Fuck You: A Love Letter to Fashion & Consumption

An economy crippled by mass consumption and fracking the earth’s resources for instant approval from a faceless icon. Their shadowy figure blotted out by warped filters that carve the face into a different shape. The digital surgical knife. A piling hoard of trends filling the grave of Hope, Pandora’s final frontier. Flooding the market with threads connecting the rich to the richer and pipelining the poor to prison.

A mass burial of yesterday’s aesthetic. Luxurious discounted garments sponsored by the new age sweatshop, prisons instead of plantations. Shakey malnourished hands sew lace onto silk as they survive another day on less than pennies to the American dollar. Incarceration and servitude wrapped in thin blue bondage.

A swipe of a credit card along my wrists cuts into my finances, purchasing self-sabotage under the guise of momentary happiness. While the hurt from my veins complements my new blood diamond bracelet, the planet is shredded by billionaire slave traders. An environmental allegory and horror story in the making. And yet beautiful yards of printed fabric fill my bursting closet and chests of drawers. Fabric drowned in a drought at the peak of Fascism, the Republican-American Dream. Each new trinket whittled by a child's cracked hands, sits atop my shelf, gathering dust and draining my wallet. Gilded figurines on my mantle take a dollar from my purse like a thief I adore. Each penny lost under the thrifted couch, eaten up by the constant stream of targeted ads algorithmically selected by the spyware built into my mass-produced tracking device.

And yet I spend, consume, and devour every marked-up sale, trend, and life hack. Because otherwise, how will I know who I am?

This shipment of addiction is from the latest Buzzfeed list sponsored by our friends at Amazon, the destroyer of the ever-shrinking rainforest. Killer of unions, eliminator of bathroom breaks. Ruler of Capitalism, ally to The Mouse. Yet cotton blends, micro modals, and polyesters become holey moth balls, subscriptions to the Church of Fashion. Their cloth offerings lay across my sickly body, candle-lit marble, and dead-stare eyes.

A picture-perfect display of imagined wealth.

MasterCard poverty and Visa loan sharks

mailed to your doorstep, wasting precious trees

and keeping the postal service afloat.

Charge the card, change the Earth.

For better or for worse.