Please Put Pockets In That Dress

How To Be A Good Person Who Loves Your Neighbor

I’ve been writing here for a whole year as of today! Here was my first post. By dint of gnashing my teeth and fretting about time management hacks I worked back up to writing every day, and, in the last few weeks, posting in the morning. I’m starting to feel like a real person again. But most of all I’m so grateful to all of you who turn up to partake of the content I so relentlessly produce. You all are the best!

After contemplating the depths of human failure, yesterday, I discovered that the great metropolises of the world have come to that part of the year called Fashion Week. Clips and bits of New York, London, Paris, and Milan are appearing in my X feed, which is so great, because normally I have to spend a lot of time on YouTube, hunting down glimpses of what’s to come. Just kidding, I have totally still been spending too much time on YouTube.

Photo by Chalo Garcia on Unsplash

But then I discovered that a famous Anglican has a famous son designing for one of the very hautest of all haut couture establishments. If you watch this, you’ll see the famous Anglicans somewhere in the middle:

You can read about what it’s like to be the father of such a genius here. I loved Roseberry’s insight about how high fashion can feel a bit like looking at an icon:

But these features mean something more than the merely visual; there is more there than meets the eye. The elongated forehead conveys an enlightened mind focused on heavenly thoughts, while the exaggerated fingers signify Paul’s spiritual power to bless people and his Gospel. Each element is a symbol, a spiritual archetype beyond our mundane reality.

That is the deeper purpose of an icon — it is an image we can see, yet also one we should see through. It is okay to stare at an icon. Why? Because an icon communicates and connects us to a meaning beyond what is immediately visible.

I have come to see fashion shows in the same way. Here comes a woman. She walks down an aisle between crowds of artists, photographers, designers, writers, and image-makers. She is stunning. Even striking. She wears beautifully and imaginatively developed clothing, jewelry, handbags, and accessories. I stare at her. It is hard not to stare. And as I stare, I let the artistry and creativity lead me beyond the moment.

One of the peculiar and frustrating things about being a female person, I daily complain, is that men are very often the ones making the “merely” practical and aesthetic decisions that effect the intimate and tactile experience of being a person. If they aren’t making the clothes, they’re making the houses. They’re determining the heights of the counters and the shapes of the chairs.

But it’s not just men. Women make complicated and uncomfortable clothes as well. Whoever they are, men or women, if they don’t faintly nod toward the deeper, spiritual dimension of the clothes we have to wear, they miss an opportunity to bless, and worse, they doom the person to a continual dissonant discomfort between body and soul. The people in high fashion bear a fearsome responsibility, though they might not think of it like that. As Roseberry points out:

The clothing on the runway makes a statement or suggests a theme. And, if you watch the fashion scene closely — as I do now; I have a monthly subscription to Vogue — you can see a trickle-down effect. Elements and concepts from one runway show seen in Paris 18 months ago can quickly make their way into the much broader world of everyday clothing or, even beyond, into other design elements all over the world.

For example, a dress with an exaggerated and outlandish sleeve could create a tidal wave of changes and redesigns of garments and blouses beyond the runway where it first appeared. Artwork from one look might inspire designers in different industries. Soon enough, women’s dresses from Los Angeles might morph into something that is a takeoff on a stylistic element from a runway halfway around the world. The influence of a look or design element made on a runway in one season can be seen on models in magazines, mannequins in windows at the mall, and even featured on a high-end handbag that is suddenly widely desired and out of stock.

What happens in Target, and I suppose even somewhere like Walmart, starts in Paris and Milan. What the people who have the most amounts of money in the whole world decide to wear or not wear has implications for the lowliest of the human family.

In the spiritual battle between form, function, and fashion, too often Satan wins the day and all Western women everywhere are forced back into leggings with sections cut out, or trousers torn to bits by what must be wild animals, or uncomfortable shapes, and, as every good person knows, No Pockets.