Let’s play pretend for a moment; what if Fashion was a super-power?

Not just an ultra-fashionable person like that one unattainably cool chick that has the low-key power of looking stunning every time you see her, not that, but like an actual superpower, you know, Marvel and D.C. and all that bit-by-radioactive-spider goodness…

What would that be like?

Well, let’s look at what super powering the other senses does to get a better idea;

Audio, or the sense of hearing, is it’s own little world and how involved one seems to in this world seems determined by both nature and nurture, as in, you might just care more about music if you had musical parents or were born with what they call “perfect pitch”, which is something of a mild superpower in and of itself…

But chances are good that even if your last name isn’t Bon Jovi or Swift, you still enjoy music, and probably just kinda hearing things too, right?

Audio is a good example because like Fashion, we use it to express ourselves, from the music we choose to the way we sound when we speak, so following that, it’s right to assume that person with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of audio would gain more revelations about something or someone from hearing things from them, compared to the average person.

Have you ever seen those movies where some forensic team identifies not just who someone is from an audio recording of them talking, but also what mood they’re in, their height, weight, age, how long they’ve been awake and just how much they salted their morning eggs?

Yeah, those aren’t fantasy or fiction (except for the salted eggs bit); a trained audiologist with a firm understanding of linguistics and neuro/pyschiatry can break apart a sentence like an egg and make an informational-omelette with it that would blow your mind…

So what can we learn from this?

Well, apart from my breakfast obsession, there is a lot of data in audio, especially so when coming from a speaking person, and I for one am excited what our future Artificial Intelligence can do with that;

imagine coming home from a stressful day of work and having your houseAI analyze your vocal patterns and figure out not only that you’re stressed, but through having run millions of simulations, it also knows exactly what it needs to do and say to stimulate you out of your funk, with surgical precision.

Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Well, now let’s apply that thinking to Fashion;

Like audio, it’s expressive and communicative, used globally and timelessly, and has its own not-so-little world that many participate in to various degrees.

Well, my first thought is of that infamous scene from The Devil Wears Prada wherein Streep’s character dresses down (pun intended) the main character so freakin’ ingeniously and adeptly that the entire movie feels it, as if she had shaken reality itself by pulling a metaphorical carpet from under the protagonist’s feet…

And she did it with Fashion mastery, showing off not only her knowledge of the secret and powerful strings that pull that world, but also her own power and history of pulling those very strings. If you haven’t seen it, do so ASAP.

I’m not saying that it’s the greatest movie of all time or anything, but that is a candidate for one of the best scenes of all time…

Fashion superpowers would let you have ultimate Fashion knowledge and the skills to apply it;

Depending on who reveals what detail with what accessory, you would be able to Sherlock Homes your way into countless things you shouldn’t know, like affairs and secret divorces, secret hopes and hopeless dreams, and apart from making fascinating gossip, this information works synergistically with the next part of your powers; ultra Style.

Not only would you know exactly what clothing means, you would know how to apply it perfectly too.

Imagine ascertaining what colour schemes would prime and affect someone on a subconscious level in order to manipulate them into being friendly or angry or unsure or anything in between that you need them to be…

You don’t have to search far to find out about how visuals affect the brain on numerous levels, and it gets scary when you think of the immense power someone could have if they understood the inner workings of that system to a “pitch perfect” level…

So here's hoping that if there’s ever a “SuperFashionista”, they’ll use their powers for good and not evil… and how, pray tell, might we mere mortals attain these powers? - you might find yourself asking...

Well, I can’t tell you exactly how Batman went from a six pack to a superhuman sixpack, but I can tell you he went to a gym and trained; the Fashion version of that is knowledge.

Fashion knowledge is something the aspiring SuperFashionista should be hoovering up at every opportunity, taking every chance to pull back the metaphorical curtain by collecting and assessing every meta and micro aspect and piecing it all together as they go; in short, they’d start with this.