fashion has a fantasy problem

Please stop elevating basics.

The current pedestalling of 2016 feels culturally jarring, not because it’s nostalgic, but because it taps into a dream state we’ve long since visited.

Its flatlays and oversaturated filters were the height of aspiration culture, where the grass was always greener and you couldn’t yet buy it that way. Thinness, wealth and whiteness were immortalised in the Victoria’s Secret, cut creases and Jay Alvarrez of it all, and it was all unquestionably out of reach for a vanilla wage earner.

Aesthetic presentation was the most gripping cultural phenomenon, and appearance was seemingly the only signifier of social status. Social media well and truly became the place to be: home to the famous highlight reel, with Lightroom presets, faux morning routines and early digital nomads paving the way for the modern influencer as a legitimate concept.

Our own lives hadn’t been contentified on such a scale yet, so we understood this way of living as something we could strive for. We genuinely believed that it could be just so for ourselves, one day.

The fantasy was narrow yet infinite, but was there an upside to the longing? Were aesthetic constraints the things that drove us to make, be and create?

As it does, the pendulum swung and we substituted the glitz and Clarendon filter for beige linens and photo dumps.

In the five years that followed, everything we could’ve wanted became readily available to us in product form. We could buy symbols of the lives we once dreamed about, in dupes and on demand. We could perform the lives we’d watched, and any social nod of approval made it worthwhile.

It was at this stage when capsule wardrobes took hold and ‘elevated basics’ became the SEO term of the century. We were primed to embrace quiet luxury, where the costume of money meant a thorough flattening of visual ideas.

With that, we began to lose the ability to yearn for greener grass. Whether it was even an ability is arguable, but it does feel as though those muscles have atrophied, that we can’t do it properly anymore.

Was 2016’s shiny, taut brand of aspiration an engine or a speed bump for the culture? Was there merit to our need for good, better, best, and the inability to buy it pre-made?

This particular swing of the pendulum was prompted by relatability, a necessary dissent to the physically and politically slender yet widely-prescribed beauty ideals born out of aesthetic obsession. If you could see yourself in a piece of art, celebrity or social movement, they were a success. If you couldn’t, they weren’t worth your megabytes.

It wasn’t a resistance to inauthenticity per se, but we still needed girl boss feminism to come and go, we needed the Lizzo-ness of 2019 to recalibrate our mindsets and magazine headlines, and we needed a pandemic to expose the wealth disparity to an extent that couldn’t be visually encapsulated by a day on a plate.

Relatability was a welcome and excessively candid counteroffer to the early days of Instagram, but its inevitable commodification gave rise to aspiration sans fantasy.

The industries that benefit from aesthetic aspiration, being fashion, interiors, the things we look at, all lost their sparkle in the name of sameness and predictable cashflow. What took hold was an aspiration to own rather than an aspiration to be, setting us up to devour fast fashion, dupe culture and their inter-industry peers.

When there’s a complete lack of flirting, no will-they-won’t-they between what we want and what we can attain, it’s all become a bit dull. We’ve lost the limitations that make us creative.

As it does, the pendulum swung and we reverted to our pre-Lemonade ways as the clean girl, tall poppy syndrome and Ozempic took hold. The grass is suddenly extra green and extra purchasable, yet still with the social stratification we’ve always known, and still without fantasy.

Individualism found its seat and diet culture arrived as body positivity left the party, as did any kind of sociocultural trust in experts. Fashion trends have become defunct as nothing can properly trend in a wasteland of trends, which has allowed fast fashion to stay happily and destructively seated at the head of the table.

We’ve taken aspiration to a level where we mimic rather than model, taking all of a stimulus rather than inspiration from the same.

Can we lock back into the fantasy of it all? Ever again?