The term “old money” is as trendy as ever, with influencers donning sleek-chic minimalist jewelry and clothing. The obsession with skinny bodies is also on the rise.
The question is, how did minimalist fashion and the obsession with skinny in a post-COVID world contribute to the recent happenings in the 2024 U.S. election?
The accumulation of post-lockdown aesthetics saw a shift in the fashion patterns of late 2021. Influencers everywhere suddenly favoured streamlined silhouettes and wanted minimalistic details. That can’t be a coincidence.
Think of H&M’s recent rebranding and how it tries to achieve a “The Row”-esque look. The Row is a luxury brand founded by child stars Mary-Kate and Asley Olsen. The brand’s luxe appeal is founded in exclusivity, so why exactly a $17 button-up from H&M that caters to hundreds of millions of women is bent on emulating that, I am not sure.
The Row is not so much the brand itself but what it symbolizes — obsession with perfectionism and effortless beauty, like the clean girl makeup look; clean girl here means who looks the most beautiful while being the most effortless.
Other brands trying to copy that, like Coach and Michael Kors, are red flags too, especially after Michael Kors killed the monogram. It’s a dystopian new way of wealth.
Old money appeals to the everyday person as it’s both functional and holds a high-quality allure that has the effect of making you appear exclusive and rich, and the low to mid-priced market is making it available for a common price tag.
However, people aren’t interested in the skills required to produce these high-quality-looking clothes. In fact, the quieter the news of sweatshops and third-world labour is kept, the better.
The mass production we have witnessed over the past decade of the fashion industry has led me to think of how much closer we get to the death of the artisan when making clothes. Why has that vanished?
I suppose the closest thing I can relate the artisan to is a strange (but beautiful) phenomenon that happened during the pandemic. Seclusion from the workforce meant less time for corporations to control their servile populations.
Pandemic hobbies such as interior design, painting dining room furniture, textile art, landscaping the weedy backyard, and making your own clothes became growing projects. This ultimately led to a resurgence of cottage core and alt fashions as a yearning for some other world.
Dresses like the Lirika Matoshi strawberry dress echo the pastoral yearning with its giant strawberry motifs. Another example is the popularity of the larger-than-life Giambattista Valli poofy dresses — they used to be the thing on red carpets.
However, these dreamy silhouettes have now completely vanished, favouring skinny silhouettes that of course echo the desire for skinny bodies.
There is a resurgence of skinny fanaticism that’s been on my TikTok For You page. People all of a sudden are discussing how grateful they are to be skinny. Ozempic is the new trend of the year, fuelling body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Celebrities are getting gelatinous fillers dissolved and implants removed. We, as a collective, are entranced with occupying less space.
Skinny bodies of course lead to skinny fashion. In turn, this signals a return to classic white beauty standards. These fashion and beauty ideals are then driven by traditional “Americana” aesthetics like old-money. Think like Lana del Ray’s music, Coca-Cola bottles, and Ralph Lauren sweaters (I mean come on, the American flag sweater? That is so obvious).
Come to think of it, cottage core aspirations and pastoral aesthetics were the first clues as to where the 2024 U.S. elections were heading. With the yearning for a whiter-tighter-skinnier look, 2020 was a sign of the conservative uprising.
Also, why is checking clothing labels a thing now more than ever? As a child of an immigrant family, it’s something I was familiar with, but it’s interesting to see it creep into the mainstream. The material makeup of clothing has become an indicator of what the person can afford — a new thing to brag about.
The middle-class attempts to emulate the fact that this is all the rage by thrifting. Some try to brand this thrift movement by calling it sustainable, but it’s just another way we are trying to copy the rich. Eight years ago, when Gucci logo shirts were all the rage, nobody gave a damn whether they were made of polyester or cotton — they just bought fakes because there was a certain look they were trying to achieve.
“But, I have nothing to do with that!” the average person insists. The interest in wanting quality stuff instead could be a signal that the middle class is preparing for some sort of major financial earthquake in the future. It could be interpreted as curating now so that we have a wardrobe of clothes that not only we can wear, but pass down in case the economic situations continue.
All in all, downgrading the middle class, average Joe, and all the rest, is not the root of any sort of problem. The sick hierarchy that placed the upper social classes to choke out those rooted at the bottom is what people need to pay attention to. I rest my case.