I'm so happy to note that this is extracted from her last column. According to Vanessa Friedman, the outgoing fashion editor of the Financial Times, this is why fashion matters:
"If anyone ever challenges me about fashion and its legitimacy, I have a very simple answer – one that I wish I had had in that long-ago job interview, and one I would like to leave with you. Why does fashion matter? The world is not run by naked people.
Beyond that is an even more basic truth about why this subject is worth so much investment of time and attention: everyone has to get dressed in the morning. Everyone, on some level, thinks about clothes; about how they want others to see them, metaphorically as well as literally. It is one of the few universal subjects.""If anyone ever challenges me about fashion and its legitimacy, I have a very simple answer – one that I wish I had had in that long-ago job interview, and one I would like to leave with you. Why does fashion matter? The world is not run by naked people.
I have to say that I'm not a fan of the American Ms Friedman; I disagree with most of the columns she's written for the paper (which I really like and read regularly) over the 11 years she's been there. She's going to join the New York Times, to replace the revered Cathy Horyn, and I shudder to think how strangely boring and irrelevant the fashion coverage will become at that title.
I have never read her but going by her comment of why fashion matters, I am not at all impressed. It's like saying food matters because we all have to eat? For me, when I think I look nice, I feel happy and confident. I think that's where fashion comes in.
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