approve that. But underneath the childishness, the aggression, and that final line – which is uglier, bitchier, and more fucking disgusting than anything I've ever written – I sensed that someone felt I was dissing Fashion Hayley.

Now, where would they have got that idea from? So I did a bit of digging in my blog stats, and noticed multiple Google searches for terms such as "Mel Campbell 'Fashion' Hayley" and "Footpath Zeitgeist fashion hayley".

Clearly someone was trying to find references that linked me and this blog to Fashion Hayley. I did the same search myself, and found this sorry piece of shit. The blogger's name is Luke Devine. The reason why my hate-commenter had to Google me tonight is that Devine did not link his post back here.

Perhaps he also didn't want me to discover (via my stats) what he'd written. Perhaps he didn't want to give me a chance to respond to the way he has blatantly twisted my comments to attribute opinions to me that I simply do not hold.

Usually I have better things to do on the internet than feed trolls – for instance, looking at pictures of cats or playing Flash games – but the fact that Devine has tagged his post with my full name, and is sending hate comments my way, means that I feel compelled to respond. So I posted the following on his blog as a comment…

Luke, you have utterly misrepresented me. I don't share your weird dislike for Hayley Hughes or belittle any of her successes. I am not trying to make her "look kind of stupid" – rather, I'd suggest YOU want her to look stupid, so you're pinning those opinions on me.

Hayley works hard and I respect her genuine enthusiasm for the fashion industry. I actually pity you for being so bitter and suspicious that you would read my blog post as "surreptitious female bitchiness" or "a backhanded piece of blatant cross promotion", and consider it only a "remote possibility" that I could be sincere.

I am a regular reader of Hayley's blog. (I wonder if you know what it's like to read blogs regularly, to get a sense for the writer's tone and favourite topics, rather than Google searching them as fodder for your snark.) So when I spotted that dress in Big W, I remembered that Hayley had bought one, and that it was similar to another dress she'd bought in Sydney.

The reason I apologised for reproducing the dodgy photo is that in the blog post where it originally appears – and which I CLEARLY linked to – Hayley herself writes: 'Photos of me on nights out are at best terrible. Believe it or not this is the least bad of the bunch."

So yeah – I WAS genuinely apologising, because I wanted to show Hayley wearing the dress, but the only image on her blog was this one that even she admits she didn't like. I included the other pic of Hayley in the similar Topshop dress… because she looks BETTER in that pic! Of course, you unkindly refer to her as "aping a fashion model". Jeez, we just can't win with you.

While I'm here, let me add that I don't see Footpath Zeitgeist as a 'fashion' blog – it's a research blog where I semi-regularly post my thoughts about bodies, clothes and pop culture. These concerns only sometimes overlap with the industrial operations of the fashion industry. I don't give a shit about the amount of site traffic it gets, about 'cross promotion', or about being part of some 'machine'.

The vintage/op-shop debate continues

This time it's about the ethics of mining op-shops for clothes and reselling them in vintage shops or on eBay. Miss Patrice wrote an angry post targeting Sarah from Foreva Young Vintage, basically, it seems, for being too entrepreneurial. (Patrice has now edited the post to reflect that Sarah is only one of many resellers who source their stuff from op-shops.) Now the topic has cropped up on I Op, Therefore I Am.

Most of the commenters on the latter blog say they have no problem with resellers and feel they deserve any profit they make from such a labour-intensive enterprise. Defending themselves, the resellers make ethical arguments about saving garments from landfill, or about catering to demand from buyers who don't have easy access to op-shops.

Another comment, which I thought was quite shrewd, was that eBay is now many people's first resort for getting rid of unwanted stuff, so the "good stuff" that all op-shoppers are after sometimes bypasses the op-shop economy altogether these days. (What precisely is "good stuff" depends on the op-shopper's tastes.)

My own feelings on the matter were echoed by an anonymous commenter who wrote:

I don't object to reselling but I don't like the way it's become such a theme on this blog. Somehow a great find doesn't seem so great if you just bought it to sell it.

Another thing that bothers me - and I have posted this as a comment on the blog - is when garments bought in an op-shop are mutilated to make them conform to a more contemporary aesthetic. I write 'mutilated' deliberately, because I see garments being altered in ways that don't respect their original designs. To me this seems to miss the point of vintage: and admiration for the styles of the past.

Of course, I've bought things from op-shops with the intention of cutting them up, re-sewing them or otherwise changing them - but only for me to wear. If you're planning to sell these things to other people, then who are you to decide what's "wearable" and what isn't? Surely that's something a buyer decides for themselves, using their own tastes?

Alternatively, perhaps these people who both resell and mutilate consider themselves creative: what they are selling is a certain look. It's akin to being a fashion designer who works only with second-hand materials. Again, I have no problem with this... unless the clothes are being sold as 'vintage'. You simply can't have your cake (trading on the cachet of vintageness) and eat it too (hacking those vintage garments up so they no longer have their vintage shapes).

It's not called Sidewalk Zeitgeist

Lately I've been noticing Australian fashion bloggers (especially Foreva Young Vintage and Fashion Hayley) describing the process of second-hand shopping as "thrifting". This isn't a dig at these blogs - I enjoy reading them - but this "thrifting" bizzo really grates on me, because "thrift stores" are what they call op-shops in the United States. (In the United Kingdom they're mostly called "charity shops".) We are not Americans, so why do we have to use their words?

It might seem like a petty complaint, but it seems to evoke a certain cultural cringe: that Australians inevitably take their fashion cues from overseas. But perhaps I'm just hypersensitive to (and more than a little sick of) the studied curatorship that goes into buying clothes second-hand, given that I've just written a post about the way that the fashion press uses "vintage" as a synonym for "personal creativity", and because I recently wrote up a vintage clothing market for ThreeThousand.

I have the unsettling feeling that when they're op-shopping, some fashionable chicks see themselves as part of a global aesthetic culture of "thrifting" rather than a local affective culture of "op-shopping". There seems to be very little thinking about how garments have histories, often local histories, and how the garment resonates with the buyer's own history. Instead the op-shop is treated as a resource for cheaply acquiring (and even on-selling via eBay) on-trend clothing that is emptied of its previous history so it becomes 'new' to the buyer.

By way of contrast, I've really been enjoying reading the collaborative op-shopping blog I Op, Therefore I Am. I found out about it when I was invited to blog there, but I figured that since I already blog in three regular places, none of which is specifically about op-shopping, I'd be over-committing myself. What I enjoy most about this blog is that it isn't just about the 'vintage' logic that seems to dominate the thinking of the fashion blogosphere.

Instead, the bloggers - and there are heaps of them - visit op-shops around Melbourne and Victoria and report excitedly on their finds - not just clothing. Some things I get excited about too, and some leave me cold. Some I think are embarrassingly daggy. But the striking part is how these purchases go on to enrich the lives of their new owners. These objects have meaning aside from their aesthetic meaning. It's the amateur still life painting that sits in the buyer's bathroom for her to enjoy as she brushes her teeth, wishing she could tell the anonymous painter how much she likes it.

So when I think of "thrifting", I think of the hipster's pursuit of a distinctive look, but when I think of "op-shopping", I think of shopping practices that recognise the ways that an object's history creates affect, or feeling, in the buyer. I know I was recently overjoyed to discover the twin of my favourite coffee mug for $1 in the Don Bosco op shop in Brunswick - it seems so serendipitous that for so little money, you can find something that's already special to you.

Footpath Cracks - Bettina gets 'em young

Welcome to the first of an occasional series. Footpath Cracks are my bitchy fashion news briefs, and they'll come up when I feel some style-related issue in the press deserves a good snort of derision.

In today's inaugural crack, Bettina Liano has announced she's designing a range of children's wear. I am a little alarmed. I suppose the "ruffled tops, tulle skirts and jersey pieces with mini versions of Bettina's celebrated denim garments" won't be too much of a stretch. But isn't there something a little wrong about producing this clothing for kids? After all, this is the same designer who said in 2003,

"It is important for women to feel amazing in my clothes and feel sexy but comfortable in my jeans."

And as The Age noted last year,

"Her designer jeans (generally falling into the "spray-on" category of fit) are incredibly saucy."

I also wonder if this is her attempt at buttressing brand loyalty among mums who may have "sagged out" of her target market, so to speak. If so, you have to applaud her for thinking laterally. But by far my favourite thing about this article was that:

"The clothing will come in size 3 to 10 ..."

Just like her adult designs, then!