A few months ago, a male colleague who’d just joined the Vogue India team told me he’d seen The Devil Wears Prada for the first time. “It’s basically The Wolf of Wall Street for women (and the gays),” he said, like he’d stumbled upon an industry secret. He wasn’t wrong. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan, in a way, hoped to be the Miranda Priestly of Wall Street. A few days after that, a friend looked at an expensively dressed woman on the street and remarked dismissively, “She looks like she doesn’t thrift.”
Between those two remarks sits the modern fashion snob. Not the old archetype who makes you feel poor with one withering look. The updated version is more efficient. She doesn’t just care what you’re wearing. She wants you to justify it and cite the reference. Whether you know the backstory of your split-toe hoofed shoes or nylon bag.
With one devastating monologue about a cerulean sweater 20 years ago, Miranda Priestly—the original prototype of the fashion snob—taught us that nothing is random, everything has lineage, and your “personal style” is, at best, a trickle-down effect of a collaborative effort between a designer whose name you can’t pronounce and a merchandiser you’ll never meet. The scene’s enduring impact comes from being correct and condescending at the same time, a response that has aged well online.
In the mid-2000s, the fashion food chain was easy to trace: runway to magazine to retail to real life. A small circle of editors and insiders acted like translators of the fashion gods, deciding what mattered and what didn’t.
Now, anyone can preach that gospel to a willing audience. Fashion shows are live-streamed, clipped and litigated before the final look has even left the runway. While commentary accounts on Instagram like Style Not Com have become fashion week darlings for their on-the-spot reporting, Inside The Mood and Atlas of Shows are our Wikipedias for which designer referenced what. Red carpets and fashion weeks are treated like group projects: we all gather for fashion critic Elias Medini’s La Watchparty to zoom in, identify the reference, decide if it’s “on theme”, and deliver a verdict.
In these circles, it is no longer enough to say you like something: you have to know why and you must know it on the spot. You must know the lore, recognise a neckline from 1997 and simply praise the lord that Isabella Blow once walked the earth.
The new flex is being able to look effortless—or indeed, anti-trend while still signalling that you are in the know. For me, that’s a mono-tone look often layered with a chikankari gilet or a handloom overskirt to establish some craft literacy, a few spritzes of Another 13 by Le Labo and shoes that can survive Mumbai pavements while still implying I am familiar with a particular subculture.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
