Complex Numbers

Waisted

Another entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]:

Fashion Waste

When I was a little kid, homonyms confused me.

I suspect I'm not alone in this, though I learned to read earlier than most, so I got them straightened out quickly enough. However, this might explain my unfortunate (for other people) predilection for punning.

One confusion that I remember in particular was when my mother was explaining where a person's waist was. I had already picked up on the idea that the belly was where digestion happened, after which whatever was left over came out as poo -- and like most toddlers, Kid Me found poo hilarious.

Point being, it took me a while before I understood the difference between "waist" and "waste."

I mention this because one of the key measurements for a lot of clothing is the waist size, so this particular prompt brought back the memory of my younger self's confusion. Pants, for example, start out with a waist and end up as waste.

Another thing that fascinated Kid Me -- a few years later -- was science fiction. I particularly enjoyed seeing what authors thought would happen in the future. Nowadays, periodically I'll see an article about "what science fiction authors got right/wrong about the future." But those miss the point. Science fiction doesn't make predictions; it comes up with ideas. The only way it could be a "prediction" would be if the writer buried his or her prediction under a rock or whatever without telling anyone what it was, and then, however many years later, someone dug it up and went, "Oh, that's laughable," or "Wow, that's pretty close to whatever happened."

As it is, that kind of science fiction exists in a kind of Platonic realm of ideas. In order for something -- a chair, a computer, a starship, whatever -- to become part of consensus reality, first someone has to think of the concept, the idea. You don't have to be a science fiction writer to come up with it, but SF writers do it a lot. Once that idea is out there, though, other humans who didn't think of it in the first place can then consider ways that it might become reality. And so you go from having handheld flip-top communicators on Star Trek in the 1960s to having flip phones in the 1990s. Sure, it's possible someone would have come up with those eventually without Star Trek, but the point is that Trek neither invented an actual communicator nor predicted its development, but provided the idea that would eventually become the flip phone. Which led to one of the most amusing meta-jokes ever made on TV, when William Shatner's character in Boston Legal flipped a phone open and it emitted the distinctive communicator chirp.

A less well-known example is that Robert Heinlein conceived of the waterbed before anyone ever built one of the suckers.

What's less common in science fiction is introducing a possible technology for the future, and then having that technology go away, the way flip phones and waterbeds did. Or how we never did go back to the Moon (though I'm aware that plans are in the works).

All of which is to say that one trope in the science fiction of my youth was how wonderful disposable clothing would be. Buy a cheap suit, wear it once, discard it.

Yeah... that sounds like a great idea to those of us living in the future, doesn't it? So. Much. Waist.

And yet, people are doing it.  

It's nothing new for high-society people to wear an outfit once and only once. In some circles, to be seen wearing the same dress more than once is considered vulgar. But they're not necessarily the problem; I mean, those are some rarefied social circumstances. No, the problem is when the rest of us unwashed masses do it, too. And even then, as with so many other things, putting the blame, or even the responsibility, on the individual misses the mark.

Now, me, I get an article of clothing and I wear it until it starts to fall apart. Other people go even further and do things the old-fashioned way, sewing and applying patches and whatnot. But I've only ever followed "fashion" so that I can mock it. And, going back to that long-ago time when I was a kid, when some article of clothing wore out past the point of repair, my parents would attach it to a mop or otherwise use it as a cleaning rag.

Come to think of it, I don't remember what they did with clothes I'd outgrown. I didn't have a little brother to hand them off to. Now, I guess I'll never know.

What to do about the problem of fashion waste, I don't know. People are going to buy cheap shit if it's available. There's not a goddamn thing we can do as individuals that would do more than scratch the surface of the larger issue. Sure, if enough people scratched the surface, it would eventually fall apart, but that's not going to happen because people see "oooh, five dollar pants" and buy the shit out of them instead of investing in a long-lasting $75 pair.

The latter of which would certainly have a sturdier waist.