Welcome back to The Vibes, a fortnightly culture newsletter created as an excuse to spend more time on the internet. You can read the last Ten Vibes here or look at all posts here.
Apologies for the late essay this week, I wrote something else but then it was bad!
Good morning!
People who say they don’t think about clothes are lying!! Are you telling me that those clothes fell onto your body?? Sure, hardly anyone always wears immaculately put-together outfits, but the clothes that we do wear are a reflection of ourselves in the outside world. Uniform dressers like Steve Jobs are clothes people in the same way that Carrie Bradshaw is a clothes person.
I think it’s when we get to teenagerhood that we begin to care about how our clothes represent who we are. Even if we can’t reproduce the exact outfits we see in the films we watch, we can pick out the vibe.
Clueless, for example, is a fashion movie. Sure it’s got all the other ~plot~ stuff going on but have you seen a bigger movie outfit legacy than Cher’s matching yellow plaid set? No— you haven’t! *Lorde voice*
I think that, apart from the literal clothes, what makes it a fashion movie is that clothes are so important to the character of Cher. There’s the one scene that is sort of like the pivotal scene for Cher when she realises she’s been “totally clueless” and her self-realisation monologue is cut short because she’s seen a Dior outfit she wants to buy.
In Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, clothes don’t really matter until they do. What I mean by this is we see Lady Bird in mostly the same sort of outfits, school uniform, jeans, blazer, polo, etc. etc. but she doesn’t not care about clothes. She knows, like we all do, that fashion choices are a representation of self (but so we all know, outfits are a representation of self— colourful socks are not!) and can be a show of respect— see the care put into picking dresses for Thanksgiving and prom1.
You’re less likely to see Lady Bird costumes at Halloween because the *cough* A24 *cough* audience is a little too wrapped up in the ~authenticity~ of the film to see it as a Fashion Movie but that doesn’t stop it from being one. The same way Cher is pulled out of her spiral when she sees the Dior outfit, Lady Bird finds relief in op-shops with her mother, an argument stopping after finding the perfect dress.
Other teen films can be too on-the-nose about fashion. Let’s look at Will Gluck’s Easy A, where the lead character, Olive, is essentially branded a slut and then, admittedly purposefully, dresses like it in corsets and children’s shorts. But as we know from the beginning of the film these outfits aren’t the real her because the real her likes to wear t-shirts and make jokes! We’re in a late 2000s Taylor Swift song!
And, I mean I hate to include this argument because in so many cases it’s the most annoying thing someone can say but guess which of these three characters was written by a man. You already know because I’ve already told you before but ignore that! This is for effect!
Personally, I think films directed by women tell these fashion stories in a much more interesting way because they understand that it’s not the clothes you wear that get you the guy or that show that beneath the frilly dress you’re a real person. Many men (n*t *ll m*n) seem to use clothes as a replacement for feelings or a symbol of some authentic self. Films like Clueless or Lady Bird or The Edge of Seventeen (a film ruined by its marketing campaign) present teenage girls who are sure of their stylistic choices versus some otherworldly force dictating how they should dress.
Maybe teen film fashion matters because the teenagers watching those films are searching for the piece of culture they can cling to and claim as their own. Those who, 30 years on from the release, decide that they feel they are Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club (personally I am an Anthony Michael Hall stylewise— a timeless look!) don’t care that it’s one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed films made about teenagers. They can watch Clueless and be the million and third person to wear a matching plaid skirt suit to a costume party but it’s still ‘their film’.
My own cultural teen fashion clings were, ashamedly, to n*rd shows back around 2014. I used to take inspiration from Willow from Buffy’s fashion in her high school years (somehow I knew better than to follow her sartorial decline in the later seasons, though I wouldn’t put it past The Old Me not to). I would wear jumpers over dresses with tights and sneakers so that I’d give off this vibe—
(This cardigan/butter-coloured t-shirt is actually not bad! I won’t include a picture of me in this phase because I had v bad skin and hair and nobody—least of all me—wants to relive that even through a picture!!) I am very good at repressing any younger decision making so I cannot be certain but I am sure it had something to do with the idea that I could say that Buffy was one of my shows despite watching it a decade late.
This emulation process continues as we age out of adolescence. We find new films and TV shows with new characters that we aspire to be like. For me (surprise surprise) it’s the films like Before Sunrise, Reality Bites, and Kicking and Screaming— all explorations of post-college life with that kind of careless 90s existence energy. I do find it interesting though that it has become less about the fashion for me now and more about the vibes— to quote Kyle Chayka quoting Robin James, “a “sympathetic resonance” between a person and her environment”.
Maybe it’s not even about whether a teen film is a fashion movie or not— it’s about whether the fashion feels (say it with me!) authentic to the film, the character and thus the audience. Teens can take inspiration from the intense 80s aesthetic in Heathers because it’s a little edgy and that’s how they want to present, not just as someone who wears different clothes but as someone who watches different movies, but someone else might look at Gossip Girl’s Serena wearing any number of metallic/glittery items and say— that’s me!! (couldn’t be me though 🤢)
I think the best teen films are the ones that don’t shy away from the conscious deliberation involved in the character’s fashion choices. It doesn’t have to be every single outfit but we can recognise when a director is using an outfit for a plot device versus just part of the character. The teen girls watching these films who go out of their way to mirror the aesthetic can recognise the films that value fashion and they’re the films that are going to continue to be watched and emulated and watched again.
Next Ten Vibes will be out on the 5th of August!
Until then :)
Bianca
