” For sale. Prom dress. Flawless. Worn only once. Comes back from the cleaner. Who is feeling lucky ? »
” For sale. Beautiful graduation dress. Long. Lustrous fabric. Chic for your princess. Can be adjusted easily. Like New. Price negotiable. »
Similar announcements appear serially. They seem more numerous than ever, at the end of the great commotion which gives rise, at the end of the school cycle, to the end-of-year balls.
It is parents who, in the majority, publish these announcements. They are trying to recover, as much as possible, a portion of the money they spent on the occasion of their offspring’s graduation, after having published photos of happy kids everywhere.
All these clothes bought at great cost so that their children can show off for an evening, they will never wear them again. Everybody knows it. Finished. Finished.
The graduates become big. Only a year later, they gained even more weight and shape. And above all, their tastes change. Very quickly.
Not to mention that, let’s face it, their Sunday best is already a little out of fashion before they’ve even worn them. In the realm of formatted appearances, as we know, everything is subject to the effects of trends as fleeting as waves. And when you think you’re lulled by the breath of the latest fashion, it’s because the wind already has a whole past in the process of being surpassed…
No wonder we are blown away and out of breath by this kind of event: being in the wind will always remain the fate of a dead leaf.
The long-awaited evening is now in the past. Who other than Cinderella doesn’t land on her own two feet, in the middle of reality?
This need to disguise oneself as rich, in a society where we are fueled by the reign of unlimited desires, is causing more and more dismay. To alleviate this, Linda Blouin set up the Fairy Godmothers. This organization helps young people find chic used clothes for end-of-year balls. Every year, the requests increase.
It’s not all about the illusions projected by evening wear, of course. Among the other classified ads that refer to proms, there are those for car rentals which are remarkable. The vehicles offered are so polished that in comparison the asepsis of the operating theaters of our hospitals looks like slums.
Judging from published photos of prom nights, teenagers are treated to the bling of red Ferraris, yellow convertibles and white limousines. And the rest of the year, they take the bus, the metro or their car.
In a mining town in northern Quebec, young people paraded last week, installed on the plateau of immense pickup “Pimped” and clean as new. We are not very far, when we think about it, from the allegorical floats of yesteryear, where society displayed the parade of its hopes around, embellishing them as much as it could. The parades staged hopes to better forget the narrow reality of the lives of madmen. After all, no matter the era, it always feels good to challenge the sky, with your hopes at arm’s length.
Why has this great masquerade become so necessary, to the point that all of society is complicit in it? Is all this staging destined, without admitting it, to make people believe that young people are able to enter adult life at full capacity, despite evidence which warns us to the contrary?
In The time of the jesters (1993), Pierre Falardeau cited an extract from a film that documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch shot in 1957 in Ghana, before the country’s independence. “The haouka religion reproduces the colonial system on a smaller scale, but in reverse. The colonized disguise themselves as colonizers, the exploited play the role of exploiters, the slaves become the masters,” summarizes Falardeau.
This carnivalesque inversion of the world, intended to make its social weight more bearable, the Romans already practiced in their time with the Saturnalia. This festival also had a regulating social function. Once a year, the poor and slaves were allowed to pretend to be those who dominated them. They mimed them, with all possible excesses, with all imaginable excesses. This parody made it easier to accept their dominated status the rest of the year. Each society reenacts such rites, in some way, in its own way.
At the time of parading dressed in a green coat embroidered with gold threads and a tin sword, while wearing the tricorn necessary to enter the French Academy, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had replied, to those who smiled to see him agree to make up like this, that he had not spent his life studying the rites of passage of indigenous societies in Brazil to turn his nose up at those of his own society.
While the housing crisis, the degradation of the planet, the difficulties in finding a job weigh down the future of young people, the simulacra of prosperous lives into which they are immersed during the proms seem to take on increased importance . Never before has the reality of youth seemed to diverge so much from these staged glamorous celebrations. The day after the balls, some will go so far as to reconsider their study choices, unable to afford a roof over their heads in the city where they place their hopes. What’s the point of showing off like this when no one is able to sign simple leases for the years to come?