If I'm doomed to the game, can I at least play it in peace?

I get it. We are being tricked into buying stuff that won’t give us everlasting joy or a sense of self or a lifestyle we don’t have or a status we can’t achieve because no one believes the Walmart Birkin is real and even if they do, we’re still sitting in 46D and didn’t attend the same school as them, don’t look like them, and it’s all just a sadistic trick to take our hard-earned money.

But. If I’m doomed to the system, to the game of signs and symbols, can I at least play in peace? Learn on my own that a certain level of restraint is where it’s at, that consumption poses an inherent dichotomy, that freedom without responsibility is ultimately oppressive—but so is constantly policing my choices? What if I want to find out for myself? What if I want to be the child that needs to fall to find out that the jump wasn't safe after all—except I’m an adult, and I want to be treated like one. Not warned. Not scolded. Not saved. Spared from condescension. Live in my illusory, quiet rebellion? Be let alone?

Because what if our goal is not to belong to any clique or climb a status ladder? Not because we’re not aware that looking like a “status seeker” only reinforces our place on the ladder, but because we’re so used to living on the margins that we truly don’t care? Because we know fashion won’t save us? Neither will give us the type of joy that lasts forever because its mechanisms of desire will inexorably keep us trapped in a hamster wheel?

Thank you, but I don’t want more reminders. All I want is my illusory freedom, my scrolling time with my cup of coffee before my kids wake up, the right to own my desires and my questionable purchases, including paying the price of regret. To get dressed when I want, opt out when I don’t. Jump on a TikTok trend when I need the dopamine. Regret it when it doesn’t serve me anymore. Share the cringy picture when I want, delete it when I don’t.

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I dread the collateral damage of some of the no-buy/against-personal-style discourse. Because fashion with capital F, once again, ends up being deemed as frivolous and unworthy of our attention. And fashion being attacked is the equivalent of selling the sofa where we found our lovers with their mistresses on it, instead of dumping the lover. A misdirected purge. A false cure. Burying our heads in the ground when in reality, clothes are not to blame. The people who find genuine joy in getting dressed and sharing it with the world, providing free market research for brands, are not to blame. Those who see fashion as a form of expression, with no intention of selling or convincing you of anything are not to blame. Those who put in the effort in the morning as a way to get in a certain mood are not to blame. Those who question why they like what they like and despise what they despise are not to blame. The ones who follow people they are inspired by—not to become them, but to catch a mirror image of their own beauty when finding it on their own feels difficult—aren’t to blame.

And they need to know the discourse isn’t aimed at them.

I need to know. Because I admit it— I took it personally at some point. I went into survival mode after I sensed the threat of all those fashion intellectuals coming for us. For those of us who see fashion as something deeper than a GRWM but do not dismiss the GRWM either.

I think I get it. The discourse is rather pointed at the wear this, not that crowd because the “this” makes you cool and the “that” won’t. And by the way, the “this,” I am selling it to you. Directly. Here, watch this instagram video. Or covertly. On my newsletter, where I use my influence to push products from companies I invested in, but didn’t disclose. As disingenuous and, honestly, annoying as the other side of the spectrum—those who think we can’t see they are camouflaging non-constructive anti-capitalist messaging in their anti-fashion discourse.

Who else is the no-buy/anti-personal-style discourse pointed at, principally?

1. Brands whose only goal is profit. Not art, not craft, not their clients, not their workers. All the brands posing as “ethical” while manufacturing with shitty materials in factories that pay crumbs while marking up their products to prices that claman al cielo. The real capital sins: greed, ambition—not the Thimothée Chalamet kind of ambition but the one that comes at the expense of human lives.

2. Gatekeepers. Those who have the power to extend a seat at the table but are not interested in merit, talent, or grit but instead in paying favors, advancing interests, treating friendship as transactional, maintaining their power at all costs.

I think that’s it. And the best that we, fashion-lover mortals, can do is keep approaching fashion from a place of curiosity, intuition, softness. Be aware of the multiple ideological noises that only see us as puppets. Keep treating fashion as a vehicle, a tool, a conduit, a source. A means to an end we don’t expect to control or predict. An opportunity to be surprised. To discover and construct ourselves. To make mistakes and own them. A borderless space. A game where we set our own rules, and break them as we please. Perhaps not brain surgery or the cancer cure, but a space in which we can find solace among despair, a manifestation of freedom , or its illusion—nevertheless worth protecting at all costs. Isn’t that as close as a victory as we can get? Not escaping the simulation, but dancing with it, eyes wide open, coffee in hand?

Wouldn't Boudrillard be proud?