The present epoch is characterised by its intellectual shallowness and spiritual emptiness. Appearance is all. The German writer Keller wrote a celebrated novel called Clothes Make People (Kleider machen Leute). This is even more true of the present epoch than when it was written. The world of fashion is dominated by the so-called designer clothes industry. This is a conspiracy of buyers, designers, journalists and others to deceive and cheat a gullible public.
In practice a handful of giant monopolies decide what we wear, just as they decide how we live and what we think. They have powerful means of manipulating public opinion and taste. Although the clothes that are displayed on the catwalk fashion shows are ugly, absurd and grotesque, and of no practical value, they sell for enormous sums. Nobody actually wears these clothes. They are really a statement about present day society, where some people have no roof over their head, and others have money to throw away. These clothes are not actually meant to be worn. They are a decadent expression of the right to extravagance, a manifesto of parasitism.
The same decadence can be observed in every period of social decline. We see the same symptoms in the Roman Empire, Restoration England in the 17th century and France in the 18th century, on the eve of the Revolution that swept away all decadence with a broom of steel. It is a manifestation of cultural and spiritual poverty. What is important is not what people are but what they wear – or, more correctly, what they are able to buy. What is important is form, not content, illusion, not reality, external appearance, not inner quality. This is a self-evident manifestation of alienation in its most primitive form – that of fetishism.
In the first decade of the 21st century, young people kill others to possess their designer shoes. This fetishism is powerful enough to overcome all natural human feelings and replace them with greed and avarice. This inversion of human values is a graphic manifestation of spiritual poverty, where the worship of things replaces genuine relations between people.
