The September issue of British Vogue has the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine charged the fuck up. I thought it was because the UK issue of the now iconic issue has Emma Watson on the cover instead of Beyonce, which would be a totally legitimate gripe, but instead Vine is railing against not how expensive the magazine is itself or how much it weighs, but that no one can really afford any of the fashion that the magazine highlights. NO FUCKING SHIT, LADY. But that doesn't mean Vogue and the September issue in particular needs to cease existing or that it needs to change drastically.
While there are salient points made in this piece—namely about body image issues and the insidious ways marketers prey on our insecurities to sell us things we don't really need—the whole "I could never afford these clothes, so why show them to me?" trope is tired and, quite frankly, lazy. The notion of what a garment "should" cost is the subject of another piece altogether, but saying you'd rather go to Zara than pay for haute couture displays a true misunderstanding of the costs that go into producing clothing.
Vine doubles down on her critique, arguing that not only are the clothes exorbitantly expensive, but the fashion displayed in the magazine is "hideous." Simply stating you find something unappealing isn't really a cogent critique. She continually highlights the ways in which the couture printed on the glossy pages is simply ugly and impractical and insists that the editors of Vogue are telling their readers to go out and buy exactly what is shown in the editorials. Not only is this premise wrongheaded, her vitriol about "orthopedic lab shoes and misshapen jumpers" obfuscates the true nature of the fashion cycle. Her willful ignorance to the fact that most often runway looks trickle down into high street shops is further highlighted by the fact that she scoffs at 3,500 Pound jackets by stating she'll be "…off to Zara." Too bad Zara is probably the "affordable" fast fashion chain guiltiest of blatantly and directly copying high fashion designs. Vine ends her argument lamenting "what fashion used to be," an age old and hackneyed mode of thought that would rather look backwards than look for, as she puts it, "elegance, style, and skill that used to be the trademarks of a great designer" in contemporary fashion. All of those hallmarks are here. Vine just refuses to look hard enough.
