love affair with stray cats

Question

What does it mean by love affair with stray cats? Do stray cats symbolise something?

Fashion’s on going love affair with stray cats — impossibly cool and so-ugly-they-are-beautiful weirdos — has been going on for quite some time.

Thank you

Deadrat · Accepted Answer

Don't take this too seriously. First of all, this is from the "Business of Fashion" website, a part of a world where the Mideast may be going up in flames, and the whole world may drown in the face of global climate change, but the most important consideration is what rich people will buy to wear so slightly-less rich people can copy them.

Secondly, the author is Angelo Flaccavento, who thinks it's the height of intellectual achievement to quote Jean Luc Godard in an interview. I looked him up so you don't have to. Enough said.

Flaccavento's point is that high fashion has been making women look ugly for a long time. He may be playing on the fact that the models' runway is called a catwalk. You and I might think that designers would want models wearing their clothes to remind everyone of beautifully-groomed purebred cats. Flaccavento points out that we'd be wrong. The models are made to look like scarred, mangy, ugly strays.

Why anyone pays attention to these people is beyond me. Why women put up with them is too.

Aoymee2 · Answer

Hi deadrat,

Thank you for replying. It really cleared up the confusion.
Can I just ask you one more question about the article?
When he describes fashion as an earthquake why does he mean by that? is it a negative connotation? like something splitting a part?

Fashion is widening the perimeters of the acceptable, which is always good and if aesthetic democracy infiltrates a realm so secluded and exclusive, well, that’s an earthquake.

Deadrat · Answer

Earthquake here is a metaphor for upheaval, an event that overthrows the lofty (the secluded and exclusive world of fashion) and brings them to the level of the common (democracy). The comparison is inapt, of course, because an earthquake destroys everything, the mighty and the humble.

Let me paraphrase the sentence: "When fashion changes to encompass those previously thought too ugly to include, that's an upheaval."

Now. let me describe the so-called Arab spring in Egypt: "When the structure of power changes to accommodate the poor and the disenfranchised, that's a political upheaval."

In Egypt, the discussion turns to important things like the struggle for human rights, and people die during the turmoil that involves. Angelo Flaccavento talks about ugly clothes on models who aren't beautiful enough, and he uses the same language. This is known as travesty.

Aoymee2 · Answer

Thank you a lot!

love affair with stray cats

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