Being fashionably ghetto fab these days is all about relating. Relating to the streets, to the hard knock life, to the college dropout. And fashion takes that relating into the world of retail, where what you wear is more important than who you are, and what you’re wearing declares that you’re down. When being fabulous means being ghetto, the fashion world once again co-opts culture, first from hip-hop, then Asian culture, then Latino culture, to co-opting what it means to be poor.

Fashion takes the creativity and ingenuity that comes from being poor and uses it for its own means. When J. Lo was riding on the six, what do you think she was wearing? Not the fur-soaked line of clothing she’s peddlin’ these days. But today’s underprivileged young girl is now expected to outdo herself — she’s the fashion icon who’s flat broke. She’s expected to show us the way to ghetto fabulousness. And how? By scraping together the scarce funds for a Fetish skirt, a Baby Phat top, or a pair of AKADEMIKS jeans. And for what? To look like what she already is — to look like she’s from the streets.

But dropping a couple of fiddies for a piece of mass-manufactured clothing to look like you know the ghetto life is not only counterintuitive, it’s counter-creative. Growing up poor involves creativity that comes from NOT having, not from buying a carefully crafted image of what “being ghetto” is supposed to look like, courtesy of a coddled celebrity.

But that’s not the message in fashion. Fashion takes what it likes and maligns and terrorizes it into submission until any meaning of culture is gone. Putting Buddha on a t-shirt does not a Zen master make. Taking a spiritual figure revered by millions, whose wisdom has been studied and time-tested for thousands of years, and reducing him to a fashion statement? Or turning the sounds of frustration and inevitability of hip-hop into a quest for mo’ bling, mo’ money, mo’ designer labels that a kid from the street can’t afford?

It’s good to look poor is fashion’s message, just as long as you’re not. Otherwise, how’re you supposed to buy all the brand-name crap they’re selling?

They say people in fashion are creative. Yet just as everything and everyone else, ideas have to come from somewhere. And drawing upon the resourcefulness and inventiveness of kids living in poverty to make a fashion statement isn’t very original. And it sure as hell ain’t ghetto fabulous.

Desiree Aquino