Until this summer, I wanted to be someone who worked in fashion. I also must have wanted to be someone who sat around reading poetry, seeing as I am now going into my third year as an English student.

My room is crammed with Vogues and literary works, but as I’m sure readers of this article will testify, something being in print doesn’t mean that it is of focal significance. Ironically I think academia taught me this. An American don impishly sized up the dangers of allowing one discourse to envelop you with his collection of satirical essays: The Pooh Perplex; In Which It Is Discovered that the True Meaning of the Pooh Stories is Not as Simple as is Usually Believed; But for Proper Elucidation Requires the Combined Efforts of Several Academicians of Varying Critical Persuasions (New York, 1963).

Fashion is rather like academia in this sense. There’s an industry around both which requires them to keep churning out new material, new ideas- or at least new takes on old material and old ideas. There’s an element of each which embarrasses the ‘true’ perpetrators of the discipline. Popular-with-the-public scholars like Stephen Hawking and Alain de Botton reportedly make scientists and philosophers groan with each new book, even as their own manuscripts make their way to the publishers.

There are similar examples to be found in every art. A friend once asked me why fashion needed such a big industry around it, commentating and judging in glossy reams. The answer is that it doesn’t – we do. Film as an artistic endeavour doesn’t need the critics and the producers and the press junkets – in fact, they are usually a great nuisance to the film makers themselves – but without the film industry, they wouldn’t be able to make the film at all. Just as actors would rather talk about their work than their love lives, the designers don’t necessarily condone the celebrity endorsements, the facile magazine’s must-have-items, or the swarm of high-street copies. Those things are the necessary evils which allow the intricate and exquisite craft of haute couture to happen (often at a loss); like the journalism hack-jobs Evelyn Waugh endured to pay for Brideshead Revisited. A kind of reverse patronage system has emerged.

The lowest common denominators of art are not a fair representation of the whole. Is poetry as an art form diminished by greetings-card verses or architecture by a concrete car-park? I’m not saying that because fashion is not trivial, it is consequently vital. But like any art, ‘it awakens and enlargens the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought’, and ought to be respected for what it can be, rather than derided for what some make it.