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a journey through the fashion student trope, the industry and realisation.
A friend once told me that chef apprentices eat macaroni for dinner. During my time in London College of Fashion I too developed a somewhat of a phobia towards glossy fashion magazines, the fashion week, retail and much more! And for a good reason too: glossies promote very problematic ideals, the fashion week promotes fast cycles of new designs and retail is its very own chapter I wont delve in right now. While focussing on the apocalypse that is the fashion industry, I got so angry and spiteful and bitter I pretty much expelled all things frivolous and sartorial from my head, my home and my habitus.
What once was exciting and cool and wonderful became a massive weight on my shoulders. And not only on mine, but once I started chatting about my new-found hatred towards the industry I quickly learned I wasn’t alone.<br>
On our first year we spent hours on extravagant make-up looks, which brought us closer to paintings, clearly differentiating us from everyone else on the tube. We spent even more hours in avant-garde book stores and industrial cafés playing with Photoshop blending modes. We wore long leather coats and colourful berets outside the campus on High Holborn. We went on a field trip to Paris and only smoked there. And then it all went away, lecture by lecture, once we started realising how messed up all this was. It wasn’t the stuff we found joy in, per se, but the industry behind it all, behind the idea, the image that we subscribed to.
I have come to understand that university is the prime time for developing criticism, skepticism and — most of all — cynicism. Not that we all suddenly started reading Nietzsche obsessively but we might as well have. And this was instantly reflected in our styles. Ironic, I know.
Very soon I ditched Blair Waldorf altogether and transformed by wardrobe into a collection of uniforms consisting of jeans, t-shirts and crew-neck jumpers. Personal styles evolve, some might argue, and they most certainly do. Only here the change was highly conscious.
This is when I came to understand the core, the essence of any art student: the world is bloody awful when you stare at its flaws through a magnifying glass for three years straight. Therefore one must limit exposure to said flaws to the extent one possibly can. Only one cannot stop thinking about all those awful things so in the door walk bitterness. My attempt to save myself was to drop the ‘of fashion’ off the end of my degree title whenever I had the chance and come up with a scheme to enable me to draw forest animals for the entirety of my final year.
During that final year I had a very poignant conversation with one of my course leaders in which I vividly recall declaring my disgust for anything commercial promoting material goods and to which my lecturer answered: “Well that’s too bad because we live in a capitalist world. Who are you going to work for then?” Or something along those lines. It left me thinking for a long time. Who am I going to work for if not the devil promoting goods?
Somehow my dissertation got written and my final major project got completed and I found myself holding a degree certificate on an airplane on my way back home to Finland.
Six months later I bought my first fashion magazine in three years. They’re still problematic but I’d like to think I am a responsible reader these days. I am excited to design and make my own clothes now. I even bought something frilly bordering-on-frivolous. My degree and having had study all the things that are wrong have made me a more conscious consumer.
As much as I appreciate all the hardening knowledge gained during university I am much more at ease now that I’ve gotten some distance — both mental and physical — to the epicentre of fashion that is London, and be able to enjoy fashion with the lower case ‘f’ that my lectures always talked about.
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