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When Einstein’s theory of relativity became famous, he got off much easier than Darwin.  He was not expected to explain why his theory failed to account for the location of heaven nor was he expected to add an intelligent designer to the mix.

Whatever your local mystic would have you believe, evolution lacks no more proof than relativity.  Both have been proven.  Neither requires the existence of a creator, the interference of a divine will or the concept of design.

Nor do they rule them out.

You may add religious notions to these ideas but  it would be superfluous at best, wrong at worst and, either way, would sacrifice the elegance of the theories. These hypothesises work without God.  If God exists, he/she/it is simply not required.

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Though made clear in heuristic scientific philosophy, the superfluous addition of an exterior designer is hardly limited to debates between science and religion.  This debate occurs throughout civilization.  Whether it’s about society and the state; art and the gallery; style and the fashion, it’s the same question: What is superfluous and what is necessary?

Because we have reached the end of yet another fashion week in Toronto –an event I studiously avoid when issues of temperament and alliance make it possible– it’s timely to look at this fundamental issue in that context.

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Fashion is entirely superfluous.  Rather than solving any problems of style, fashion creates them.  It only has one reason to exist in any theory of dressing and that reason is the very worst reason to add an idea to anything — The prevailing opinion of the majority. That’s all fashion is. In this case, as in most, it is an opinion guided by an interested and biased elite.  One that wants to appear indispensable because it is in their interest to appear so.

Fashion, by its very definition, is only a measure of popularity.  Popularity has never made an idea right or wrong and has never provided evidence of  anything other than human stupidity.  If scientific notions were decided on issues of the prevailing majority opinion, we would still believe the world was flat.

Fashion adds as much to style as God does to evolution.

Nothing.

When I think of something like Fashion Week, whether it be in Milan New York or Paris, I figure it’s all about the same thing.  Designers attempting to make money while bending taste to suit their opinions.  It’s a priesthood.

And I’m not here to insult the priests but to say their god is unnecessary.

Fashion requires style but style does not require fashion.  The only important runway is the boulevard, the only important taste is your own and you don’t need fashion for any of that.  To develop style, you have to disregard fashion.

That’s not to say you have to or should act against it.  Disregarding is quite different than protesting.  New churches, new states and new fashions are always made of people protesting the last one.

Last season was dark, this season is bright.  That one was ostentatious, this one is simplified. It’s a dialectic composed of nonsense and, rather than searching for truth, it only synthesizes into more nonsense.

At times, your style will line up with their fashion.  That too is irrelevant.  Neither praise nor blame impacts beauty but both create a great deal of ugliness.

The truly stylish are not mere fashion protestants.  They are fashion atheists.

And just as a Godless communist’s moral code will sometimes overlap with that of a Christian, so too will the stylish sometimes overlap with the fashionable.  It’s nothing to be concerned with.  It’s bound to happen.  It does not prove that God exists, that the Christian is a communist nor the communist a Christian.

Religion will often take science and selectively use it while hiding its God in the dark spaces of ignorance, so too does fashion take style and selectively use it while destroying the personal aspect.  The state does the same thing to society.  Every law is a manner’s tombstone.  Rising from the grave are zombie-cop-vampires.

They’re probably wearing Evan Biddell.

With that happening, overlap must occur.  It’s unfortunate but also unpreventable that these zombies have a human-like form.  Unpreventable, that is, unless fashion itself, like every other stupid and damaging superfluity is itself destroyed.

Fashion is, at best, a Cole’s Notes to style.  Though it takes some manner of scholar to write the Coles Notes, it certainly doesn’t take one to read it.  The original work is just fine without the Coles Notes.  Their existence starts as pandering to the dull and lazy.  In the end, it only encourages and exploits them.

Just like a state.

Style is as worthy and human a pursuit as poetry, painting or sport but fashion is not.  While style is the expression of thought in the medium of cloth, fashion is the pursuit of money in the medium of stupidity.

Just like a religion.

Style requires bravery; fashion requires cowardice.  God forbid, you make the wrong choice about your shoes. A bunch of shallow dummies might think less of you for it.  Even worse is if you make the right one.  They might think more of you.

Anyone who considers themselves an expert on fashion is nothing but an expert on horseshit.  It might be an interesting academic exercise to deduce what the animal has eaten from its manure, but it doesn’t teach you how to ride one.  And it probably isn’t worth all that time getting filthy in the stable.

That’s all fashion week is and all it can ever be.  It doesn’t matter who organizes it, who’s showing at it or what they’re showing, it will always remain an Augean stable.  The bright don’t require it, the dullards aren’t worth requiring and the media is just jerking off the horse.  God knows what they do with the semen.

I imagine Catherine the Great.

Perhaps fashion is as necessary as defecation.  It very well might be the pile of shit that flowers grow out of.  Yet I doubt it.  Those flowers will grow no matter who shows what on the runway.  They’ll just grow out of something better: Life personality and an individual vision of the human body.  Sounds better to me than what saves money in a distant sweatshop and what brand is currently popular.

Fashion is an encumbrance and a perversion.  It can be added to any theory of clothing but it’s an unnecessary confusing of the issues.  It would be better done away with.  Flushed away like the brutal and stupid Gods of old.  Guillotined like their representatives.  And buried deep so that it never rises again.