Throughout this semester, I realized that the study of fashion is an important narrative that designers must understand and discuss as a system of multiple intersectionalities. Not only is fashion a complex system that focuses on clothes, but also the bodies that inhabit those garments. The choices in which an individual makes in their everyday dress routine tells us intimate and ethnographic information about the cultural, social, and economic subjectivities they present in everyday habitus. My prior understanding of fashion was only the superficialities of how clothes are constructed/designed, but I never really considered the agency that those clothes can express and how the current rate in which fashion is produced causes linear problems. For instance, the idea of uniforms is not just to signify a group of people, but it also connotes to other agencies that uniforms express through the way it needs to be maintained and the agency it inserts. In Jennifer Craik’s “The Cultural Politics of the Uniform,” she brings up a point that “Clothes were not ‘just body coverings’ or ‘metaphors for power and authority’ but ‘literally are authority'” (Jennifer Craik, 136). In this sense, uniforms retain an authority over its wearer by establishing rules of upkeep, thus, it differentiates individuals in uniforms with regular civilians because it holds them on a different status.
Also, the current linear system in which fashion exists in has become problematic for the people at the top as well as those in garment factories. People and fashion are overworked as it becomes more and more urgent and easily digestible through technologies and the growing presence of social media. During his departure show in 2015 from Dior, Raf Simons said this,
“Things go to a peak of overexposure and over-decorated and seen on the Internet and clicked away in a split second, and things are so instant and so fast, and they’re pushed away and next and pushed away and next, and I think I’ve been trying to build up something that was going to be a strong identity again.”
His departure was quick since his entrance as the creative head of Dior in 2012, this reflects the current climate of fashion and the way designers/creatives are working in a demanding environment. The sustainability of this current system has produced consequences in which creative directors are disconnected from the DNA of the brand. In response to the growing demand for fast fashion, garment workers also suffer negative consequences, like the tragedy that occurred at Rana Plaza in 2013.
