When Did Indie Movies Get So Expensively Costumed?
“At the dawn of independent film, growing out of avant-garde culture, the movies reveled in their outsider status, portraying edgy misfits living on the cusps of society, in films like Stranger Than Paradise. Somewhere along the way, however, America’s self-styled outsider arts, the ‘indie’ movement in all its manifestations across film, music and fashion, not only made their peace with the capitalist hierarchy, but began to celebrate it. Across culture, the ‘indie’ world filed for emancipation from its downtrodden, protest-heavy forbears, and became something cloying, cutesy and simpering. Once upon a time, the sight of a man walking across the screen of an independent film in a $500 silk shirt was immediate shorthand for the presence of evil. One might as well have cued the Darth Vader theme music when such a figure appeared, walking on, in all likelihood, to lay off the film’s hero from his dead end job, provoking his journey of self-discovery. Now the man in the $500 shirt is likely to be the film’s hero, and if anything we are meant to feel sympathy for the emptiness all that glitters brings.”
— This is anti-fashion in nature, and we are pro-fashion… but there is a huge truth here.