Gay Men, Straight women, and fashion

Ann Althouse took a look at the fashion industry, and what she found made her unhappy.

A lot of women are drawn into fashion too. But it may be that the most competitive and talented women are spread out into many fields, while a very large proportion of the most competitive and talented gay men choose fashion. Still, discrimination against women may well result. The chances seem high that these men, once there, benefit their own kind. Why should ambitious gay men be any different from any other sort of ambitious human being?

I found the comments especially interesting (including when Althouse slaps Jib for making a joke). Here's one from Wristpain:

wristpain said...
One thing that we are largely ignoring is that fashion as an industry is not concerned simply with the product produced. A lot of what makes a particular fashion fashionable has nothing to do with the fabric and cut and all the other blah, blah, blah that goes into designing clothes. A fashion house doesn’t sell clothes, it sells FABULOUSNESS. And right now gay men enjoy a certain cache when it comes to this sort of glamour. Which is exactly what they are leveraging into their outsized success in the fashion industry. Just like 50 cent is able to leverage his image and personal history into record sales that are completely out of proportion with his talent as a rapper, gay male designers are able to do the same thing with their cultivated air of fabulosity. Is it fair? No. But it is not discriminatory either. It is just taking advantage of certain cultural trends and preferences that happen to be in the air at the moment.

And I agree with one of the earlier statements about how crazy it is that we just ignore statements about the superiority of gay people. That kind of talk is every bit as bigoted and perverse as what we hear from the anti-gay crowd. Hearing a statement like this from someone who should know firsthand the abuses that bigotry can lead to makes me think that no one is interested in justice, just promoting their own interests.

And here's a comment from Sonic Frog:

sonicfrog said...
The answer is so clear it hurts: "IT'S THE FASHION INDUSTRY SILLIES!!!"

Ooops. Another stereotype.

I was going to pull this quote and that quote from the article, but figured that would just complicate things. Here are a couple of simple question to ask.

What makes great fashion? i.e. Why is one considered a better design than the other?

How many gay bars, pride parades, and drag shows have you, Ann, fellow bloggers, and the author of the article, been to?

The second question first. I, for one, find drag shows and the like dreadful and boring. Not my cup of tea (god I sound so gay). Now I am mostly a failure as a gay guy. I don't saschet when I walk. I work on cars. Can't lisp if I tried. Have absolutely NO fashion sense. I'm registered Republican. Never watched Will and Grace. Don't own a Madonna record. I don't like Barbara Streisand (and not just for her politics). But when you're young and gay and want to meet other gay men and not feel alone in the world, you go were the gay men are, including drag shows and pride parades. So I've seen a lot of this stuff. The one thing I can tell you is that, for one reason or another, gay men who participate in these things seem to have an affinity to accetuate and exagerate those qualities that make a female female. Maybe it's because the GM has to try so much harder to look and act the part. Reguardless. The thing is, queens are bold, often to the point of satire. Nothing is held back. What a superb training ground for a fashion designer, where noting is held back in the fashion experiment. Now I'm not implying that the current crop of designers are drag queens. They're probably not. But I will venture to quess that they have all spent some time honing their skills in that environment. They find out what works and what doesn't. What kind of expreience do hetero females have to rival that? And you want to consider the power of networking here. I agree totally with the gentleman in the article who describe the gay aspect as a club. This is our golf course, where deals are brokered and made.

As for the first question. What make fashion?

Unlike say, a physicist, there is no test or cognitive measure that tells you if a designers work is good or not. It's all subjective and instinctive. A design that may have bombed 30 years ago may be considered briliant if presented today. And so much of the industry is about what is en vogue, and well, er fashionable. No one is using the treffle right now because it's not in fashion (a "treffle" is something I made up; it's not real as far as I know). Lets face it. As far as the industry goes, gay men are in fashion.

I think there's a lot of truth in two statements of the last comment. One, "What kind of expreience do hetero females have to rival that? And you want to consider the power of networking here. I agree totally with the gentleman in the article who describe the gay aspect as a club. This is our golf course, where deals are brokered and made." And two, "Lets face it. As far as the industry goes, gay men are in fashion." Hard to ignore the star-making process and the elements that make it.