Who is popular today?

Isolated and atomised though we are, the social impulse endures. And with it, the love of clothes
I recently contributed to an article in the humour magazine the Fence about novelists and their internet addictions, which led me to reflect on the amount of time I spend online. I could pretend that I spend most of it on the New Yorker website but I’d be lying: after doomscrolling, my main internet fix is looking at pictures of clothes. The pandemic has done little to pacify this tendency – my instinct towards consumerism was instilled at a young age (yes, I blame capitalism). One of my toddler tantrums involved screaming, at fever pitch, the repeated demand: “Give me all your money!” Thankfully, my parents were never rich, or else I might have become a monster.
I love fashion. It is as central to my interests as literature, painting, music, food and the cat. (OK, not the cat. The cat is the pinnacle, for she has designed it that way.) I consider it an art form in its own right, and have extremely low tolerance for people who are snobbish about it. It shouldn’t need to be said that you can have an intelligent, inquiring mind alongside an interest in how we adorn ourselves. What we wear cuts to the very heart of who we are, and how we want to appear. Particularly, it seems to me, if you are a woman. To quote the French essayist Roland Barthes, couturiers are the poets “who write the anthem of the feminine body”. Continue reading...