Designer Clothes – Good Old Fashioned Redundancy

Monkey Boy takes on this flawed use of language by the yuppie army - yup... yup ...yup... Oh and there's a half naked male - for those who just want to look at half naked males.

Is there any other adjective used in contemporary society that is more idiotic then ‘designer’. Sure there’s the use of ‘neo’ in the term ‘neo-liberalism’. For one thing ‘neo-liberalism’ has been around for 30 years or so – technically it’s not new (neo) anymore. What it probably should be called is ‘not-liberalism’ or maybe we should start calling atheism neo-Christianity.

However, our use of designer still takes the cake. We throw it around like a baby in a trailer park and we never stop to think, “Hey, this is really stupid.” Sure at surface level it seems pretty sound – “It’s a designer T-shirt because it was designed by so and so and he’s a good designer.”

But then if you scratch a little below the surface (with a toothpick) the redundancy is revealed. To call something designer is to imply it has a designer but you’ll be hard pressed to find any item of clothing that doesn’t have a designer. Even a piece of crap T-shirt that you pick up from Pep was designed by someone.  

The fun doesn’t end here, however, we’ve extended the adjective to cover just about everything – designer beer, designer gel, designer... stubble. Why not just extend this to people? After all a large chunk of the world to some degree believe in intelligent design.

Aren’t we all then the work of that big lady in the sky? Tell people to come on over and check out your designer friends. Actually that’s probably the slogan on a mouldy happy clapper t-shirt that’s rotting away in the basement of some free roaming serial killer.

Here’s the point: using the term ‘designer’ as an adjective is good old fashioned redundancy. Let us all try step away from this ridiculous display of description and use words that actually make sense. After all no one says, “Hey do you want to come over to my house and check out my artist artwork.” At least no one I want to hang around with.