What Not To Wear If You're An Invader From Mars

I run into a lot of parents who are worried about the effects media will have on their children. Me, I’m more often worried about the adults. After all, it wasn’t children who led the panic during the 1938 radio performance of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. People believed that invaders from Mars were advancing on American cities and that it was the end of the world for humankind. Joseph Goebbels took that same message about invasion and the end of the known world and turned Teutonic frowns upside down for Hitler and the Nazis when millions listened to radio broadcasts and believed things were as they sounded. McLuhan called radio a hot medium as opposed to TV the cool medium.

At least, all of this is what I watched this weekend on TV, along with a Saturday afternoon catching back-to-back episodes of What Not To Wear. I have gone on the record many times – although no one has ever been listening – saying that fashion is a waste of time, that what’s in today will be gone tomorrow, and yet I find this show occasionally compelling. The premise, if you don’t know the show, is that two fashion mavens, with the help of the ‘victim’s’ friends and colleagues take one person aside for the episode, toss out their old hideous clothes and attempt to remake them in terms of their overall look. Each victim is horrified at the thought of losing the ‘natural’ person they have always been – whether it’s the woman in her mid-thirties wearing clothes that are too small and too tight, or the woman in her mid-thirties wearing clothes that are too baggy and non-descript, or the woman in her mid-thirties wearing T-shirts that are hand-me-ups from her daughter. There’s a lot of untouched psychological territory in this show, don’t ya think?

The point is that the victim has to endure being told they dress like an alien, that their friends and family all agree, that they have been followed and filmed for a week before this and that the home audience gets to see everything. And then they have to endure letting the mavens chuck the old cherished wardrobe away, each tossed piece accompanied by a diatribe about how awful it looks. And then there’s the hair and face makeover. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Just like any other reality show, how much of this is real and how much staged? It doesn’t matter. It’s still a form of storytelling.

And most engrossing stories have one or more morals to them. On this show, for example, we learn that one has to look one’s age. And one has to dress appropriately for work. And one has to look tidy or people will think less of you. That you can become the person your image projects. These are the messages we have drummed into us in one episode after another. Oh, and that people who make style their profession are going to know better how to dress you than you do yourself. So you have to give up a fair bit of autonomy to get along in the world and be accepted. And you have to be willing to be talked down to like a kid who refuses to grow up.

It’s as if the co-hosts take a person who they see as an alien and try to make them look like everyone else and therefore attractive. But the most frightening part of this whole process for me is that they’re right. When I see the before and after shots, I have to agree with many of the decisions the hosts have made. But I don’t know anything about style. I spit on fashion and those who worship weekly at its alteration. Yet I can’t deny the results. It’s as if I’ve already absorbed all of this somehow – me, who feels alienated from this so-called culture I live in. How did this happen? It’s not as if TV is brainwashing me - it’s merely re-illustrating that which I already know.

But the last thing I remember was our ship landing softly on the planet and when we emerged with our giant human-rending machines, a few people waving frilly clothes stood in our way and said that we would catch our deaths if we didn’t dress properly. Then they took us each aside, one by one, and said that it was only a matter of time before we would have to blend in, and wasn’t that better for the invasion in the long run anyway? Blend in, make people forget they had been conquered, and then just be able to sit back after a long week of slave driving and relax.

I know what should be next. There must be a game show on I know all the answers to. Nothing is more satisfying that fitting in by proving my intellectual superiority to those I want to dominate… or impress… or was it imitate? “Why not all of them?” I’ve decided.