How has my understanding of fashion changed over time?
In my opinion, fashion has always been a tricky subject because of the several components it encompasses in order for fashion to even function as it is today. Fashion not only is a sense of style of people’s clothes or about how others dress in a certain way, but it is also a social and conceptual concept that’s much more complicated that I thought. In the beginning, when fashion came up, most people, including me, thought it was only about clothes and the stuff we wear that becomes identity and about how the clothes portray as our personality; however, there is a whole system involved that creates fashion, almost like becoming a universal language for people all over the world to communicate with in the stuff they wear, whether they are labelled as designer products or not. The most seemingly hard to get but true fact is that fashion is about labels and class. This fact, though many have negative feelings about, including me, is something that makes fashion so prejudice against the poor and very much for the rich. This complicated concept of having money to create fashion is what makes fashion, among other topics relating, very ignorant towards the other aspects of the world. Fashion ultimately was created by Charles Frederick Worth creating couture gowns for the first time and thus making fashion trendy with the different elements put into the clothes and it came from the rich down to the poor. Including other cultures, fashionable garments were worn by the royalty in China among other countries and only a certain type of fabrics were able to be implemented for the people who were “less-than-worthy” in the nation during the ancient times. Vanessa Friedman from The New York Times stated, “That could be overstating the matter, but there’s no question clothes are one way we order the world.” and in a sense, class is also that way. With the more expensive pieces of clothing worn by higher-up people, the clothes they wear are the way they order the world. In this sense, though very condescending because it may seem like there’s no way out except being rich and powerful, it is true in the fact that because they have the money to buy the “rich” clothes, they indeed are the ones with power since fashion means money and money mean power in the materialistic world we have today.
