Fashion Isn't for Popular Girls

If you think fashion is for vapid and shallow snobs, you might be the snob.

I think many people—especially people who aren’t “into fashion”—see fashion as synonymous with the most obnoxious girls they knew in middle school.

Fashion as the special interest of popular girls was represented in the media too. The Plastics of Mean Girls had strict rules about wearing pink on Wednesdays and always had something catty to say about someone else’s outfits. In the iconic ‘90s show, Daria, Daria’s vapid, popular sister Quinn ran the “fashion club” with her popular clique. One thing was clear: girls who like fashion are cunty (and not in the “serving cunt” way.)

This wasn’t just a hallucination of Hollywood. As a middle school girl, it seemed that the only girls who found fashion interesting were the precocious, snobby, and cliquey girls who we all kind of hated, but who were nevertheless “popular.” They decreed that Juicy Couture track suits were “in” and Limited Too panda T-shirts were “out.” A few times, these girls even tried to make me over like we were in some kind of romantic comedy, but threw their hands up when I refused to steal from my mom’s limited makeup arsenal and repeatedly did Austin Powers impressions, declaring that this makeover would “make everyone randy, baby!”

Although they saw me as a hopeless geek, I actually was interested in fashion, but I felt like the only non-popular girl who had this passion. In middle school, I was obsessed with punk styles, specifically fishnet stockings, combat boots, and tartan skirts. I also had a Punkyfish (now a hot vintage brand on Depop) pastel blue fuzzy jacket I got on a trip to London with my family and black velvet overalls that served Y2K TLC realness (does it count if we were literally living in the Y2K era?) To me, every day at school was an excuse to show off my latest lewk. And every single time, I got ridiculed if not out-right bullied. I recall walking down the hallway one day in the aforementioned Punkyfish fuzzy blue jacket, only to have a popular eighth grader say, “Um…what was that thing?” (and by “thing” she meant me, not the jacket.) I had a pair of dusky blue vegan leather bellbottoms that I wore with a matching top and platform boots, and one of the older girls who wore dark lip liner with no lipstick, who used a full bottle of LA Looks hair gel every day, cornered me and said she was “sick of my matching shit and shit.” At sleepaway camp, I wore low-rise frayed denim shorts, an anklet, and a white bell-sleeve crop top, thinking I was channeling boho-meets-Shakira, and earned the nickname “The Wal-Mart Ho.”

Nevertheless, I persisted. My interest in fashion, at least to me, was a form of rebellion—not against my parents, who found my “edgy” aesthetic really adorable, much to my chagrin—but against the boring, single-minded arbiters of fashion: the popular girls. The bullying made me sad, but I welcomed it on some level, because if I could trigger the most uncreative people alive, clearly I was doing something right. Plus, I had lots of positive reinforcement from my parents’ artsy friends, who assured me my style was “totally hip.”

I remain interested in fashion, although my fashion sense is no longer driven by oppositional defiance disorder. But as I settle firmly into adulthood, I’ve noticed a new group of haters emerging. I (as well as other women who just love fashion) am stuck in their crosshairs. These are the “anti-fashion fashion snobs.” These people hate fashion on its merits, and were probably never interested in it, but critique other people’s clothes in a deliberately nasty, non-constructively way, mostly to signal how much they hate fashion in the first place. They see any interest in fashion as admission of vapidity and snobbery, and have a completely unnecessary kneejerk reaction against it. They are grown-ass adults in a perpetual struggle against the Juicy Couture girls from 1998.

Only one problem: those popular girls probably stopped caring about fashion in high school. They were never really into fashion—they were into superiority and excluding others. They were never into creativity, or even beauty. You’re mad at the wrong people!