How does fashion currently respond effectively to meet fundamental human needs? What opportunities do you see for fashion to respond to fundamental human needs holistically?
According to Max Neef’s idea of fundamental human needs on Development on Human Needs, I believe fashion is more of in between the needs of subsistence, protection, understanding, affection, participation, creation, identity and freedom. As Max Neef claimed, fundamental human needs are finite, few and classifiable, and are the same in all cultures and in all historical periods,[1] fashion is seemed to be outside of the realm from finite and permanent in all cultures. It is more about human desires instead of human needs. People follow trend on each season, and trend never ends, it goes on with an infinite cycle. Repairing is also a cycle that one could buy second hand clothes or exchange clothes with one another. Hence, there are always alternations in the fashion system, such as style, quality, concepts, and understanding.
Yet, essentially fashion is created based on fundamental human needs, we, human firstly need to wear clothes to protect our body, and once there are more interaction between body and clothes, we get more ideas on manipulating the shape, material and style. Then, fashion is essentially built for creation, which designers put more energy into clothes, to make them powerful and influential; it can even affect human identity, and give more space on freedom instead of acting constantly in the same live style. Therefore, I think fashion does not fully belong to the fundamental human needs system, but it develops another branch based on the system. Or, on another way of saying this, fashion might not meet fundamental human needs, but clothes do. (It actually depends on how we define fashion.) What good is that a few designers start to rethink about fashion and designing with natural materials to consider human health, which respond the human needs more actively.
[1] Manfred Max-Neef, Development and Human Needs, P199.
What is a fashion system? Who is a user within a system? Is a family a system? Can fashion be a family?
Fashion system is an interdependent supply chain that includes creation, production, communication, management and so on. Each of the part from the system is interrelated and interactive, and comprehensively contributes to fashion development. Designer, producer, customer, client, consumer are users within the fashion field, they play different roles in the system. As I am a fashion designer, sometimes it is easy for me to ignore the relation between design and user sensation. When I get too concentrate on design itself, I put myself into a personal realm instead of thinking from a user’s aspect, such as prices and function.
The huge range of diversity in fashion empowers a lot of potential and volume within the group, almost everyone in the world are belong to this system and hold various perspectives on it. That is one of the reason fashion can last so long until now. Yet, the diversity also brings conflicts from creation, production, material quality, concepts, style, and even identity. Each time period appears a relatively dominant trend in fashion, and on the next time there would be against concepts to the previous one’s. Acceptance is not the only possibilities reinforce fashion evolution, but conflicts does support the development of fashion, which motivates the whole system to be alive. If we see family as a system, each person has their own personality, and each of them seems to be individual yet they belong to the same group, they have the same element in between each other like DNA. Similarly, we can say that fashion could be a system as well; each of the part in the system is individual but they also interdependent each other, without any part of it, the group would be unfulfilled, although there are multiple notions behind the system, they still share the same working chain, supplies and resources to promote the overall organization.