We live in a world of anger.
We’re all humans and inherently, we all have our flaws. We can see throughout history what we can accomplish when we make decisions with grace in our hearts (Women’s suffrage, 1920, and the Civil Rights Act, 1964) and we have also witnessed the inhumane destruction mankind has committed against one another when we make important decisions with anger and fear (the Holocaust and the Slave Trade).
These were very large scale events that caught the attention of everyone of that time and the facts will be forever remembered and taught for generations to come. There are many problems today that are mainly made up of suppressed resentment and abuse of power but because they aren’t so public in terms of larger events, they don’t get noticed until something big goes horribly wrong. The disdain and anger in people is still present, just not voiced.
We fear what we don’t know and we’re scared to leave the comfort of what we have, regardless of how toxic that situation is. I know by now most of you have read numerous stories and posts about self-love (if you haven’t already, check out the blog, there are some great reads about this topic!), and how the fashion industry should promote diversity and you might be tired of reading the same topic getting debated again and again. I assure you, we do this because it’s something we are passionate about and we want to spread our concerns out to those who need to hear it.
The system we have right now is causing society to stumble so far down and it’s causing people to direct their hatred towards themselves. The industry makes money when people hate themselves enough to believe that buying a certain product will make them feel better, if not beautiful. But when you’re in that hole, and those you share your life with try to pull you out, how can you truly believe that they love you when you can no longer count on even yourself? The minds of our children are poisoned from the beginning so that they may never remember a time where they genuinely celebrated their body.
It’s an unforgiving cycle within the industry that makes it really difficult for brands to promote diversity and still hit all their sales goals because their old retailers may not like the change and filter to buy from another company. The network of company-to-brand relations are built in a way so that the movement towards change is narrow and hard to persist, it is designed so that they are most likely to fail due to loss in sales and higher production costs, among others. I believe that over time, in this age where people are able to protest to achieve what they believe in, this harmful reality will no longer have to be any sort of reality but a lesson learned from history that gets passed down through generations so that we may not fall back into this cycle of death once again. I hope that one day people can finally see the beauty of diversity and realize that bodies shouldn’t have to look any specific way in order to be validated as beautiful.
An important, relatively easy, and valued step we can take now is to start buying from companies that promote diversity. You can easily determine, when looking at company advertisements, which ones do and do not promote diversity. This way we can keep the businesses flourishing and create a fashion business model that others will want to eventually follow. We can work together to accomplish great things.
I would also like to say that for the people oppressed in these dark times where a man who promotes outright racism controls a world power, you are not alone and I stand with you.
