Does fashion need deeper conversations?

A case for short, sweet, and at times more superficial fashion talks

Dear fashion friends,

I’m living my easy-girl era and, with it, I seem to have lost interest in going deep. The mind-blowing, thought-provoking conversations I once craved—and often started myself—no longer feel appealing. I’ll let my friends attest, but I feel like my entire body simply closes the exact moment we go a single atom below the surface. (Sorry if you’ve had to go through either form of punishment!)

Inevitably, I’m reminded of a recurring conversation I had with my therapist years ago: “You don’t need to have deep, philosophical, transformative conversations with everyone around you. Not everyone needs to activate every single one of their brain cells every time they engage with another human. And that is okay,” he used to say.

Reluctantly, and because I’m—irritably, even to myself—the person who always has to give everything a try before saying no, I decided to explore his theory. I put an effort into having and learning to value different qualities of conversations with the people I encountered in life. But it just wasn’t exciting enough. It didn’t spark anything on me. It didn’t feel like the way I wanted to live life and so I consciously chose to move away from such a philosophy and go back to surround myself with “my” people: Those who can and want to go deep with me.

Yet I’ve been revisiting my decision lately.

I’ve been experimenting with keeping conversations short and stupid, and even—to my surprise—I’ve been carrying this approach to fashion as well.

Not because I don’t enjoy a deep, long, thoughtful fashion talk. Not because I’ve given up on my mission to disseminate the true power of fashion in shaping our entire worlds and societies. And certainly not because I’m satisfied with what fashion scholarship and the media have done to communicate the actual breadth of fashion’s global histories.

But because sometimes deep just gets too overwhelming and what we might need is some softness. Shallowness. Superficiality.

Or maybe we just need things to be bite-sized?

Take, for example, the Spanish Style exhibition at the Hispanic Society that I reviewed earlier this month. It was short, sweet, perfectly digestible… and while it didn’t exactly go deep into many of the topics it engaged with, it did serve as a mouth opener into the richness of fashion during the Spanish Golden Age. It was an excellent introduction for newcomers to the history of fashion in the Hispanic world and a wonderful summary for those of us who are already well-versed. Fashion nerds like me could enjoy the exhibition without the intellectual hangover. We took away questions, further inquiries, and an increased curiosity about Amada Wunder’s award-winning book*—all of which we can engage with in our own time. And the key to this exhibition’s success was, if you ask me, a combination of its size and the simplicity with which it communicated the decades of research that backed it up.

Then there are the informal conversations. If you’re the “Doctor of Fashion” in your friend group, you might find yourself—like I often do—answering a bunch of questions in pretty much every gathering. I personally love them! But I’ve started to conclude recently that I love these chats so much precisely because they are quick and easy, often tied back to personal style and lived experiences, and their nature doesn’t always offer much space for intellectualization. They feel more like a rapid fire Q&A, a sort of podcast-y or social media-y conversation than a proper lecture, and that’s probably for the better.

And when it comes to more profound, academic-style conversations, we’ll always have classes and conferences and book clubs and other spaces dedicated, exactly, to having deeper talks (even though, in my experience, this purpose is not always fulfilled). Funnily enough, I’m typing this just after having published a vlog about my recent lecturing at the University of Glasgow and what I enjoyed most about my experience there was the depth and level of engagement of the discussions I had with students in class.

To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever want it otherwise. But I also don’t think I need such deep conversations outside of classrooms… which is interesting because I have absolutely no plans to spend time in a classroom in the next few months (unless, of course, you’d like to invite me, to which I might say yes a bit too eagerly, maybe to my own shame).

So I’m inevitably left wondering if I’m just done with pursuing deep fashion conversations and, more broadly, if we do indeed need to have deeper conversations in and around fashion.

What do you think? Do you prefer lighter fashion talks or do you simply need to go deep every time “the F word” enters the chat? (This is, of course, a nod to Dr Valerie Steele’s stellar essay which, if you love fashion and haven’t already, you should totally read!)

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thank you, thank you for reading, commenting, and joining the conversation.

Until next time,

—L 🩷

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