A Spiritual Approach to Connecting With Fashion

"Fashion is part of the daily air and it changes all the time, with all the events. You can even see the approaching of a revolution in clothes. You can see and feel everything in clothes." - Diana  Vreeland After a difficult transition in sales from winter to spring, I noticed that by changing the floor plan of the store I work at, it lightened up the atmosphere dramatically. A little more than a month later, as I moved through the floors to get to my department this morning, I saw how the Easter-time display, a brilliant destination get-away theme, was getting old. Some of the clothing on the mannequins are now on clearance. And while the display is stunning and intricate, it's time to revamp. Upon reaching the top level, I noticed the racks spread out very nicely, with beautiful clothes neatly hanging from them. I thought, how blessed am I that I get to work in such a beautiful store, with beautiful merchandise. For the first time, I saw the fast turn-over in ...

Something that has been brought to my attention, that I would have never noticed otherwise (and an example of how societal programming works), is that models no longer smile in advertisements. I even saw an image of a scowling child for a hospital campaign in the mall the other week, an appeal to "Join the fight". It is an age of anger, confusion, uncertainty, and bullying, and this is now being expressed, or possibly perpetrated, in fashion advertising. While the public might have been growing tired of the images of fake smiles and strange enthusiasm of people in posters, this new direction is indicative of even more strange times to come. A time of complete falseness - a new breed of "false advertising". In my research I found studies have shown that while broad smiles show friendliness, they also depict less competency.  One article explains that in fashion or retail, it's okay to have less competency, whereas for a medical advertisement, it's more ...

"They say couture is dead. Maybe for them, but not for us." - Karl Lagerfeld I've been meditating on the concept of impermanence, on progress, on endings and beginnings. A big reason has been inspired by a challenge presented: change now or be stifled. After personally feeling the crunch from retail jobs being taken over by computers (such as cashiers being  replaced with kiosks , live agents with  chatboxes  and sales associates with online shopping ), I have woken up to the fact that my job too might be on thin ice. But I recall what my yoga teacher said to us well over a decade ago, before the 2008 recession and before a time when our communities really started to feel the heat of job performance being outdone by AI - Figure out what it is that you can bring to a job, that a computer can't. Fortunately I have the privilege of in fact being in a position to offer a service that a machine can't, and that is establishing human connection by selling somethi...

"Change or die" - Mara Hoffman In the  piece I wrote about Eileen Fisher earlier this month , I addressed the severity of the amount of pollution created by the fashion industry. I posed a question of what could happen if more and more designers were brave enough to address and commit to making changes to reduce waste in the manufacturing and distribution of their merchandise. Well, more and more designers are getting on board to stop throwing overboard waste into our landfills and oceans. Recycling product and using organic materials is one way that CEO's are taking environmental steps to decrease their companies carbon footprints. Every little bit helps, because not only does it send a message to people from inside and outside the sector, the human brain has a mirror neuron that is used for learning and it is also the biological feature of why we  influence and copy each other . While the fashion industry produces  1.26 billion tons of greenhouse emissions every ...

I shared an article from  Vogue Magazine in one of my alternative spiritual groups on Facebook. The piece was about Gothic fashion and the members widely rejected it. When one of the administrators flat out criticized this fashion as not in fact being Gothic, despite my best efforts to say it is not vintage clothing but rather designer, so while the cuts and fabrics might be different it is still very much Gothic, I decided to remove the post. It made me realize how closed-minded we are to fashion and trends. I wonder if this is because we are brought up in a society where only a selected few can truly enjoy clothing - the wealthy and the increasingly lowering number of those who fit into single-digit sizes.  But when we look at the geniuses behind these designs we see that they themselves are edgy, stand-offish, outcasts, and had to overcome their fair share of societal pressures. I was intimidated by high fashion since my early adulthood years. From the outlandish conc...

We all know when we feel good in our clothing, and when we don't. When we do, we feel more attractive and while some of us might be introverted or shy, we still become more confident in whichever way we might choose to exude that. But when we over-do our dressing, and again, we know when we do, whether it be buying and wearing clothing out of budget, dressing disproportionately for the occasion, or just not being in tune with how we are really feeling and therefore doing ourselves a disservice by dressing in a way that doesn’t reflect that, something can be amiss in our behaviour. Studies show that how we dress changes our brain activity. 1  An example is when we wear track pants we are more casual and laid back, maybe walk with a bit of a swagger, but when we wear formal wear, there is a pressure to live up to that image. We change even the words we use - our brains actually work differently!  2   So why then is it important for the spiritually inclined to...

In a high-end department store, image is important. What is glamorous, exquisite, and even excessive are demanded. An impossible standard that is supposed to represent beauty and success which very few people even in middle to upper class society can achieve. And in the haze of beheld desire, something that I have noticed recently is more women coming in looking for plus-sized garments, and not having any options to purchase. I realized as we come into the first wave of the 2019 spring / summer collection, I felt badly telling these women that we cannot service them. I never felt uncomfortable about the way we as a society treat plus-sized women. In my previous fashion retailer store, I would often hear complaints when I directed customers to the plus-sized section, "Nice. Stick us in the back." And while we had a fair collection of merchandise, the placement in the store was marketed without much compassion. When I was encountering these customers several years ago, I ...