TRASHION
My young daughter came into my bedroom the other day, held up a shirt with glitter on it, and proudly announced she was “into trashion now.”
She meant fashion, of course.
But the mistake landed like a small meteor in my skull.
Children do this sometimes.
They open their mouths and accidentally name the culture more accurately than a professor with six hundred pages of footnotes.
Trashion is not a mistake.
Trashion is the whole industry.
And not only the industry.
If you look closely, trashion is our whole modern culture.
Fashion, as adults pretend to understand it, is supposed to be creativity and expression.
In reality it is rapid-cycle reinvention built on engineered dissatisfaction.
Every season exists not because anything improved, but because if trends ever stopped moving, the whole machine would collapse like a fainting goat.
We pretend designers are guided by inspiration.
The real muse is predicting the look that will sell itself.
Fashion changes so you keep buying things you do not need, worn for reasons you cannot explain.
The point is not beauty.
The point is velocity.
If anything deserves the name trashion, it is the entire system.
But my daughter had accidentally named something deeper.
She had not only baptized the industry.
She had named the psychology behind it.
Her little mispronunciation forced me to admit something I had ignored for years:
Most people do not wear fashion.
They wear identities on lease.
Trashion is not just clothing.
It is the endless makeover of the self.
You change your outfit, your haircut, your online bio, your so-called aesthetic.
Not because you evolved, but because you were updated.
Not because you discovered something true, but because everyone else did last Thursday.
And that is when the whole thing becomes funny.
We call it self-expression, but it is really self-trimming.
It is mowing the lawn of your identity because the neighbors might look.
Someone will say, “Fashion is art.”
Fine.
And sometimes trash is too, at least when a gallery decides it is.
But the average fast-fashion rack at H&M is not art.
It is a highly optimized machine for converting human insecurity into profit.
Another person will say, “Fashion lets people express themselves.”
Yes, for four weeks, until the expression expires and needs replacing.
Ask yourself a simple question.
Has any of this churn actually helped you?
Did anyone’s life improve because the shape of jeans tilted five degrees?
Did any soul expand because the season’s color was sage instead of olive?
Fashion keeps changing for one reason.
If it ever stood still, you might realize you already have enough.
And nothing terrifies an industry more than the moment a person stops wanting.
That is why my daughter’s mistake felt profound.
She said the quiet part out loud.
She revealed the dumping ground behind the cathedral.
Trashion.
She invented the perfect word for a culture that throws away its clothes, its trends, and often its people, all to keep the schedule moving.
And that is when something simple hit me.
Children do not do fashion.
They do not manage identity.
They do not chase trends.
They do not care about the moving target.
They just like things.
They tell the truth by accident.
They wear what they want. Witch hat, hippie skirt, football shirt.
Maybe that is the real opposite of trashion.
Not sustainable fashion.
Not haute couture.
Just people dressing like themselves without asking New York, Paris or Milan for permission.
If the industry ever embraced that, it would collapse by the end of the season.
But out of the ruins we might finally build something real and beautiful.