Many Days Spent on the worshipful altar of Retail Sales. I spent a couple years working as an editor for a small production company that worked on a variety of videos for a large well known corporate retail clothes and shoe store. The job was great but the store was like a customer service cult. It was very successful, but creepy. This job has been one of my first trips back into that environment and strangely today (day 2) it was a strong reminder that the corrupt system of the hamster wheel of fashion and consumer want / need to be trendy was a major reason that I left that otherwise stable job. The level of devotion of these people to the life of selling clothes and shoes is damn frightening. It is a bedrock basic almost spiritual drive with them.
I understand that people will want to wear clothes. And if they wear clothes they should be pretty or make people attractive but the diabolical devil in the details here is the small crack this opens up to exploit people's desire to be attractive to others and people's insecurities about their appearance. The constant need to update and buy more to make you that much more appealing to others or to just feel good about yourself rather than those attributes coming from the inside makes "fashion" an unending hamster wheel. The quality of the clothes is great and if you buy something from a store it's wonderful to have helpful and nice customer service, but the cult-like fawning over people in order to get them to buy more and to create a lasting contact (convert? proselyte?) to the store's "way of life" seems almost frightening.
Fashion is an empty suit.
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