I started The File as a means to write about fashion in a way that I wanted to— unplagued by the mandatory “social justice” cliches that now populate fashion media. I am also interested in how aesthetic ideas can interact with conservative and libertarian philosophies. The name is meant to be general, able to describe an aggregation of information and impressions, and a neutrality upon which anything can be projected. It is inspired by two sources: the first is Fashion File, a TV show from the 1990s that featured runway collections and commentary.
The second is The Kelly File, a former news show hosted by journalist Megyn Kelly. I began following her work earlier this spring through listening to her independently produced podcast and reading her excellent memoir “Settle for More.”
In spite of the return of public fashion events, however, which have already been parsed ad infinitum, I have found that I just don’t give a rat’s ass about what is happening in the fashion world. I can’t seem to muster one single anemic fuck. I got into fashion because I care about beauty. Sex. Style. But fashion media has become an arm of the Democrat party and I don’t wish to be its operative. I don’t wish to represent the views of any party at all.
Many creative people alarmed by the increasing strictures of the progressive movement have called for art to reclaim its essential apoliticism, or perhaps its transcendence of the political. In her essay “The Artist and the Censor,” writer Alice Gribbin asserts that “an embrace of the art for art’s sake ideal is the greatest defense for artists against self-censorship. Those who defend art from moralizing or censure— who accept the reality of art’s autonomy— are those who see art for what it is.” Art and aesthetic expression in fact should not be strangled and suffocated by political imperatives. But I have often found that clothing is the creative field most inextricably linked to politics. Fashion is an expression of identity in its highest, most beautiful form— the visual representation of the fully realized Self in all its intricacies of sexuality, ancestry, and approach to living. Fashion is deeply connected to the body and the way one moves through a daily routine. It does not hang solitary in a museum. It is of the world.
The phrase “fashion for fashion’s sake” might conjure images of the great creations of John Galliano or Yohji Yamamoto. Such images represented the height of aesthetic achievement in an age when the main responsibility of the fashion press was to report on clothes, not promote partisan causes. If fashion media cannot return to its former state of relative neutrality, the least it can do is consider ideas from across the ideological spectrum or show curiosity about the visual worlds of those living outside its view. This will most likely not happen at established publications. But I am heartened by a recent retweet by Professor Peter Boghossian: