Recently, Lady Gaga attended Brandon Maxwell’s New York Fashion Week show where he presented his new autumn/winter collection. With her voluminous red Bowie hair, she was obviously making headlines. After the show, Gaga was interviewed. When asked if she would ever consider being a designer herself, she replied, “Let me just say now I’m quite happy with him [Maxwell] designing for me and designing for other women. The thing is, at the end of the day, I have a real respect for fashion designers, and it is the reason I don’t have my own line and I probably never will.”
She then added, “If I ever do anything in fashion it’s always going to be as a muse or aesthetic creative. I like to be part of helping artists find themselves and feel good about who they are. I would never, for a second, claim to be a proficient fashion designer.”
As a fashion design major, I was more than happy to read this, and this article was shared numerous times among my fellow fashion majors. Finally, someone who understands that art is not something anyone can try their hand at and succeed. The respect for artists and designers is long overdue. For years, people have had the impression that all artists are starving and irrelevant, that they do not contribute to the society because they simply product art, something considered a luxury rather than a necessity. Even Old Navy made a shirt that discouraged kids from becoming artists. The shirt showed the term “young aspiring artist” with the word “artist” crossed out and replaced with words like “astronaut” or “president.”
A lot of people believe there is a huge separation between their lives and fashion. Perhaps the most famous scene from "The Devil Wears Prada"is when Miranda Priestly, played by the goddess herself Meryl Streep, lectures a young and oblivious Andy on the power of the fashion industry. The cerulean sweater she wore came from the Oscar de la Renta collection that popularized that specific shade of blue. Many people think they do not participate in fashion and simple purchase clothes at a local store, but what they don’t realize is that every type of collar, sleeve, trim, color and texture have been hand-picked by the leaders of the fashion industry and then eventually it gets passed down to your local suburban stores. So, in actuality, everything you see in store is just a watered-down version of the high fashion garments that designers showed on the runway, from a collection of garments that they have poured their souls into, as well as blood, tears, coffee and some cigarette ashes along the way. Designers work for days, even weeks, nonstop just to perfect their designs and create the most innovative and aesthetically pleasing garments that not only conveys their pure artistic ideas, but also markets to the consumers.
So, next time that someone says, “Fashion is a waste of time,” tell them that cerulean didn’t pick itself.
