Good Stuff is Hard to Find
I have never been "popular" and that fact hurts my bank balance. I don't know how one would get popular, line their pockets AND stay true to what I'm wanting to do which in a nutshell is bring good clothes to ordinary women with office jobs.
You know, after figuring out how to dress ME like I want to dress, so if I get a successful business and have scads of cash, that right there seems to be how so many things become a victim of their own success. If I'm now a wealthy business woman, maybe I idiotically become everything I complain about in fashion because now I personally need the clothes for attending Paris Fashion Week or whatever and I no longer need nor want office wear.
HGTV began as an expansion of the This Old House concept. It was initially three hours a day, five days a week of original programming aimed at helping ordinary people live better and the budgets were quite small. As they became more successful, it became the home decor version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless and I largely lost interest.
At that point, it's mostly entertainment, not educational programming to help ordinary people live better. All visual arts are prone to this phenomenon where, as the money rolls in, it stops being anything useful for ordinary people and this is ruining the world.
No, I'm not kidding. The post war birth of the suburbs cured America's housing shortage and everyone was THRILLED to pieces and now we have suburban family homes on steroids as the PRIMARY thing we build and people have entirely forgotten what was wonderful about the suburbs to begin with: They were starter homes for everyone and you could still walk to school and the corner store.
Now we have "fixed" a lot of issues with suburbs in a way that makes them a horrifying dead zone while pricing out far too many people. And no one seems to know how to fix it and most people seem oblivious to the crux of the problem.
I have trouble finding YouTube videos about fashion that I like for the same reason and have not previously said anything about it because it's easy to say "X person in Y channel SUCKS for z reason" which is generally not wise to do. It's harder to describe the problem without cutting your own throat.
One YouTube channel is clearly and obviously a BLATANT Freudian slip style celebration gleefully squeeing about "I married well in spite of being uncouth trash!!!!! Because of X reason!!!!" And naming that reason would practically identify the channel.
I mean, good for her, I GUESS, but this is not a channel with a shred of useful fashion advice, really. If you find it ENTERTAINING and you REALIZE it's just entertainment, no harm done.
But I doubt most people see it that way.
Most likely, many women hang on her every word because they see evidence she has money and spends it on nice clothes and these people will spend their time looking for clues as to "How does a woman become successful on her own merit?" failing to realize this channel is not a source of such information.
It's not socially acceptable for ANYONE -- say moi -- to point out "She's basically a well paid whore under the polite euphemism married well and nothing she says will in any way help you develop a successful career" and, NO, she isn't saying on her channel "MY HUSBAND is LOADED and the fool married ME and that's the ENTIRE explanation as to how I have money for nice things."
My son -- who was apparently raised by some too truthful to be good ball busting bitch -- once told me to my face "Fashion magazines are mostly aimed at women like you who are homemakers and FANTASIZING about having a real career, too clueless to realize women with real careers don't dress that way. It's why they are sold in the grocery store checkout, MOM!"
He's correct. When I actually had a corporate job, I didn't read fashion magazines. Instead, I read the company dress code before shopping.
Clothing ads aimed at women are apparently also largely some variation of that because far too many of them have that 1980s Madonna music video vibe where they do shit like pair women's suits with lingerie tops as if to say "You, too, can be SUCCESSFUL and also SEXY as all hell."
Yeah, no. Dressing like a hooker is typically a violation of dress code and can get you sent home to change or even FIRED. But I guess it sells clothes just like it sold music for Madonna.
Madonna, however, wasn't trying to give advice on how to climb the corporate ladder and wasn't remotely PRETENDING to do so. Some YouTube channels follow the Madonna music video model while pretending to be good advice for working women, not working girls, and rest assured it's so NOT.
Sex sells, the casting couch is alive and well in some industries but, no, this is not actually a means for a woman to establish a real career and accumulate meaningful power.
So if I don't want to pimp my clothing line -- and I don't -- how does one clue people this is attractive, not overly sexualized and something YOU should want?
I have no idea.
Hautelemode is one of the few fashion channels I still watch sometimes and THIS piece from more than six years ago is the first thing I saw by Luke Meagher (pronounced more like Mar):
It's under twenty minutes but has a depth of information and likely took HOURS to put together and only happened that quickly because he's got encyclopedic knowledge in his head on a variety of topics.
He starts by talking about Freddie Mercury's life as a child and what he chose to study in school and he connects that to how Mercury later dressed on stage which is an uncommon thing for people to do.
In other words, Luke Meagher understands the phenomenon this post is about: That the person dreaming it up is the seed out of which creative work grows.
Sadly for ME, Meagher did get popular and currently has 971k subscribers and most of his videos still display his encyclopedic knowledge of women's clothing -- mostly women's clothing and I think he once said his boyfriend knew more about men's clothing than he did -- but have veered into that Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless merely entertainment territory.
He's become an industry insider and that's real. I've seen comments on Reddit about how a lot of so-called influencers are smoke and mirrors and take a bunch of photos on a one day trip somewhere and then post them over a period of MONTHS to fake a lifestyle they don't have.
He actually lives in New York and earns his money this way. I don't know what his income is but a New York apartment ain't cheap and, no, he doesn't live in a walk-in closet sized apartment. I know because a lot of his stuff is shot in his living room with him sitting on his couch in front of his shelves and shelves of fashion books.
He recently did a piece on Gucci that I'm confident required signed papers with written permission from Gucci and has been to Paris Fashion Week repeatedly, seemingly increasingly with insider access. No, he didn't hitchhike to Paris even if theoretically he may have crashed on a friend's couch to cut costs or whatever.
I love his depth of knowledge but the golden nuggets that grab me are relatively rare. The piece about Freddie Mercury talks about Mercury showing up somewhere specifically looking for pleated pieces because pleats allow for movement and Mercury PERFORMED on stage.
Few people think about clothes that way AT ALL, not even people in fashion. This is how my mother thought about clothes and why she made me matching or coordinating shorts for all my dresses.
I imagine he would be qualified to help me figure out how to dress myself because looks aren't really the primary driving force in my metrics while at the same time it's absolutely not a case of looks don't matter.
But why would he want to? He has his own thing and I couldn't afford to hire him as a consultant even if he were open to that kind of thing.
Most men who have chatted me up about my work seem to actually be interested in chatting me up and are apparently using my work as an excuse to talk to me. This has consistently failed to do anything for me career wise.
Also, he's openly gay and scandalously younger than me.
Anyway, he's awesome but his channel still is mostly stuff I'm not that excited by even though I still watch it hoping for the occasional Freddie Mercury or Gucci archive type piece.
And unfortunately everything else on YouTube is basically garbage. Generally speaking, women with actual corporate jobs aren't doing YouTube fashion advice channels and the lives of the people doing such channels are such that they generally aren't qualified to give you any such advice.
And if a woman with a corporate job did do such a channel AND made money that way, then quit her job to do this full time (or got fired from it because of the channel), now she's no longer really qualified to the degree she once was and at risk of losing her focus.
Years ago, some app helped women online clothing influencers make money by selling the clothes they wore and getting a cut. At some point, the app founder had to tell one of them "You need to stop posting photos of you wearing expensive clothes. You're no longer converting. YOU got rich. You're audience didn't."
If I imagined I had an audience, this would be the logical place to say something like "If you KNOW of any YouTube channels of similar QUALITY but more focused on stuff I'm interested in, let me know."
I don't think they exist, frankly.
And also I don't have an audience.
