What do Kafka and fashion have in common? A feeling of always arriving too late. We chase after fashion and can escape it only to a limited degree.
In a way, we are at its mercy. My first memory of having an interest in clothes goes back to the time my mother tried to lure me to kindergarten with fashionable synthetics. At the time, I refused to go. To me, kindergarten was a pointless exercise, a waste of time that disrupted my enjoyment of observing things with its constant calls to join in some activity or other. There was always something to do. So my mother lured me with a see-through shirt with a blue rose pattern, decorative stitching and a wavy hem.
Like a magpie that had just found a diamond, I gave in. I kept my side of the bargain, went to kindergarten and in return got the shirt. From that moment on, I decided myself what outfit I was going to wear to kindergarten.
The shirt is symbolic. It represents my first memory of self-empowerment through my own fashion style. It symbolises my decision about how I would present myself to the world for the rest of my life.
Identity through choice of clothing, a choice that can boost confidence but also break people, and one, above all, no one can avoid. A nightmarish, arbitrary situation in which a person feels completely helpless. Confrontation with recurrent defeats and disappointments. The inability to escape from a system to which one unavoidably succumbs, like the protagonist Josef K. He faces his death sentence without being aware of any guilt.
