Do A Little Turn On the Catwalk

In the past decade, Geekdom has taken a rocket-like flight to the top of merchandiser’s short list of interest groups to cater to with comic book content getting extra special attention fueled by blockbusters like the Avengers and the more subdued The Dark Knight Rises.  With all this attention we’ve been getting over the past few years, some interesting crossovers have been popping up.  One sign that we have really drifted out into the mainstream, is one of those crossovers being with the fashion industry.

Maybe it’s the emergence of geek girls as a force inside the genre, or maybe it’s just part of the natural progression of merchandising.  Whatever it is the fashion of geekery has been practically exploding over the interwebz. Blogs and hotspots like “Fashionably Geek” and “Being Geek Chic” have been dealing out the geek chic to crowds. News feeds have been overflowing with custom painted themed shoes, the latest geek themed nail art and outfits based around geek topics and characters from T.A.R.D.I.S. skirts to Storm Trooper latex cat suits.  This is all showing a clear fact- Fashion is the latest industry to join the ranks of those willing to help your average geek to build an immersive lifestyle around their obsessions.

All of this sounds great for those of us who have long had to search till the ends of the Earth in order to find things we actually enjoy wearing, however there is another side to this emergence of geek culture in fashion and we wonder; is fashion itself to become one of “those” obsessions? Has a culture that largely prided itself in not accepting the mainstream industries now prepared to embrace this change of status?  Well, an upcoming Fall release from Avatar Press would make the case for yes.

Antony Johnston will be adapting a long buried film script originally conceived and developed by Alan Moore in the 1980’s into a ten-issue miniseries twenty five years after it was written.

“Fashion Beast” has been described by Moore (who had final approval and was involved in the development along the way) as “something along the lines of marrying the strange and isolated life of Christian Dior with the fable Beauty and the Beast.”

The title is currently available from ComicPull and will be released to the wider audience this fall. This is by no means the first foray of the fashion world onto the pages of comic books though, including an offering exposing the seedier side of the glamour by designer Isaac Mizrahi in his ‘Adventures of Sandee the Supermodel” as far back as 1997.

With a slew of comic book character fashion adaptations popping up all over the web, currently favoring the Avengers and as fans with a fashion bent get inspired by their favorite heroes and villains, are we seeing what it means to truly be absorbed into the mainstream?  So many new forms of fan expression are coming forward with such talented creators, the real question here is; has geek really become the new cool?