>Mike:
>
>
>>If you think there is no difference between Catholic
>>school uniformity and corporate standards of fashion,
>>drive by a Catholic school when all the kids are
>>standing around in their uniforms waiting for the bus.
>>It's the most soul-crushing sight you'll see.
>>
>>
>There is a big difference! The Catholic school uniformity comes
>explicitly and unabashedly from above and as a result often instills the
>life-long disgust for authority in right-minded individuals. The
>corporate standards of fashion, by contrast, are imposed from above just
>as the Catholic school uniformity is - but they are cleverly disguised
>as "individual choice." As a result, people slavishly follow them
>without even knowing that they are being remotely controlled. Worse
>yet, they defend the corporate yoke as the epitome of "individual
>freedom," as it is often the case in the US.
>
This is one of the most truly exasperating aspects about the Left in the
U.S. It's this insistence that we live under a dictatorship so
extensive, so all-controlling and pervasive that _nothing_ can truly be
said to be personal, private, or individual.
Have you ever really _looked_ in a clothing store? There is a tremendous degree of variety available, especially for women. You can obtain clothing is damn near any color imaginable, and if you can't find the _right_ color, you can buy dyes and do it yourself. Women can buy blouses, camsoles, pants, jeans, accessories out the wazoo, and a seemingly infinite variety of shoes (okay, you can't buy them with razor blades on the inside, but there ya go). Men don't have the same variety, but given the styles of suits, T-shirts, jeans, hats, scarves, shoes'n'boots'n'sneakers, it ain't much less. There are dozens of magazines available which show people what their local stores may or may not carry, and there's also the mail-order trade. And for those adventurous souls who look for _really_ different styles, there are thrift stores, antique stores, vintage clothing stores, even costume stores, and more than enough sewing machines, fabric stores, pattern books and magazines for people to _make their own_ if they want to.
Spare me the duckspeak about how these are only choices given us by our corporate masters. First of all, it is a _much_ wider choice offered by nearly any other society. Do you really think that everyone who lived in, say, 18th century France could dude himself up like the Sun King? Or take a look at the nominally non-capitalist societies of recent history: do you regard the boxy, ill-fitting business suits of the Comintern as expressions of freedom? Frankly, as "yokes" go, the corporate one is much more comfortable.
And let's look at this business of "corporate standards of fashion" which are "imposed from above just as the Catholic school uniformity is," but it's "cleverly disguised" so that people are "remotely controlled." Gee, really? Care to explain why rap and hip-hop fashions became such a rage? Ever consider that the economies of style are just as subject to popular desire as they are to other concerns? Do you really think that corporations work up clothing designs with the sole aim to "remotely control" people, without even trying to find out if people actually _like_ the designs to begin with?
I wonder if there isn't a weird paradox at work in this sort of sentiment. The massive variety of clothing styles available to nearly everyone-- a variety that's pretty much unparalleled in human history, by the way-- is derided as just another corporate yoke, just another variety of Mao jacket or prison oranges imposed by malevolent corporate masters to enforce conformity. This means that the mass of citizens can be ridiculed as mindless, conformist sheep, unaware of what's _really_ going on. But, if they are so blind as to unquestioningly wear what's given to them, then why expect these mindless cattle to develop their own styles at all? Doesn't this indicate that some kind of snobbery is at work behind this "corporate yoke" theorizing?