Dress Yourself for a Better Life

I think it’s fun to be a fashion victim.  I wish there were more fashion victims.  If you look at people at the average fashion show, they’re too restrained for my taste.  Once in a while some performer shows up and sits in the front row like a Kanye West or Nicki Minaj and they look really great and really interesting.  Most people are quite pared down and very concerned about how they might be perceived. 

We have great people like Andre Leon Talley, who’s very flamboyant and thank God for him, because we need more people like that who are “fashion victims” but who have a great sense of fun and flamboyance and dress-up.  It’s a very life-affirming thing.  

If people are depressed they look terrible, they wear boring clothes and they sit around in sweats.  You know, even men in the trenches in World War I, they would say you have to shave every day, you have to comb your hair, you have to put your uniform on straight, like that sort of ability to organize yourself.  It’s a life-affirming thing, it’s an anti-depressant. 

And always remember what Vivienne Westwood said – the inventor of punk, a truly innovative genius – she said people who wear impressive clothes have better lives.  And it’s very true.  

And that doesn’t mean expensive clothes, because you can buy impressive clothes from H&M, you can buy impressive clothes from the Goodwill if you’re creative and have a good eye.  So people who wear impressive clothes have better lives, it’s so true.  Get yourself a foofy outfit. 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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