"In the morning I grab the clothes that smell cleanest out of the pile of 'clean' clothes on my floor to wear that day…"

"Would you say this is an acceptable way to approach fashion?"

Question asked in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" of fashion critic Robin Givhan. I consider it a rhetorical question, but she did answer it. No, of course, is the obviously right answer, but it's also obviously wrong, since to answer it is to misinterpret it. And yet, if you submit to "Ask Me Anything," aren't you implicitly offering to answer everything? A clever way out would be to say: I said you can ask me anything, but I don't believe you are asking me anything.

"The rhetorical question is... any question asked for a purpose other than to obtain the information the question asks."

Here's a nonrhetorical question: For what purpose did the above-quoted man ask his question?

I was going to send you to this piece about a fashion designer "pushing" women "into a trap" or "a prehistoric exoskeleton."

It's Robin Givhan expatiating about Thom Browne. She seems to be going overboard.  But then I clicked through to the first picture in the slide show and I'm frozen in horror. Please look at that picture first.

Okay, now, I've settled down, and I think that picture is funny. I'm amused. I can go on with the slideshow. It's quite amazing!

I like this one too. Not as something that could be worn in a real person's life, but as theater. And this.

And — isn't it just perfect? — when the artist emerges, he's a man in shorts!

Back to Givhan. Would you like the job of describing this stuff in a world that has photography? Givhan develops a theme about the literary tradition of portraying women as crazy. It's an old feminist theme. "The Madwoman in the Attic." Were you ever trapped into reading that? Anyway, what does that have to do with Thom Browne?

Browne is not a feminist scholar nor an academic of any sort, but his fashion told a lucid and thoughtful story about constraints, social expectations, and cultural prejudices....

... Browne’s intricate, high-minded gestures served as an invigorating reminder that fashion has the potential to tell stories and raise fundamental questions about how we live our lives. 

After all that, Givhan comes to rest on the same idea anyone flipping through the slide show:

One only wished that Browne had allowed his audience to see more clearly, if only for a moment, something fundamental to a fashion show: What he proposes women wear.

I thought the fashion cognoscenti were aloof from the proletarian question: Who can wear that? When the artist goes this far, it's gauche to ask.

"Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial.'"

Wrote Virginia Woolf — "it is the masculine values that prevail."

An old quote, echoed here by fashion writer Robin Givhan:

I always compare fashion to sports, and when you think about some of the issues that have come up in sports, particularly in baseball, with steroid use and all of that, you wonder, “Why is Congress having hearings and calling Barry Bonds? What does that have to do with anything?” And you realize it’s because we as a culture, or at least some people in our culture, take sports really seriously, and they believe that it represents something about who we are, about our belief in fair play, and they recognize that that has an impact on younger people. I don’t think that fashion will really change until that same sort of recognition happens. 

I agree with the proposition that sports and fashion are exactly equally important and that it's helpful to keep that in mind even as you personally feel more drawn to one than the other. I hate to think that the essence of being taken seriously is that Congress holds hearings, but I don't think Givhan is saying she wants congressional hearings into the problems of the fashion industry. The baseball hearings are evidence that sports are taken seriously, too seriously maybe.

Keep the equation of sports and fashion in mind and use it to test whether we're taking something more seriously or less seriously than we should. This is similar to the way we analyze reactions to Obama by asking what if Bush had done the same thing.

ADDED: Sports are as related to maleness as fashion is related to femaleness, and the 2 things are equally important. You can get by with 0% of your interest in sports as you do your sports/fashion allocation, but you can't get by with 0% of your interest in fashion, since you must wear clothes. Set your percents however you want other than that.

The total amount of time that is your 100% varies from person to person. I'll bet my 100% fashion/sports time is less than yours!