GTWJ ESSAY • AUGUST 29, 2026

When Did Loving Fashion
Become a Competition?

On fashion superiority, intellectual gatekeeping, and why knowing more should make fashion bigger — not smaller.

Fashion can be deeper than clothes without becoming a test of who is allowed to love it properly.

I was scrolling through Instagram recently when I came across a Reel that said, and I quote: “If you claim to like fashion, you must like art, history, film, culture, music, design. Otherwise, you just like buying clothes.” My first reaction was that I understood exactly what the person meant. Fashion absolutely does exist beyond shopping. It is not simply walking into Chanel, buying a pair of loafers and calling that an understanding of fashion. Fashion is an industry, a visual language, a cultural archive, a form of design, a system of craft, commerce, image-making, history and identity. It is shaped by politics, music, film, architecture, technology, class, gender, subculture and every other part of the world that clothing inevitably touches. I agree with all of that. And yet the final sentence bothered me, because somewhere inside a perfectly reasonable point about the depth of fashion was another message entirely: if you do not engage with fashion at the same intellectual depth that I do, then perhaps you do not really deserve to say you love it.

Fashion is more than buying clothes.
But does that mean everyone who loves clothes
has to love fashion in exactly the same way?

I think this is where the conversation needs more nuance, because there is a real difference between liking clothes and studying fashion as a broader cultural discipline. Someone who follows runway collections, understands the history of fashion houses, studies designers, notices shifts in proportion, knows how an atelier works, recognizes archival references and understands the relationship between fashion and film, art or music has a different relationship with fashion from someone who simply loves a beautiful pair of shoes. Pretending those are identical experiences would be dishonest. But acknowledging that difference does not require us to turn it into a hierarchy of human worth, taste or legitimacy. We can say that one relationship is deeper in a particular area without saying that the person who has chosen that relationship is somehow superior.

The Important Distinction

Different levels of knowledge
do not have to become
different levels of worth.

I also think fashion has a complicated relationship with seriousness. For a very long time, fashion has had to defend itself against the idea that it is frivolous, shallow or unworthy of serious thought. Because clothing is connected to appearance, consumption and historically to interests associated with women, people have often felt the need to prove that fashion is more intellectually important than it looks. And perhaps sometimes we overcorrect. We move from saying, “Fashion can be intellectual,” to saying, “The intellectual way of engaging with fashion is the superior way of engaging with it.” Those are not the same statement. One expands fashion. The other narrows who is allowed to belong inside it.

Fashion can be serious
without needing to be serious all the time.

There is something strange about the embarrassment we sometimes seem to feel around admitting that fashion can also be simple pleasure. You can spend one afternoon reading about the history of a house, understanding a designer's references, watching an old runway show and learning how a particular silhouette developed. And the next afternoon you can walk past a shop window and think, I want those shoes because they are beautiful. The second experience does not erase the first. You are not required to turn every attraction to clothing into an essay on cultural history before you are allowed to enjoy it.

Knowledge Should Open the Door

Learning more should make us more curious — not more exclusionary.

The more you learn about fashion, ideally, the more exciting it becomes to share that knowledge. If you know why a collection matters, you can explain it. If you recognize an archival reference, you can show someone else where it came from. If you know the history behind a house, you can make the clothes more interesting for somebody encountering them for the first time. Knowledge can be generous. It can be an invitation. But knowledge can also become social currency, something used less to understand fashion and more to prove that we understand it better than somebody else.

“Let me show you why this is interesting”
is very different from
“If you do not already know why, you do not belong here.”

People enter fashion through completely different doors. Someone may begin through cinema, noticing costumes and wanting to understand the relationship between clothing and character. Someone else may discover Alexander McQueen and suddenly want to know everything about runway history. Someone may inherit a coat from a grandmother and become fascinated by vintage clothing. Someone may love textiles, sewing, tailoring or pattern cutting. Someone may begin because they saw a Chanel bag in a shop window and thought it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. All of those entry points can lead somewhere deeper. And sometimes they do not. Sometimes somebody simply continues loving the bag. I do not think that makes their pleasure illegitimate.

An interest does not have to become
an academic pursuit
in order to be legitimate.

I also do not completely agree with the idea that someone must love every adjacent discipline in order to genuinely love fashion. Art, history, film, music, architecture and design intersect with fashion constantly, and knowing them can enrich your understanding enormously. But they are not an entrance exam. Someone could be obsessed with garment construction, tailoring, textiles and pattern cutting while having very little interest in film. Someone could love fashion history but not care very much about contemporary music. Someone could understand the technical construction of a jacket better than most people in the room and know almost nothing about the cinematic reference behind the show's soundtrack. Are we really going to tell that person they do not love fashion?

Different Relationships With Fashion

There is more than one way in.

Personally, I love the deeper side of fashion. I want to understand why collections look the way they do. I want to know the history of houses, the work of designers, the cultural context, the ateliers, the films, the references, the archives and everything surrounding the clothes. I genuinely enjoy learning about fashion beyond shopping. That is part of why GTWJ exists in the first place. But my choosing to engage with fashion at that depth does not require somebody else to do the same. It does not make me superior to the woman who really loves handbags, follows the collections casually and mainly enjoys fashion through the things she chooses to wear.

I can love fashion as history, culture and design
without needing someone else
to love it the same way I do.

Fashion superiority becomes especially obvious when knowledge stops being used to understand clothing and starts being used to rank people. Who knows the original designer? Who can identify the season? Who knows the archive reference? Who knows that the bag existed before the current creative director? Who can pronounce the name correctly? Those things can all be interesting. They can all matter. But knowledge is not made more valuable because somebody else lacks it. And perhaps if the first instinct after learning something is to use that information to embarrass someone who does not know it, then the knowledge is no longer serving fashion very well.

A Question Worth Asking

Do I want to know more about fashion
because I love fashion —
or because I like knowing more than other people?

There is also a funny contradiction in dismissing somebody by saying they “just like buying clothes,” because clothing itself is not somehow separate from fashion. The commercial product matters. The customer matters. The person who walks into a shop and wants a beautiful coat is part of the fashion system too. Fashion houses are not producing collections exclusively to be discussed in essays and museums. They sell clothes, bags, shoes, jewelry, perfume and objects people genuinely want to own. Appreciating fashion as culture and appreciating fashion as product can coexist. Pretending the second is beneath the first creates a version of fashion that seems almost embarrassed by its own material existence.

This is not an argument against knowing more.

Quite the opposite. Learn everything you want. Study the designers. Read the books. Watch the documentaries. Look at old collections. Learn how garments are constructed. Understand why certain houses matter. Know the references. Follow creative-director changes. Learn the vocabulary. The deeper you go, the more fashion can reveal. But knowledge becomes much more interesting when it creates curiosity rather than superiority.

Fashion education should give people
more ways into fashion —
not become another way to keep them out.

Maybe the distinction we should make is not between people who “really love fashion” and people who do not. Maybe there are simply different relationships with fashion. Some people study it. Some people collect it. Some people make it. Some people follow every runway and know every creative-director appointment. Some people could not tell you who designed a collection but know exactly what they want to wear. Some people love fashion history. Some love the craft. Some love the psychology of getting dressed. Some really do just love beautiful shoes. Fashion is large enough to hold all of them. And perhaps the more we understand how enormous fashion actually is, the less interested we should become in shrinking it down to one correct way of participating.

Final Thought

Knowing more about fashion
should deepen our relationship with it.

It shouldn't become evidence
that we deserve it more than somebody else.

GTWJ • FASHION, IDENTITY & CULTURE