Author: Ben Tuthill
More and more people are adopting maxi dresses with every season, and it’s time someone said something about it. This might start some fights and gain me a few enemies, but whatever: I’m bored and nostalgic for the days when this paper was a venue for bitter dialogue and uninformed arguments (remember the Halloween Costume controversy of 2010? Those were the days).
There are two major camps in the maxi dress debate. One – made up of fashion-forward young women – says that maxi dresses are flattering, comfortable and emotionally liberating. The other – made up of less progressive women and, almost universally, men – says that maxi dresses are dowdy and better off burned.
The Anti-Maxi Dress Front usually offers one caveat: you can pull them off if you’re tall, thin and beautiful. “I love maxi dresses on someone like [supermodel] Karlie Kloss, but if you’re an ordinary girl like me…nuh-uh,” Sylvia said. Sylvia is my imaginary friend who I sometimes interview when I wish I had a quote but don’t actually have the time or energy to find one.
The tall, thin and beautiful argument is pretty common when wild new silhouettes break onto the scene. The sentiment was often discussed in 2008 when high-waisted skirts were just starting to take off. “They look great if you’re tall and skinny,” I remember my friend Hannah (actually a real person) saying. “But usually it looks like you’re trying too hard.”
Flash to 2013: everyone wears high-waisted garments. Women – and, ever increasingly, men – of all shapes and sizes have them and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who calls them tacky or unflattering. Photos of 2000s-era hip-huggers are cringe-worthy. It’s like Christina Aguilera never happened.
What’s happening here? It’s simple. High fashion moves faster than low fashion. High fashion changes dramatically from season to season; a silhouette can be the Next Big Thing in the F/W shows and completely passé before it even hits stores. Low fashion – the stuff normal people wear – moves slower. It takes a long time for the masses to get comfortable enough with a new silhouette to actually wear it.
Class lines used to divide the target demographics of high and low fashion. High fashion was for rich people who had the time and income to waste lots of money on constantly changing styles. Low fashion was for your mother, your father and all your neighbors in the podunk suburb you pretended you weren’t from. It moved slowly because people with average incomes didn’t have the financial means to reinvent their wardrobe every month.
Fashion functions well as a trickle-down industry. A look with staying power – one that survives multiple high-fashion seasons – eventually makes it to low-cost retailers who modify it into something wearable and affordable. The trickle-down process happened with high-waisted skirts: they started out on the runway and eventually made it into the wardrobe of the average American woman.
For a long time, the system worked. Then American Liberalism, mass media and the internet happened and, with them, came the rise of the fast fashion industry. Retailers like H&M; and Forever 21 preyed upon consumer desire for the latest high fashion trends by producing designer imitations as quickly and at as low a cost as possible. Suddenly everyone could afford to buy imitation Altuzarra parkas one season and imitation Givenchy Rottweiler prints the next. This is, the so-called “Democratization of Fashion.”
One of the many problems with this Democratization is that it tricks people into thinking that they can look as good in a $15 knock-off Chloé skirt as Kinga Rajzak looked in the original. But that’s not how it works, and it’s not because Kinga Rajzak is 5’10” and gorgeous. It’s because a lot more than $15 goes into a Chloé runway piece: materials, accessorizing, tailoring and a whole lot of time, thought and design. When Forever blasts out a disposable copy in two months to beat the real thing to the market, nearly all of that gets lost.
In other words, fast fashion disrupts the high-to-low trickle by making the high available to low markets before the low markets are ready. It introduces a new silhouette to low-cost retailers before low-cost retailers have the chance to figure out how to make the new silhouette well. When high-waisted skirts first started showing up, people thought they looked awkward because they were awkward: they were designed poorly and manufactured by an industry that only knew how to make low-waisted skirts.
That’s where we are now with maxi dresses. There’s nothing at all wrong with them: designer maxis look great. A chiffon maxi skirt, tailored well and accessorized with the right belt and the right top, is flattering, classic and (I assume) comfortable. With a little bit of time, money (a Chloé skirt goes for around $2,500) and thought on it, a maxi dress could be the look for Spring 2013.
The problem is that most people don’t do that. Instead they buy a cheap jersey stretch-knit, toss on some flip-flops and call it a day. It may be comfortable, it may be emotionally freeing, but – as the entire host of Anti Maxi Dress activists will tell you – it doesn’t look good.
This isn’t a maxi dress problem; it’s a fast fashion problem. Blame consumerism, blame the internet, blame Michelle Obama – but don’t blame maxi dresses. If this look has staying power (I think it might) then I have complete faith that in a few years low-cost retailers will figure out how to make it in a way that most people can wear. But until then, maxi dresses as inexpensive, everyday apparel aren’t going to work.
You can’t have a Ferrari, you can’t have a hedge fund, and you can’t have a maxi dress. Being poor sucks. Get used to it.
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