I’m not a smoker. It’s bad for me, but I also have plenty of other vices that are bad for me. The truth is that it’s a point of insecurity. When I smoke, I usually manage to blow it into my eyes and end up in tears. Last Tuesday, however, I was walking out of the New York Public Library to get some lunch, and I saw a tall, gaunt, black-clad beauty striding toward me down the sidewalk. No doubt in the world, she was a model. And as if her physical being was not enough, she was smoking not one but two cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through her nose as her thumbs tapped very important letters into her iPhone and earbuds played what certainly was hipper-than-thou music into her head. Fuck lunch. I bought a pack of Marlboros, stuck two in my mouth and began striding back to the library. I was working wonders for about half a block, and then…tears.

Yesterday was the last day of New York Fashion Week, an eight-day stream of American-based designers showing their collections for spring/summer of next year. For those deeply entrenched in the fashion world, it’s not only an essential part of how the business of the industry operates, but it’s a non-stop onslaught of shows, presentations, events and parties. I personally go to just a couple of things and mostly celebrate by live streaming shows when I should be working (and later flipping through the slideshows on Style.com of the shows I summoned the discipline not to live stream).

The fashion industry gets a lot of flak for being consumerist, elitist, exclusive and promoting unattainable definitions of beauty, especially now, when many Americans are struggling to keep their families clothed and in good health at all. And after having spent a summer interning at a fashion magazine, I know that it definitely can and does embody all of these iniquities. It’s as cutthroat as any other industry that controls a large portion of the marketplace with an added emphasis on superficial appearance. From my experience and observations, any industry worker who is not a top dog is assigned their worth based on how they look, whom they befriend and how efficiently they complete mundane tasks, which often have far more to do with spreadsheets than with clothes.

But these are just the realities of the mechanics. I judge the machine separately.

Fashion is not clothing. Fashion is an art that takes the utilitarian medium of clothing and transforms it into something that, rather than simply being needed to live, makes us want to live and live differently than we do. As a writer, slim are the chances that I will ever be able to purchase many of the clothes in Vogue that I have pored over since I was twelve. But my imagined self wears them, hence why I still subscribe. Like film or dance or paintings, good fashion creates narratives we can invest in; furthermore, since it is not relegated to a screen, stage or wall, we can feasibly picture ourselves in the leading roles – as the wearer, as the muse of something divine. Fashion offers the ability to create ourselves not into the objects of someone else’s affections (though that may happen, too), but into the objects of our own.

And we do yearn more for things in which we see ourselves. A study published in July showed that when asked to choose a face for a preferred romantic partner, participants unknowingly chose the faces that researchers had morphed with the participants’ own, even over other faces that were more classically attractive. The optimal number was 22: 22 percent their own face, 78 percent their partner’s, i.e. just enough to see yourself in someone else but not too much as to know it is, in fact, you.

Maybe we’re all narcissists, or maybe, like when I tried to smoke two cigarettes, we like seeing ourselves akin to our fantasies. We like the feeling of wanting to want ourselves.

I will say that I probably never dressed better than during that summer internship, and, like schools that believe that uniforms and dress codes make for better students, I conducted myself accordingly. On particularly ambitious mornings, I would wake up early to read in Central Park before going to the office. I read Edith Wharton’s The Age Of Innocence that summer and remember trying to imagine a time when it was imperative that everyone dressed up for everything. No leggings to the store, no hats and shades to hungover brunch. Society demanded people take pride in their appearance. Stifling as whalebone corsets and crinolines sound, perhaps there was value to that.

I suppose that is what the fashion underdogs looking unearthly good while updating contact lists understand. I suppose that’s the currency of their paychecks.

For the vast majority of the general public, high fashion is out of reach. It is expensive, requires difficult care and realistically is flattering to few. But I hope that we haven’t gotten so grounded in the harsh realities of our times that we have restricted ourselves from imagining lifestyles more artfully crafted and tastefully approached than the ones we live. I hope that we do not let our qualms with the one percent inflict guilt on our reveries and desires, that we haven’t become too forcedly humbled to take pride in the selves we send into the world. Because fashion is not just about owning a hand-embroidered gown that costs tens of thousands of dollars, a bespoke suit or any material good, for that matter. I’ve found that it’s about the freedom to fathom ourselves differently, which, sometimes, is as simple as letting two cigarettes bring you to tears.

Gabrielle Lipton is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. Previous publication includes Slate, IndieWIRE,Paste and Relapse; side projects include her website and concocting unusual flavors of homemade ice cream.