Is style anti-fashion?

Luck and Milk's post on the high cost of fashion got The Bargain Queen thinking today:

As I admire my closet full of clothes, shoes, and accessories, all ridiculously priced for a nation who's median household income is $18,000 short of the Jimmy Choo Crocodile skin handbag asking price featured on the glossy pages of Vogue, I cringe shamefully. "Are these frivilous things worth my hard earned paycheck?"

It's so ridiculous how a fabulous life requires priding onself in keeping up with The Joneses, when in the corporate side of the blindingly superficial bourjois me-want-this and me-want-that limelight, The Joneses are just slick ads paid for by money hungry, balding executives whose paychecks are courtesy of our cravings.

Fashion is a label, a brand. Style is not a look but an essence of its own, the answer to how a $563 outfit from Bergdorfs looks drab on one, but somehow a similar $25 top at Macy's looks sensational on another.

This pretty neatly sums up something The Bargain Queen has given a lot of thought to: the difference between fashion and style.

As Luck and Milk says, fashion is something we're sold. It exists to drive the textile manufacturing industry, so we replace clothes that are still perfectly functional simply because they're 'out of style'. But this isn't about to turn into a socialist rant about fashion being evil, so we should all wear compulsory uniforms instead. (How hideous!)

Viewed the right way, fashion serves up a new set of possibilities each season and is a huge amount of fun. There's trying on new stuff, making faces at the things that look hideous, being thrilled when something looks amazing and making fun of the truly hideous things that exceptionally talented designers come up with, among other fashion-related thrills. But there's also that feeling of sinking inadequacy that comes from drooling over beautiful things you can't have and fantasising a life where you could.

To The Bargain Queen, style is the ability to navigate through the choices fashion offers and consistently choose things that suit you, your lifestyle, your budget and your tastes. Style is the thing that separates the fabulous from the fashion victim. The Bargain Queen could talk forever on this topic but she has to go have dinner with her in-laws, but stay tuned for a whole lot more!

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