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A fashionable hope

“You see somebody standing next to you. You come and go like fashion comes across. And when the solitude gets to you, get yourself to Pensacola and wash yourself off.”

So goes one of my favorite lines from the first album by my friends Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer as the band Generationals. With a fantastic new album Alix out now, I spent some time listening to the band’s debut recently, and this lyric rolled around in my head for days on end.

The more I set my mind to fashion for this issue of 225, the more I came to see the artistry and profession of style in a whole new depth.

The misperception of fashion can be that its chief trait is transience, or even worse, disposability.

It comes and goes, as Generationals sing. These things are replaceable, and they will be—soon!—with newer, better things.

Ironically, this flux is one of its values and its powers. The evolution of personal style is constant, a continuous renewal reflecting the cycle of death and rebirth to which we are so drawn, and that often mirrors the way our lives unfold across the seasons and how the human heart really works.

Of course there are things I’d never wear, or styles I even consider ridiculous, but I applaud others for taking braver sartorial sojourns than I. Kudos to you!

No, I’ve come to realize that fashion is unimpeachable because even as it reaches into the past for inspiration, it is always looking forward. And things that look forward are hopeful. And everyone wants to be hopeful.

“When I create a collection, it’s a season or a year in advance, and that’s exciting and motivating to be able to put something out there that is what I’m doing now or in the past,’ but that someone will be wearing well into the future,” Baton Rouge-based clothing designer and Project Runway All-Stars winner Anthony Ryan Auld recently told me. “So as a designer, you have to be hopeful.”

One of my favorite writers is J.R.R. Tolkien. While the Oxford academic’s steadfast style leaned heavily on his classic tweedy, houndstoothed, pipe-smoking milieu, his fantasy epic Lord of the Rings novels are drenched in a resounding positivity, a hope springing even from the deepest dwellings of despair.

This theme is perhaps best personified by beleaguered ring-carrier Frodo’s uplifting companion, Sam.

Even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and grief, this selfless and humble gardener remains assured that his existence is part of a larger narrative—one that will have a beautiful resolution regardless of how his own journey may come to an end.

“Not all those who wander are lost,” Tolkien writes. “The old that is strong does not wither; deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

Life will throw a lot of frost at us. But if we know where our roots are buried, and if they are anchored wisely, then we have, at the very least, a promising glimpse of how the larger story will end.

Which means—to me, at least— fashion isn’t folly, but a beautiful blossoming, an elegant way for our leaves to match those roots. And it’s no fleeting feeling, either. I like to think Tolkien and Auld would agree: It’s a discipline just like hope.