Travel is hard. However, not moving is not a natural state – evolution has given us limbs and locomotive ability, to hunt, to take flight from a dangerous situation. And as leisure and luxury became possible, to travel.
I was in Calgary for a few days. It was not extensive travel, about 3,400 km distance and 4.5 h of flight. But upon returning to Montreal, I felt a little exhausted and took it easy on the weekend.
Motion is a relative concept. Flying makes me move at a speed of 800 km/s with respest to Earth. But with respect to myself, what is moving is the thought that courses through the neural network.
My brain did not rest as easily as my body. It is always the discovery of irony that makes life organic, to me. The irony about fashion is the disconnect between the popular notion that it is fickle and the reality that it is enduring. All depends on the vantage point of the observer. Seen on the short scale, of months and seasons, indeed fashion changes a lot and other aspects of life appear static. However, to observe on the timescale of centuries, the situation is reversed. The bags of Louis Vuitton have not changed much in 100 years. At the time of Vuitton, radio waves had not been discovered, and Marconi’s transatlantic experiment would have to wait for another decade or so. Someone from Vuitton’s era would find himself in the world of aliens today, as he is surrounded by cell phones, iPods, laptops, GPSs, and all the other gadgets that define our current era. Therefore, facts are that, if the timescale is stretched from months to years, it is technology that is more wont to change, not fashion. This is where the popular myth is wrong.
To be sure, the scientific foundation of technology changes slowly, but the fact remains that technology itself is extremely fickle. Serious debate can be had on whether the information technology has made our life better – whether someone not having the benefit of email and fax 40 years ago was really less productive than his counterpart today. Empirical facts seem to say the contrary, at least in the domain I am familiar with. Major discoveries and breakthroughs in physics almost all happened before there was email or fax. I am not saying that IT has made people dumb, but it tends to be self-perpetuating, but not necessarily for the betterment of life. One innovation in technology begets another, but all for its own sake, and the sake of getting people to buy the newest toys to sustain a questionable industry. While this sentiment cannot be proven, as we only have one history, and it has already played out, I do fancy that, had the history unfoleded differently, had silicon’s electric properties not been discovered, the world would not be a bad place at all.
What has the above to do with fashion? Technology itself is fashion, and is much less stable than what we traditionally understand as fashion. Seen on the timescale of generations, technology is volatile and unstable, whereas traditional fashion is steady, despite the seasonal fluctuations. We often have retro fashion trends where people express their nostalgia about the 50’s and 70’s. Will we have a tech nostalgia about the 50’s, about the black and white TV which dominated the period. Or the electric typewriter of the 70’s? Obviously not. But I argue that in such forgetfulness, humanity is losing part of its soul.
So the point is: in comparing fashion and technology (which is usually lauded as a mark of progress), contrary to popular belief, the former is more enduring and useful, while the latter is fickle and – dare I say – wasteful.
